Not everything needs to be enhanced

Since paying attention to the important news of the world often creates a sense of…a sense of (what is the phrase I’m looking for?) a sense of utter despair (yeah, that’s it) there are times I only allow myself to look at the fluff news items which pop up on the internet.  

The other day I saw an article about a man who purchased what he was told, and his eyes believed, was a pair of toy poodles.  When he took his new fluffy doggy friends to the vet for a checkup he found out he had something other than canine companionship.  He was now the proud owner of two ferrets. (What does one call that? Ferretine companionship?)   Not just any ferrets, but two ferrets that had been raised from birth on a steady diet of steroids to increase their general size and hair teasing and blow drying to increase their general fluffiness.  

Ferrets on steroids?  Who comes up with this nefarious plan?  Is some guy actually sitting around his living room one afternoon thinking:   “Hey, I know what I’ll do. I’ll get a couple of newborn weasel-like creatures and pump them full of steroids so they grow to abnormal size.  Oh, oh, then I’ll wash their hair over and over but never use any conditioner whatsoever so they have split ends all over their bodies.  This will mean I will have two giant frizzy ferrets. Oh, boy!  Then I will sell them to some unsuspecting rube at the local bazaar by convincing him they are actually toy poodles.  Yep, that makes perfect sense. I am totally doing that.”

Maybe having steroid-ridden ferrets for pets is better than toy poodles.  Can a toy poodle chase rats, mice and rabbits out of their burrows?  Can a toy poodle perform the weasel war dance? What’s a weasel war dance and will it replace the Harlem Shake?  A weasel war dance is described by Wikipedia as “a frenzied series of sideways hops and bumping into things” which serves as an invitation to play and almost anything would be better than the Harlem Shake.  Are toy poodles crepuscular?  Wait, what in the name of William F. Buckley is crepuscular?  Well, besides being darned fun to say crepuscular means ferrets sleep 14 - 18 hours a day and are only active around the hours of dusk and dawn.  There are frequent days I myself longs to be crepuscular.  

This could be the beginning of a whole new industry in pet services. In sports the press often refers to steroids and the like as performance enhancing drugs or PEDs (or sometimes Tour de France Juice). PEDs could now be pet enhancing drugs. Think about it. Gerbils the size of Rottweilers would be cool. However, you would need one of those plastic tube habitat things as big as the tubes at Chuck E. Cheese's to accommodate your cute not-so-little Gerbzilla.  A canary on steroids might be neat.  If nothing else you could scare the kitty litter out of the neighbor’s cat who keeps waking you up in the middle of the night yowling on your backyard fence like Pavarotti with an ingrown toenail.  

Why stop at sports and pets? Let's look at getting performance enhancement into more walks of life. First we need to decide just what performance enhancement would look like in different fields. Would the PED heighten what the person was supposed to be doing or would it enhance what they typically do? That is a genuine danger.

For example, let's look at insurance salesmen. A PED could make it so the salesman clearly and concisely explains the different plans available and kindly matches your needs and budget with the proper product. Or, he could become the most insufferably insistent and preternaturally boring person who ever plunked himself down on your couch, drank your coffee and proved as likely to leave as the odor of a skunk which died in the crawlspace under your kitchen.  

If PEDs were used simply to enhance what we already do they probably need to be controlled more stringently than other drugs currently outlawed.  Sure they can help a baseball player who already has amazing hand-eye coordination and strength enough to send a nine and a quarter inch spheroid 390 feet onto Waveland Avenue send even more balls out of the park but used in other situations the results could be catastrophic. Just think what would happen if we enhanced the current skill set shown on a regular basis by politicians.  We are back to the phrase utter despair.

Christopher Pyle thinks if he used PEDs he would definitely become crepuscular.  He can be reached during the hours around dusk and dawn at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.