Tags: animals, lists, weird news
January 26, 2009 | lists
With Part One of our list of exploding animals, we’re sure we’ve earned a lifetime ban at PETA conventions. The chances of us ever getting asked to attend one of those nudie photo shoots where some hot actress is wearing only a couple of leaves of lettuce and a smile are slim. But since we’re the kind of guys who will forsake the frivolities in the interest of giving our readers more bang for their buck, we will continue and compound the offence given in the first installment by presenting you with another four animals gone boom. Put on an apron, don the protective eyewear and hold your noses as we present the Top 4 Exploding Animals!
4) Exploding Snail: (available via subscription only) Dave Barry made a lot of hay with this one in his column. A Syracuse woman was sitting down to dinner at a fancy eatery for her 36th and ordered the escargot, that French delicacy that you eat and puts your bill over 100 bucks. She was getting ready to eat her second escargot when it exploded in her face, blinding her for 90 minutes and resulting in burns around her right eye. The restaurant owner who actually benefited from the notoriety gained by his combustible crustaceans reckoned that steam built up inside the snail due to its internal moisture and that propelled out of the serving dish and into the birthday girl’s eye.
3) Exploding Toad: In 2005, the world’s thirst for exploding amphibians was nicely sated by a story out of Germany and Denmark concerning toads that just seemed to be sitting around blowing up all over the place. Nature protection officials were watching toads swell up and go boom – their innards decorating up to one meter of the surrounding area. The lake where most of these incidents were taking place was dubbed “The Lake of Death,” but, as an astute Wikipedia writer took the trouble to point out, “No other animals in the area were exploding.” Over 1,000 toads had burst their guts over just a few days.
The actual reason for this is the kind of thing that used to horrify us on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Scientists found it was due to an influx of predatory crows into the region. For crows, few things are as tasty as toad liver and they are pretty skilled at getting it. A crow can swoop down, pluck out a toad liver and be off to shit on a park-goer’s head before he can say, “Why do I always forget to wear my hat?” The toad puffs up to protect itself – too late – and
due to the hole where the liver used to be their blood vessels and lungs rupture and this spreads to the intestines and, well, boom.
2) Burmese python explodes: We feel for the python in this one. Who among us hasn’t say, at a buffet or a wedding with decent eats, gone for the glory and tried to shove just one more piece of chocolate cake down an already well sated gullet? Or ordered another round when half of the last one lies spilled over the table. The ability to overindulge is the ability to enjoy life, with both hands.
So if you’re a giant Burmese python skulking around in the Florida everglades, a bit tired of the standard diet of rats and puppies, and you come across an alligator – all that sweet alligator meat right there on the hoof as it were – you might be tempted to forego a proper sizing up of your prey and just say get in my belly. That’s what this python did, and he bested the alligator, eating it, but not exactly able to digest his meal. The alligator so distended the python that it exploded, leaving behind cool photos and giving us one more entry on this list.
1)Exploding Whale: The golden rule when it comes to explosions is, of course, the bigger the better. If a film director shows a backwoods cabin being blown to smithereens, the audience will be impressed, but if he can get some convincing CGI guys on the job and have the Eiffel Tower shot to the moon like a rocket where it blows up on impact, then you have yourself a summer blockbuster. And when it comes to exploding animals, it does not get much better than this one, the granddaddy of all exploding animal threads and videos.
This happened in Oregon in 1970, but has lived on via a hilarious news report (see below) at the time which has become a viral favorite on the net. A whale had washed up on one Oregon beach, and it was decided that the Oregon Highway Division were responsible for disposing of it – because it had begun to stink worse than an accidental face-full from the fertilizer sprayer. As he says in the video, the gentleman in charge of the operation said that they had no experience dealing with dead whales and had no idea how to go about it. Bury the whale and predators will dig it up or the tide will wash in and things’ll go back to square one. They could chop him up, he said, “but nobody wants to do that.” So they decided on dynamite.
The detonation was not a success. A large part of the whale was still in tact after the explosion, while massive chunks of blubber from other quarters went hurtling at terrified bystanders who thought that the quarter-mile distance they had given between themselves and the whale would be enough. It wasn’t. Everybody was showered in bits of whale goo and one sizable chunk of blubber crashed on the hood of a man’s car, smashing it in. It looked like a hell of a fun day at the beach in Oregon.
Combustible Mention
The Non-Exploding Cow – Moooving Art from Berlin: As mentioned earlier, it is not possible – despite Dave Barry’s many attempts to convince otherwise – to blow up a cow by holding up a match to its ass and waiting for it to fart. There are also far better ways to spend a Saturday night even if you live in rural areas. If you do attempt this, you’re likely to have one angry cow on your hands and a farmer with a shotgun in search of an explanation as to why you’re lingering around the hindquarters of his livestock.
Had this stunt went off as expected, it could very well have knocked the exploding whale off the top of this list. German artist Wolfgang Flatz planned to drop a dead cow packed with pyrotechnics from a helicopter onto a demolished building. The cow was expected to land in an explosion of fireworks and beef bits not since the barbecue blew up during 4th of July Celebrations at the local Stop and Gobble. A teenager protesting the planned bovine blast at least offered an interesting reason for the protest, saying that the event could trigger “spiritual shock”, and if anything is going to convince you of a creator at work – insane though he may be – it would be the site of a cow plummeting to earth and setting off a display of fireworks and gore when it lands. That beats the founding stories of most religions. Nonetheless, the gawkers in the crowd were disappointed by the actual event. The cow was just dumped out of the helicopter and landed with a thud, no fireworks, and sadly no exploding cow.
CLICK HERE FOR PART ONE OF OUR TOP EXPLODING ANIMALS RUNDOWN!
Man, where’s PETA when you need them? Scary stuff here!
Seagulls are always fun. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5JsrwZx6Dg