Biologists at the University of York have announced that for the third year in a row, the Australian koala has been chosen as the world’s most insane animal.
The selection is made each year by a committee of biology faculty who look at categories like delusions, paranoia, bizarre sexual thoughts, antisocial behavior and weird ticks.
“It was a tight competition this year,” said Felix Nevski, a biologist from Belarus who specializes in tropical birds. “There were so many crazy species nominated, but koalas still take the cake. Man, those little creeps are really mental.”
The decision was seen by many as an upset, as several other plumb-crazy species were on the short list. Most people expected the winner to be the bitatawa, a type of monitor lizard native to the Philippines that has been nominated every year since it was first identified in 2009. According to herpetologists who study them, bitatawa lizards do the most disturbing things with their tongues, often causing observers to want to run away and take a bath.
But as in previous years, koalas were agreed to be so certifiably grade-A bonkers that the selection committee had no other choice.
“Those little leather-nosed marsupials harbor the sickest thoughts imaginable,” Nevski said. “They hang out in their eucalyptus trees, perving on passersby and humping limbs, all the while coming up with perverted fantasies about rape and murder.”
“It’s fortunate for us that koalas are relatively lazy,” Nevski added, “or they probably would have already slaughtered every Australian man, woman and child using crude instruments like screwdrivers. That’s the kind of twisted animal they are.”
