All Animals Attack All Humans: Wave 1
by Jeff Lewis

The person who wants to make a million dollars, I have long maintained, could of course do so very easily by crafting a script or novel based on this elemental premise: ALL ANIMALS V. ALL HUMANS.

John Hodgman, The Areas of My Expertise

I’ll leave the screenplay to those better versed in the horror genre, but intellectually, this premise excites me tremendously.  If I had a government grant or an endowed chair, I could easily devote the better part of two years delving into ALL ANIMALS V. ALL HUMANS, with the result being a Guns, Germs and Steel-style best seller, probably called Beyond the Culture Wars: When God and Darwin Forsake Man.

What are the boundaries?

It’s important to be realistic about this scenario, to address it rationally and scientifically.  For example, there wouldn’t be any anthropomorphic villainry.  There would be no Drang Kuk, Poultry Overlord, master of 30,000 enslaved pheasants toiling belowground in an industrial laboratory, developing a strain of upper-respiratory avian flu that only affects humans.

That sort of thinking is silly and wrong-headed.  ALL ANIMALS V. ALL HUMANS would play out according to the bounds of nature, like in Hitchcock’s documentary The Birds, which didn’t actually happen in real life, but should have.  A bird in the eye here, a horn it the throat there, waking to find that you are being devoured by pill bugs—that's how interspecies warfare plays itself out.

You see, if all animals were to attack all humans, it wouldn’t be coordinated—the locust king wouldn’t meet with the Kommandant of the Urban Racoon & Coyote Royal Dragoons and the High Consul to the Consolidated Rodent Forces to plan a punctuated land-air attack.  Each animal would join the war individually, with only the tribal animals—
parrots, wolves, dolphins, chimps, Argentine ants—making coordinated attacks.

Cutsie and the twins will cause much sorrow when
All Animals Attack All Humans.

Wave 1

Pet owners would take the brunt of the first wave of attacks, particularly those who own the breeds that scare the bejeebers out of me—pit bulls, pythons, rotweillers and the various mambas.  This would greatly benefit ALL ANIMALS at the outset because many of the most aggressive humans would fall to the hands of the pit bulls and rots.  As an added bonus to ALL ANIMALS, this would take about 80-90% of all assault rifles out of circulation for the first phase of the war, at least until the attack dogs starved to death in their drug lord compounds, at which point the compounds would be used as a fortress by their desperate, nouveau riche, ranch-owning neighbors fleeing cattle and other ungulates (but that is looking ahead to Wave 2).

Next to fall after the dog owners would be those with bee allergies.  Also suffering setbacks would be honey addicts, who would fall under friendly fire after eating honey infused by beekeepers with buzzocides meant for the queen.

First to fall among the beasts: possums—which really suck at fighting—
giraffes, and Carebears, which would be the first “animal” eradicated from online trading at eBay by shoppers ignorant of the nuanced differences between real and imaginary bears.

The overriding theme of Wave 1 would be surprise.  Unfortunately, ALL HUMANS wouldn’t grasp that a war was on until the Discovery Channel filed for bankruptcy, having invested too heavily in When Animals Attack!!!-style shows.  The network would not be able to overcome the ratings collapse brought on by market saturation/population implosion.  Wolf Blitzer would investigate the demise of the network and, ironically, be eaten by sheep on the air.

In addition to Wolf, those suffering setbacks in Wave 1 would include:

Copyright Jeff Lewis 2006.

Jeff can be reached at jeff@babblog.com.

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