England’s Telegraph newspaper has reported that pets in the United Kingdom are being injured by video game consoles and other electronics at an alarming rate, and they’ve published a list of the ten most egregious offenders. While they lead us to believe that the majority of these injuries come from pets chewing on power wires, the fact that the offending list of devices contains obviously wireless items like remote controls belies that explanation.
Here in Lungfishopolis, we take matters like this very seriously. To that end, and in an attempt to get to the bottom of this, researchers at Lungfishopolis’s Kleinman-Vance Laboratories have been experimenting and theorizing, and have come up with the following conclusions about how each of the listed devices may have injured British pets. I wish we could make the standard claim that no animals were injured during testing, but that would be a lie. It is because of this that I must ask: if you love animals or are particularly squeamish, stop reading here.
The tenth most frequent injury comes from Karaoke machines. While our researchers initially theorized that the drunken flailing of singers might have injured housepets, they settled instead upon the notion that the singing itself might be the cause of injury. It has long been known that dogs will howl along with poorly-sung songs. Bad singing can also be the cause of nausea, dizziness and vomiting in household pets. In Lungfishopolis’s in-house tests, one cat was found trying to claw his ears out.
Number nine on The Telegraph’s list was the mobile phone. Our tests discovered that the signals of certain mobile phones would set off the collar sensors of dogs who were equipped with invisible fence collars, thereby delivering electrical shocks. Although not permanently harmful, these dogs became confused and thereafter refused to leave the house. While not a physical injury, this is certainly cruel, and causes psychological harm to affected dogs. There is currently a class action lawsuit pending in Wales against Sprint/Nextel.
The Nintendo DS is eighth, but as far as we’ve been able to determine, its wireless signals kill only sea monkeys.
In seventh place is Sony’s Playstation. Lungfishopolis’s scientists have determined greatest danger posed by the Playstation 3 comes as a result of the thousands of networked cell processors forming a Skynet-like overmind. While evidence of this overmind plotting against humanity is scarce, this may be because it has first been honing its craft against an adversary less able to fight back. That’s right: household pets. If you have both a Playstation 3 and a pet, beware.
Our discoveries regarding the DVD players in sixth place on The Telegraph’s list were particularly grisly. Although they only constitute one in ten electronics-related animal injuries in Britain, our researchers surmise that the majority of these injuries were in fact fatal. It seems that certain British DVD players have a manufacturing flaw that causes the discs to spin much faster than is intended, and this causes them to eject from the player at a high rate of speed. This has been shown to cleanly decapitate cats, dogs, and in one case a baby hippopotamus that an Amsterdam woman had been keeping as a pet.
The destructive capabilities of the Nintendo Wii should come as no surprise to anyone, after the epidemic of smashed televisions and broken safety straps. But as it turns out, relatively few of these injuries were to cats and dogs. Seventy eight percent of the pets injured and killed by flying Nintendo Wii remotes were fish who died after their tanks were broken. In one case, a Pomeranian had its nose broken, and one spectacularly unlucky schnauser was crushed when the flying remote knocked over a poorly balanced bookcase, but most injuries were fish.
Perhaps the most spectacular injuries come as a result of Plasma Televisions, which appear in fourth place on the list. Today’s high definition displays have been shown to be so realistic as to be indistinguishable from reality to pets and small children. This is perhaps why so many pets have attacked some image on the screen that appeared to be threatening, and in doing so broke the screen, releasing the TV’s plasma. As you likely know, plasma is the fourth state of matter, and as such is amazingly hot. When the ionized gas is released from the television, nearby pets are vaporized instantly.
In third place on the list is the common remote control. It took our researchers longer than normal to determine how a remote control might have injured pets. And while consuming the remote’s batteries is certainly an issue and did cause issues for many of our test subject animals, the primary danger turned out to be pets standing or laying down on the remote’s volume button, which in turn blew out the speakers and caused an electrical fire, which in at least one case destroyed the residence. Parakeets and goldfish elsewhere in the homes were included in the death toll, which helped to raise the television remote to third place.
Laptops are also high on the list, causing 10.8% of pet injuries. After careful study, our researchers have concluded that the brunt of the blame lies not on the laptops themselves, but on the popular web site ICanHasCheezburger, and the associated LOLCATS. While most humans find LOLCATS entertaining, prolonged exposure has been found to affect housepets similarly to the affliction in M. Night Shymalan’s The Happening. Further research has found that it is actually possible for a housecat to die of humiliation if it sees a photo of itself transformed into a LOLCAT.
Lastly, in first place, the iPod. The iPod is listed as having caused 15% of all reported injuries – the highest number on record. The iPod proved to be the most difficult device of all for the scientists at Kleinman-Vance labs to determine a cause of injury. In the end, they theorized that the only way an iPod might have wrought such destruction is if its effect was indirect or consequential. Thus have our researchers theorized that a serial killer, probably wearing some kind of iPod mask, stalks the streets of London, using iPods to slay pets indiscriminately. The Lungfishopolis Police Department has notified Scotland Yard and the Ministry of Defence, and expects that this terrible killer will be apprehended presently.
