Jurassic park daily: The Tiny Elephant
Ah yes, we all love Tiny Elephant. We all want Tiny Elephant. Who wouldn't be immediately disarmed and won over by Tiny Elephant? You don't even have any money, but you want to give all your money to the guy with the tiny elephant.
But I'm about to be a huge bummer by pointing out how miserable Tiny Elephant must be.
Think about teacup chihuahuas.
Look at this poor thing. Oh, I'm sure he's a very nice dog, and if he was my dog I would move heaven and earth to take good care of him; we'd eat chicken and bacon for dinner and every night he'd sleep in bed with me and every day he'd nap on a tiny little chaise lounge with his name on it that I'd made him myself.
But this dog should not be.
It's well-documented that breeding dogs to be really small, or really large, or with super fucked-up flat noses, is extremely bad for them. Those dogs are not healthy. Their lives are often short and filled with pain, all because we wanted to genetically engineer a more stylish model, so we started mixing genes without having any idea what the hell we were doing.
The tiny elephant, like tiny chihuahuas that are kept in purses, is just an accessory. This is an animal, a living thing, that has been genetically modified well beyond sustainability, and is clearly unhealthy and deeply unhappy and badly abused, and it will spend the entirety of its short miserable life in a tiny cage, being shown off for money.
(This thing's digestive tract is alllll fucked up due to only being 9mm long)
"Hammond always fretted that the elephant would die before Atherton could grow a replacement."
Just in case we didn't hate this dude quite enough yet.
Y'know, rereading this book a good 20 years later is a real eye-opening experience. First time around, I assumed shit went hog wild on the island the way it does because the people at InGen made every goodwill attempt to do things right, and they just lost control in spite of their best efforts. I thought the moral of the story is that no matter how hard humans try to control everything, life, uh, something something.
Now I'm seeing that problems are mostly caused because they didn't try to do things right, they tried to do things fast and cheap and flashy, because they don't actually care.
There's a single line Hammond says that I thought of as a throwaway when I first read it, but now it sticks out like a load-bearing tent pole:
"[Inspections] slow everything down."
That's an ominously, disgustingly realistic depiction of how a 75-year-old millionaire showman would see the world. Sadly, it's just about the most realistic thing in the book so far.
And the least realistic so far, and one of the most awesomely badass lines in the book, is Ross the lawyer going, "I don't care how much money we've got tied up in this; if you get there and it's as bad as we think it is, burn it to the ground." Standing ovation sir.
