Imagine a world where giant elephant-like beasts roam the vast plains of North America.
Perhaps someday this will be more than a long-lost memory. Perhaps within our lifetimes we will see this for ourselves.
An effort is currently underway to extract the DNA from a preserved woolly mammoth carcass, inject it into the living egg of a living elephant, and clone the long-extinct beast.
I don't have to point out how good of an idea this is.
Preferably, once the revived trunk enthusiasts have a viable breeding population, they can be re-introduced into the wild, so that they might reclaim their place in the food chain.
A dog, as the old idiom goes, is a man's best friend. I contend that a hound is doubly so.
Consider the boorish manner of some breeds. The wayward tail of the Labrador is enough to render the entire breed a nuisance. Long furred breeds like the collie and the malamute require extensive and expensive clearing of fur. Small breeds often suffer from an imperious temper, and are no more companions than they are capable of guarding a domicile. Retrievers are nice, but they lack grace. German Shepherds bark too damn much. Poodles are too toffish. Akitas, rottweillers and dobermans have wild tempers and cannot be trusted.
You'll find that all breeds of dog, with the exception of the hound, have some flaw. For those of us who don't find flaws endearing, the choice is obvious: hound dog.
A Cat makes a great pet and companion. Cats are not only loyal, caring, and affectionate, but they posses a swath of incredible, if lesser-known, abilities:
Cats possess superhuman hearing. Cats don't only hear a much wider range of frequencies than us, but their hearing is far more acute.
Cats can see a wider spectrum of light than humans, stretching into the ultraviolet and infrared spectra. This allows them to see through relatively thin objects, and to see the heat emitted by an object.
A cat's characteristic slit-shaped cornea acts as a crude polarity filter. This allows a cat to see with reduced glare. This helps with hunting prey under reflective surfaces (e.g. fish).
As with all animals other than humans, cats are able to communicate telepathically. This is a rather base form of communication, but it has many advantages. Using this form of ESP, cats are able to sense distress and comfort their friends during trying times.
These abilities combine and culminate to make the cat nature's greatest killing machine. If a cat was as big as a dog, you couldn't trust it not to kill you. It wouldn't be out of malice, but out of pure deadliness. Effectively, hanging around a dog sized cat is equivalent to standing too close to the business end of a thresher... No good will come of it.
Cats' lethality is a mixed blessing. They are the culmination of billions of years of evolution of all that kills in nature, but they also weild this power with a gentle, loving paw. They have tiny little hearts of gold, and want nothing more than to be loved.
Imagine a world where giant elephant-like beasts roam the vast plains of North America.
