Would you like to make friends with a real stupid genius? If so, introduce yourself to a squirrel.
Squirrels are stupid enough to try and cross busy highways. They also sit still and let hunters take aim. However, they can outsmart the average space scientist when looking for food or robbing the best guarded bird feeder. In other words, they think with their stomachs.
When I was fifteen, I spent the summer on the family farm near Meadville, Pennsylvania. Its forty acres included a farmhouse, an outhouse, and a patch of woods where wild critters presided.
One day, when through with my chores, I decided to purge our grove of its lions and tigers. Armed with a .22 rifle and lots of bravado, I clumped through the woods showing the stealth of a dog that had six tin cans attached to its tail.
Except for one stupid squirrel, all of the game within miles vacated my grandmother's woods the moment I entered. The squirrel apparently thought I was there to feed him since he posed for me on a leafless branch of a twenty-foot oak.
Thinking I had cornered a trophy-sized bear, I took dubious aim at the critter. The squirrel must have had a suicide complex since he quit posing and scurried into the path of my bullet. He died on the spot.
I looked at the squirrel for over five minutes to make sure that he wasn't playing opossum. Then, I picked him up by the tail and slowly headed back to the farmhouse. That's the first and last critter I've shot. I'm sure I would have missed him had he not been accident prone, careless, and stupid.
Once I moved back to civilization, I didn't dare shoot at another dumb animal. I was afraid that the local rodent lovers might hang me up by my thumbs. In addition, few metropolises of more than five people allow you to discharge firearms inside the city unless you belong to a gang.
It's unwise to poison one, too. A poisoned squirrel is apt to crawl into your attic and die. From what people tell me, dead squirrels can smell as bad as live skunks. Besides, pet dogs and cats tend to gobble down poisonous bait as fast as any dumb squirrel.
I explored other options and found that embalming and mummification were very expensive while cremation would stink up the house. Besides, where could I perform that nefarious deed? Few modern homes have ceramic kilns large enough to cremate a squirrel or ovens that wouldn't retain the odor of overcooked fur.
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