Will Cuppy - How to Become Extinct (1941)

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The Dodo never had a chance. He seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of becoming extinct and that was all he was good for.

Will Cuppy
Three million alligators were killed in Florida between 1880 and 1900. Goody!

Will Cuppy
Salmon have strange ideas. They are afraid of parsley and slices of lemon.

Will Cuppy
Fish are very easy to understand because only about thirteen thousand kinds or species have been discovered up to now.

Will Cuppy
Goldfish come of a very old family, but it seems to do them no good. They have little place to go.... They have been cultivated so long that they are now useless. Goldfish have most uninteresting habits.

Will Cuppy
The Garter Snake or Striped Snake is our most abundant North American serpent. Although they are always getting killed or driven from their natural homes, there are just as many Garter Snakes as ever, and I can tell you the reason. Garter Snakes are crazy about sex and they don't care who knows it.

Will Cuppy
Vipers show you what Mother Nature can think up when she puts her mind to it.

Will Cuppy
It is the chief function of the ichthyologists, or fish people, to keep pointing out, day after day, the perfect fitness of fish for existence in a liquid medium. And they're right, at that. But I sometimes think that if fish were not well adapted for an aquatic life — if they were square, say — then it would be time to talk.

Will Cuppy
The Carp is dull and cluggish and greenish or brownish. You wouldn't want him around.

Will Cuppy
The Age of Reptiles ended because it had gone on long enough and it was all a mistake in the first place. A better day was dawning at the close of the Mesozoic Era. There were some little warm-blooded animals around which had been stealing and eating the eggs of the Dinosaurs, and they were gradually learning to steal other things, too. Civilization was just around the corner.

Will Cuppy
Most people erroneously call this snake the Puff Adder, Beach Adder, or Blowing Viper. So, naturally, they kill it.

Will Cuppy
We have no Common Vipers in the United States, but we have worse.

Will Cuppy
The female of any species is generally regarded as a relatively anabolic organism, more passive than the male, who is relatively katabolic and active. The fact remains that one frequently runs across a rather katabolic female.

Will Cuppy
A few Cobras in your home will soon clear it of Rats and Mice. Of course, you will still have the Cobras.

Will Cuppy
Other countries may boast of this and that, but nobody can touch the United States for poisonous snakes. We have about twenty species, most of them deadly, and Europe has only five or six, none of them much good. We have fifteen kinds of Rattlesnakes alone and nobody else has even one.

Will Cuppy
During the Cretaceous Period many of the inland seas dried up, leaving the Plesiosaurs stranded without any fish. Just about that time Mother Nature scrapped the whole Age of Reptiles and called for a new deal. And you can see what she got. Here we see the working of another Law of Nature: No water, no fish.

Will Cuppy
The father guards the nest and fans it with his pectoral fins until the children are able to shift for themselves. Then he eats them. He does this because of his altruistic (parental) instinct. The higher one rises in the vertebrate scale the more altruistic one becomes. The higher vertebrates are just one mass of altruism.

Will Cuppy
If you annoy the Hog-nosed Snake enough, he will roll over on his back and play dead. If you turn him right-side up, he will roll over to prove that he is dead. While he is playing dead, you can go straight up to him and step on his head or smash him with a big club.

Will Cuppy
We do not really know why the Woolly Mammoth became extinct. Early Man killed some of them, of course. But most of the time Early Man stayed right in his cave, holding hands with Early Woman. I wouldn't know what the Woolly Mammoth did about that sort of thing. Not nearly enough, I suspect.

Will Cuppy
As Darwin puts it in The Descent of Man, "Male snakes, though appearing so sluggish, are amorous." Isn't that just like Darwin? It was one of his main ideas, you know, that the males of almost all animals have stronger passions than the females. Since then we've learned a thing or two. At any rate, the female snake is right there when spring arrives in the woods.

Will Cuppy
Even as a child back in Indiana, whenever I took a Butterbelly off the hook I used to ask myself, "Does this fish think?" I would even ask others, "Do you suppose this Butterbelly can think?" And all I would get in reply was a look. At the age of eighteen, I left the state.

Will Cuppy
The Chameleon's face reminded Aristotle of a Baboon. Aristotle wasn't much of a looker himself.

Will Cuppy
The head of a Pike, served at supper, is said to have caused the death from terror of Theodoric the Goth, who imagined the fish's features to be those of Symmachus, a man he had just killed. But for this story, we of today would have no idea what Symmachus looked like.

Will Cuppy