Animals

From Wittypedia

Animal is the collective name for things which are not vegetable, mineral or tartan. Mice are animals, as are leopards, but these differ in size enormously. Fish are also animals, although they mostly live under water, which is unlike land based animals - as anyone who has tried to keep cows in an aquarium will tell you.

Animals were once hyper-intelligent with many getting degrees at good universities. This all changed when there was a world-encompassing flood (sometime in the fictionolithic period) and the ark was built to house two of every species, thereby saving them from almost certain death but, at the same time, creating an endemic inbreeding problem which is responsible for the far less intelligent examples we see today. Also of note are the inevitable side effects of webbed feet on (now) aquatic birds and the extra thumb on a koala. The duck-billed platypus, on the other hand, is the result of 40 days with nothing to do and no wall between the mole and mallard enclosures.

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The horse is an animal, as are both the weasel and the pirate but balloons are probably not.