while i am all for protecting
nature’s bigger creatures
i do sometimes wish your
friends at the world wildlife fund
weren’t such jackasses
to the little ones.
i realize that no one is going
to pay twenty dollars to see
ants jumping through hoops
or licking mackerel at the zoo.
at the same time, i doubt that
one white rhino is the equal
of several billion ants.
have you ever conversed with
a white rhino?
at any rate,
since i moonlight in the econ
department here at anttech
and fancy myself something of
a utilitarian,
i have been busy devising
what i have dubbed the
common biometric scale
or CBS for short—
a conversion scale that allows
one to make unerring determinations
about the fair market value
of any living being on this planet
(there is also a lemma that can be
used to estimate value in
‘grayer’ shopping districts).
the differential equations are too
complex to reproduce here
you can explore them in greater
detail in next month’s issue
of Acta Formicidae
but as a sample illustration,
here is an abbreviated lookup table:
one hunam being is equal to
fourteen baboons is equal to
seven hundred white rhinos
is equal to six million two hundred
and forty four thousand
monarch butteflies
or half an asian clawless otter.
i am sure you are surprised
at this last result
but i assure you, econometric
models do not lie.
you may also notice
that i have not listed the value
of any ant species:
unfortunately,
the equations currently suffer from
a difficulty handling quantites
that approach zero
