By Emily Cutler | Last Week Tonight | September 12, 2016 |
By Emily Cutler | Last Week Tonight | September 12, 2016 |
Last Week Tonight has a couple more weeks off, and apparently decided their web exclusives could take a break from being funny too. This is like one of those fake PSAs except it’s not fake, making it just a PSA. Birds are terrible. Full stop. This is fact. Here’s the full hierarchy of birds:
Birds That Have No Interaction With Humans
This is the best a bird can hope for. “I don’t come into contact with humans ever, and therefore give them no offense while also offering nothing of substances.” We’re talking about your owls, eagles, hawks, vultures. Anything that lives in the actual wilderness and cannot be kept as a pet. And the best thing they can say is that they’re ignorable. Fuck a bird.
Birds That Are Pets
My sister and brother-in-law have a long history of birds as pets, so I don’t want to say anything too offensive in case they read this. But birds as pets is somehow worse than fish as pets, and fish as pets is dogshit. Even affectionate birds can’t be cuddled like a dog or very stupid cat can. It won’t generate electricity for you by running in a very small wheel like a hamster, and won’t properly warn people that you’re unsuitable for dating like owning a snake will. Birds are just a very loud houseplant that you can’t leave for days at a time, if that loud houseplant were also an abusively jealous boyfriend. Oh, and I hope you’re happy in that dysfunctional relationship, because some birds live to be 75 goddamn years old. Hope your kid really wanted you to will that bird to them because you’re dead and it’s not.
Also birds fly away. Your pet flies away from home. Did you want to open a window? Great, your pet lives in the sky now.
Birds That Are Our Neighbors
Fuck these birds but good. Your aforementioned geese and ducks, but also your pigeons. Jesus Christ with these things. It’s not entirely their fault either. Unlike other city or suburban dwelling animals (squirrels, rats, an occasional coyote), birds don’t recognize their inherent inferiority. We run the place, and other animals respect that by running away from us. Birds, because of the mastery of the sky, feel like our equals. They will not run away from you when you’re jogging through the park. This despite the fact that a goose’s stupid face is exactly the right height for kicking. I would beat the shit out of a goose if need be, and they don’t get that.
For instance, my younger brother, while minding his own business on a subway platform, encountered one of these asshole pigeons. He, being a better person than I am, tried to walk around the pigeon. And that son of a bitch pigeon intentionally got in his way until my brother accidentally kicked it. Into an oncoming subway train. This is why you don’t run shit, birds. If pigeons had the Darwin awards, that bird wouldn’t have even won because I suspect that “accidentally got kicked into an oncoming train” is the third most common cause of death.
In short, ‘fuck you’ is right, you festering, airborne shitbags.