HORNY FOR SCIENCE

Ethics, Zebras, and Unicorns

Are unicorns real? Yay or Neigh

Zebras and unicorns are cousins

And that was my conclusion. I know it’s so Tarantino of me. Bear with me, Honey Bunny, fat Travolta’s still in the potty.

I was talking about ethics. In what context, I don’t know, but someone was probably speeding or something. Anyway, my wife mentioned a zookeeper somewhere had spray-painted a mule to look like a zebra. When the zookeeper was questioned, he said something to the effect of “How else can we teach about zebras? We don’t have the money to buy a zebra. This way, they have a way to learn about them.”

“Well, either way, it’s unethical,” I said.

My wife asked, “But if they do it to teach, is that bad? If kids learn about zebras, what’s the harm?”

“The harm? Aside from lying to the kids, they are learning about painted mules, not zebras. More specifically the effects of chemicals and paint on mules.”

My wife said, “Zebras aren’t real, anyway. Someone decided to paint mules to look like zebras; Zebras are as mythical as unicorns.” Not that I was surprised, I should have expected such a conversation; she was driving the family on an outing. A rarer occurrence would be the appearance of a unicorn carrying Charlie Sheen wielding a dulcimer — I digress.

Instead of exploding into an all-out monkey-armed freakout, I countered, because I was truly ensconced in an all-out logical feud. I knew she was just trying to get my proverbial two-headed goat. Oh, I countered — countered the shit out of it, I did.

“Define mythical,” I said, with as much smarminess as I could muster — it was a lot of musters.

To which my reborn Aristotle retorted, “Something that is not real, but that people believe in.”

Concurring, I presented her with a myth about a unicorn. “A myth about a unicorn is that they deliver unbound life to whoever drinks of its blood.”

She agreed.

“Now — give me a myth about zebras.”

Nothing. Then —

“Well, I can’t because they are more mythical than unicorns.” So mythical, there are no stories.

My brain thudded against the side of my head, trying to jump from the moving van. It’s so obvious! Zebras are at the center of a millennium-long coverup, throughout which they have been hiding out in plain sight.

So long protected by the awesomeness of the slightly fey macho-ness of the unicorn, the mule-painting was a ruse to get people’s attention away from the idea that Zebras are, in fact, mythical beasts.

More mythical, my wife says than unicorns — I have yet to see the “Mytho-scale” that gauges the level of mythy-ness. They are so mythical, that they might not even exist. The only thing I could think to argue was that zebras are less mythical than unicorns because unicorns are not in zoos.

Next thing I know, my wife will dispute that the Garden Gnomes and Lawn Jockeys rose up against the Flamingos in the great Lawn Ornament Uprising of 1987.