News from the Natural World: A P*ssed off Slow Loris has been brewing up a particularly bad case of the sniffles, but why?
Cibil the Slow Loris had had a really tough year in 2020. He’d been minding his own business in the steaming jungles of Sumatra when one evening a blinding light pierced his eyes. Startled by the glare he tightly clasped the branch he was holding and froze in terror. The next second a stinking hairy hand grabbed him and stuffed him into a bag. His first thought flashed to his darling wife Simone, was she safe? He couldn’t leave her to raise their children alone.
The next morning he awoke to find himself in a cage, some humans were leering at him. The next second they pinned him down and pulled out each of his finger and toenails with a pair of pliers. The agony was unbearable. Then the pliers rammed into his mouth. His teeth were pulled out one by one. What had Cibil the Slow Loris done to deserve this torture?
Cibil vows revenge on humans
Cibil had been stolen to be sold as a pet in the illegal wildlife trade. Every year thousands of Slow lorises are poached from the wild. Then they are illegally sold on the street or in animal markets. Humans desired these shy animals as their pets. But having a Slow Loris as a pet encourages the trade and therefore pushes these extraordinary animals closer to extinction. Often whole families living in the wild will be captured for the pet trade. Lorises are transported hidden away in dark, overcrowded and poorly ventilated containers. The stress of this transport results in a mortality rate of between 30% and 90%. Often captured lorises are found in crates alongside the bodies of other lorises that have died. Why would any human want a tortured wild animal as a pet?
But Cibil wasn’t a shy and retiring Slow Loris. He had a trick up his sleeve. He knew the human’s weakness. They take our claws off, they drug us and also drill out our teeth. Those f*ckers! He’d seen on the television how the Coronavirus was ravaging the human world and claiming thousands of lives and collapsing economies. But so far he hadn’t heard a single politician actually blaming the cause of the virus on the right culprit. He had heard the humans blaming the Chinese, blaming markets, blaming weapons labs, blaming conspiracy theories. But he hadn’t heard the politicians blaming the actual cause, the humans. It was clearly the human’s destruction of the natural world that had caused the virus. Well if those humans weren’t going to learn then Cibil would brew up his very own Zoonotic disease and unleash it on the human world.