Jonathan Kieran

Don’t you just hate alliteration? I mean, it has its place in satire (in my opinion) but never in straight literature or reporting. Writerly folk, please use it strictly for comic effect (or affectation) if you employ it at all. That’s what I am doing in the present instance—I’ve been idly trying to imagine how news stories might be headlined in Days of Yore. You know:

“Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” as screeched by some metropolitan urchin desperate for a nickel.

(Yes, these are the dog days of Summer and I am experiencing little bouts of ennui while cooped-up amid the freakish heatwave plaguing California and … the world, apparently. It happens.)

That being said, believe me when I tell you that there is nothing funny about the REAL STORY to which my alliterative wordplay is attached today.

A woman in Montana was trying to beat the heat by tubing on a lazy river with her companions when she was attacked—Nay, MAULED—by an otter. You have to see the photos (link below) to believe the damage wreaked by this particular specimen, and the evidence is not for the squeamish, if squeamish people even still exist in this guts & gore-desensitized culture.

At all events, the poor woman was doing nothing intrusive beyond riding her rubber tire in the otter’s environment for purposes of low-impact recreation, but the attack underscores just how deceptively vicious these oh-so-cute creatures can be.

Living the lion’s share of my life along the Monterey Bay in California has afforded me an opportunity to see any number of “darling” little otters in action. I don’t enter the Pacific Ocean (equally vicious) past the point of my knees, but otters and their heinous behaviors are easily spied from shore or nearby cliffside. They can often be seen floating near or within the great kelp beds that drift in wild tangles near the shorelines, providing refuge to any number of oceanic critters in our glorious ecosystem.

One can also see plenty of adorable “plushy” otters stuffed as kids’ toys in the gift shop at Monterey Bay’s renowned aquarium. I have no doubt that these souvenirs are perennial bestsellers for the wonder-lit kindergarten mobs that invade that institution like thousands of exotic crabs seen amassing on remote desert island beaches described with avuncular surety by one of the Attenboroughs on TV.

Otters are popular. Otters are cute. Otters seem docile and blissfully disconnected from the hullabaloo of the maddening world, floating innocently on their backs in the briny, sometimes sending the Adorability Quotient into the stratosphere by holding their fuzzy infants atop their bellies as they practice their own version of tubing.

But the truth is much darker and more cutthroat, like most of the natural world.

Otters, you see, are the Devil’s Dingleberries. Fanged, furious, stinky, and ever-calculating, these wretched and sleepy-looking little bobbers will zip to the bottom of the coastal waters and rip a precious, unobtrusive octopus to bloody shreds in seconds. They’ll jump and climb onto surfboards and tear into the buttocks of dreadlocked white dudes desperate to laze away their hangovers. Otters will stealthily make their way onto yachts and chew the nipples right off any number of scantily clad, champagne-drinking airheads gathered for the amusement of Leonardo DiCaprio.

An otter would also gladly reduce Sponge-Bob Squarepants to minuscule bits of ecologically damaging synthetic fibre pollutants. But first, an otter would linger on Bob’s spindly legs at leisure, nibbling and biting and consuming until Bob screamed for mercy and vomited bacteria-loaded kitchen-sponge bile before expiring.

Of course, we would have to thank an otter for a service of that sort, but this is beside the point. Otters are the watery versions of relentlessly hungry and will-o-the-wisp ferrets with rabies. Would you ever want to share an inflated inner tube with a ferret like that? I thought not. So it should be with the otter. Be not lulled into Aw-Shucks admiration or dreamy complacency. Beware, Ye water babies!

Look at this poor woman’s face and body and tell me you’d just love to cuddle one of these little hellions.

Instances like this make me proud to be an Otter Contrarian and allow me to take delight in the fact that my favorite sea animal, the compassionate Great White Shark, is often known to glide in ghostly fashion through the shadows of the kelp beds and rise to swallow otters whole when they least expect it.

Gulp. GONE. Canapés of the seaside all-you-can-eat buffet.

They deserve it.

[Look for Jonathan Kieran’s fabulous new—as yet untitled—book of hundreds of witty, cynical, zeitgeist-rocking, and knee-slappingly clever cartoons of Pure Smartassery in 2024! Stay tuned for developing news and previews.]

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