This week’s Zombiology 101 entry got
me thinking. Obviously, if we start to go on the offensive and head out into
the great wide world, I have to wonder what kind of a world we are going to
find out there. Specifically, I am wondering what animals survive something
like this.
What we have discovered with our zoms
is that meat is meat. They eat anything. For some reason they do seem to
frenetically hunt humans but if I had the choice of trying to chase down a
squishy pink human or a fleet-of-feet animal like a dog, I am going after the
human too.
We have seen cows brought down. My
theory on this is that all it takes to bring a bovine down is a cow sleeping in
the middle of the night, a single zom, a single bite, and time. The
anticoagulant in a zom bite will cause the animal to bleed out eventually. Some
will obviously take longer to bleed out than others.
I think birds as a species survive
this thing intact. Even the fastest human is not catching a bird before getting
all sluggish and zombified.
I think any animal that can climb a
tree is pretty safe.
You want to say that animals like dogs
and cats would be pretty safe too. Chasing them down is pretty strenuous work
if you can run. Mick had Rocky chasing chickens for goodness sake. Zoms can
manage a shuffling stagger at best.
I think in the cases of these animals,
in a one-on-one confrontation, the animal is winning. But if there was just one
zombie out there, I wouldn’t be writing this blog.
Let’s say Fido is a small breed of dog
(a Jack Russell terrier?) that is small but can kick up speed if he needs to
but he is trapped in his yard with a zom. No matter how fast Fido is, he is
going to get tired. The zom won’t. Ever. And with that temptation of meat not
letting the zom “power down,” it really is only a matter of time.
If we remove the fence from the
equation, Fido now has a fighting chance because he can easily outdistance a
single zombie. The problem is can he outrun a horde? What if the breadth of the
walking dead is so wide that eventually Fido just gets outflanked?
Now let’s change Fido to Smokey. Yeah,
a grizzly bear. Remove the fact that a bear can hit about 40 mph over open
terrain. Obviously, a bear can kill a zom with one swipe. But are they smart
enough to outdistance a horde? You want to say yes. I think that they would
have an advantage and would survive zom encounters 9 times out of 10. But I am
counting those encounters to take place up in the wide open spaces of places
like Montana and Alaska.
I cannot even begin to hypothesize
about animals in, let’s say, Africa.
But most of our cows in Oklahoma are
fenced. Is it only a matter of time until enough zoms pour into a pasture where
the cows just don’t have anywhere else to run? Sure, half the horde is probably
getting trampled and stomped out but, remember, all it takes is one bite…
I gotta admit. It has me curious.
