If Trees Had Thumbs

What're YOU lookin' at?

I just performed a Google Image search for "if trees had thumbs," and the sea of randomness that awaited me was quite astounding.  Based on the results I received, I think I might've made Google have a brain aneurism.  The first picture was a cat lying on a bed.  The second was a dog lying on a bed.  The seventh was a creature with the body of a human and the head of a cat, playing a video game.  Next came an image of two creatures, one with a woman's body and a cat's head, and the other with a man's body and a dog's head, sprawled out on a boardroom table having a thumb war.  I don't know what I was expecting when I ran that particular search...but certainly not any of that.


Lately I've been thinking about what the world would be like if other life forms protested things the way humans do.  What got me pondering this question was the recent initiative to slaughter massive numbers of barred owls to make room for more spotted owls.  Now, if I were a barred owl and also happened to have a large frontal lobe, opposable thumbs, and access to the news, I would totally make little signs with slogans like:


Down With Haters!  Barreds Are Owls, Too! 
Stop The Slaughter!  End Spotted Privilege!

Or I would just zap them with my death ray eyes.

I think we would encounter a lot of this type of activity if other life forms possessed the handy combo of large frontal lobe + opposable thumb (+ access to markers and poster board, I suppose).  Lionesses, for example, would finally have a platform to protest the bullshit treatment they receive from male lions.  We might see signs all over the Sahara with messages like:


I Kill It = I Eat First!
Lionesses Against Sex Biting
Stop Killing Our Cubs, You Crazy Fucks!

I've had it - I'm just gonna rip out your tongue.

Grass could protest the genocidal behavior of weeds.  Krill could protest their defenseless slaughter by whales.  Sweet little creatures like impala could protest everything, because pretty much all they do is wander around waiting to get eaten.  And dogs and cats could just protest the shit out of each other.  They'd be our new bipartisan rivalry.


But I think trees would have the most reasons for full-scale revolt.  Poor trees.  They don't do anything but grow placidly, offer serenity, clean our air, and produce oxygen, and they get treated like crap.  They're chopped to bits, polluted, carved in, tagged, peed on, and occasionally occupied by patchouli-smelling weirdos.

Could someone please get this stinky hippie off me?

Poor trees.  I think if trees had thumbs, it would prove even more devastating for humanity than a cat-woman, dog-man boardroom thumb war.  They would totally kick our asses, and then we'd have to say that we got our asses kicked by trees.  And that would be really embarrassing.