Running With Scissors

Chicanery In The Coal Mine

Humanity's relationship with animals has been historically troublesome, and deadly most of the time, as any relationship is bound to be. Every encounter between a human and an animal ends up in one brutally killing the other, often because they find the other to be delicious with garlic and rosemary.

Other reasons why said encounters eventually turn fatal might come from the fact that humans think animals to be tools, using their pelt and fur to make suits as to protect their disgusting, soft skin. Some might use animals as decorations or unwilling companions, taking them out of their habitats and slowly killing them with the fruits of capitalism—mostly smog and global warming.

Or if you live in a communist nation, said companions get turned into food on a rainy day. Death does not discriminate between socioeconomic systems.

Either way, animals die en-masse thanks to humankind's intervention, which is pretty brazen considering how much humans say they love them.

They love animals in their cartoons, and their cereals, and even in their InstaFace thingamajigs. Sometimes, there comes an animal that threads the fine line between love and genocide, and no other animal has it worse than the common canary.

For those unfamiliar with this particular bird, all you have to know is that it's perpetually angry and it wants to kill you most of the time, but it's so small that he can't actually do any harm, which makes it angrier. It's an ouroboros of perpetual hate.

In order to vent out their frustration, they do what any teenager worth their salt does: sing their lungs out. They create intricate, aria-like songs to demonstrate how much they hate everything around them, and that they would much prefer to be at home sipping on a glass of Merlot while chilling in the bathtub.

Humans, being the self-centered pricks that they are, decided that those songs were beautiful and awe-inspiring, and thought it was a good idea to trap the small, angry bird in a small cage to make it even smaller and angrier, and thus, more melodious.

They were quickly robbed of their freedom, stuck in small, confined spaces, and bred silly, just to amuse humans for a few minutes a day with what basically amounts to a rant made by a war veteran about how her lesbian granddaughter is what's wrong with America. Incidentally, that's exactly what the human trapped at the "Running with Scissors" headquarters yells at us every day.

Still, canaries became a fashion statement among wealthy humans, or at least until the plebe started to get their hands on them, which turned them into feathery turds, which was not appreciated by canaries. They just wanted to be left alone with their hate.

It was at the lowest point of their popularity that they were first used as an advanced warning system. Coal miners would take canaries underground as they worked, which pissed canaries beyond belief, which in turn made them sing like mad. It wasn't that miners used the birds as some sort of old-timey iPod, but instead they were used to detect poisonous gases inside the mine.

If a canary were to stop singing, it would mean that the mine was filling with poison, and thus alerting the miners. It worked like a charm, except for the Canaries. You see, the reason they would stop signing was that their lungs were too busy being filled with poison. Poison kills. Canaries are not fond of dying. But nobody ever asked them if they were okay with dying to help a bunch of filthy humans.

For all their trouble, canaries have been immortalized in one of the most iconic idioms of the English language: "A canary in a coal mine."

We believe they would've preferred not being killed, but it's better than nothing.

The phrase is used to indicate an obvious warning of impending doom—something so immediately dangerous that the alternative to escaping is death. It must take someone really dumb to ignore the canary in the coal mine. A real spaz.