“Armed monkeys” move humanity closer to
the brink.
Scientists at the University of Chicago have issued a stark new warning that the demise of civilisation as we know it is in the hands of, among other things, the animal kingdom. With the threat of nuclear war increasing as weapons proliferation rises, and global climate change accelerating to near irreversible levels, a third global threat was today identified. Speaking in the latest Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists journal, scientists have highlighted the possibility of a grave new challenge to future world peace in the form of an animal insurgency.
It is suggested in the article that a variety of global
conditions may facilitate such an uprising. Among these conditions suggested
by the scientists were that the growing arms trade
increases the likelihood that a displaced monkey might venture into
urbanised centres, whereupon he may stumble upon an AK47. The scientists
also point to increasing anger within the animal community over treatment
from humans.
With dogs and cats forced to eat slop
while their masters gorge themselves on gourmet chilli and pizza, and cows
left in fields to freeze like idiots while their owners bathe in luxury mere
feet away in farm houses, revolutionary murmurings have been picked up in
animal tests conducted in the university’s animal psychology department. The
recent dissection of a field mouse’s brain, for instance, led to claims that
mice do not like to have their brains dissected by the human bourgeoisie.
Such
has been the impact of the prospective animal revolution that the University
of Chicago scientists have seen fit to update their infamous
Doomsday Clock.
The pessimistic clock, which now reads five to the hour after being moved on
by two minutes on the 17th January 2007, is an amalgamation of all the
things which might go wrong on a global scale to cause
the end of the world as we know it. It would be the
sort of clock you might see up on the kitchen walls of the chronically
worried.
The point at which the clock strikes twelve signifies the destruction of the
world by nuclear war. Alarmingly, experts believe that, further into the
future, animals may gain inadvertent access to such nuclear weapons, as the
proliferation seen across developing nations increases the possibility that
a monkey might wonder into poorly guarded barracks and press
“the button” by some hilarious freak
occurrence.