Rabbits Have Found a Cure For K-selection

The scene is the main auditorium at Oxford University. Assembled in the audience is a motley mixture of rabbit illuminati. Lead Rabbit researcher enters, and walks to the podium. A hush falls on the crowd as the lead researcher shuffles his papers, looks up at the audience, and then begins to speak.

“Ladies and gentlemen. Today is a great day in rabbit-land. Today, I announce that after decades of arduous study, our research team has found a cure for K-selection. Never again will we be confronted by shortage.

The cure is this – we will shrink all humans to 20″ tall!”

No really, they think this is a great idea:

For much of the history of humankind, bigger has been better.

As our ancestors got taller, they became faster and stronger, allowing them to better hunt food and avoid predators.

But in a world where we no longer need to fight for our meals, our height offers no real advantage.

In fact, if we could shrink our size down to just 50cm, we would need only two to five per cent of the resources required by an average-sized human…

He says being tall is no longer ‘a desired result in an age of increasing scarcity’…

You see how difficult it is for a rabbit designed for the anti-competitive world of r-selection and free resource availability to see the world through the prism of a competitor. Humans being tall is only bad as things get scarce if you are the short one. If you are big and competitive, you think, “Let the games begin!”

Hendriks says shrinking down humans would allow us to consume vastly fewer resources, and move us from a world of scarcity into one of abundance…

It sounds like an unrealistic concept. But Hendriks says that it may be scientifically possible to cook up some type of elixir that will slow growth. Another way to do this would be to tweak our DNA, he adds…

Hendriks says, regardless of whether it’s scientifically possible, the most important thing is that we start rethinking the possibilities of the small.

It may be, he claims, the only option to save our planet.

I’m on the fence about this one. On the one hand, being able to identify leftists based on their sub-two-foot height would be great. But then I keep thinking of the scene in Gulliver’s travels, being tied down by hundreds of mini-leftists.

Better we just go with Apocalypse, and fix the overpopulation problem the old fashioned way.