Amphibian by Carla Gunn

rubbing Fiddledee and thinking about how unfair it was that I couldn’t watch the Green Channel. After a while I got up and turned on the TV and watched a different channel, but I was not happy about it.
    MythBusters
was on. They were testing the myth that you could kill yourself with your own farts. Jamie and Adam and Tory counted the number of farts they had on a normal day, and then they ate only certain foods all day long. Adam ate only beans, Jamie ate meat and Tory drank pop. Adam’s farts went up the most. He farted twice as much – which shows that ‘Beans, beans, good for your heart, the more you eat, the more you fart’ is true. Then they put Adam in a tub that had a tube over it to hold in all his farts, but he didn’t die so they busted that myth. But they did find that there are three deadly gases in farts: methane, carbon dioxide and argon. But it wasn’t enough to kill him. The death-by-fart myth was busted.
    How come it’s all right to watch a TV show about myths, but it’s not all right to watch shows about truths?
    After
MythBusters
I watched a show on the Travel Channel called
The World’s Ten Most Dangerous Animals
. The animals from ten to two were:
    10. Bears – kill about 6 people each year
    9. Sharks – kill about 8 people a year
    8. Hyenas – kill about 50 people a year
    7. Jellyfish – kill about 55 people a year
    6. Big cats like leopards, lions and tigers – kill about 80 people a year
    5. Elephants – kill about 130 people a year
    4. Scorpions – kill about 500 people a year
    3. Crocodiles – kill about 2,000 people a year
    2. Bees and wasps – kill about 10,000 people a year
    I was sure I knew what number one was going to be. I watched about fifteen commercials waiting for the final animal. I was absolutely sure I knew what they were going to say, but I had nothing better to watch. But when finally they got to the big moment, it wasn’t at all what I thought it was going to be. The man on the Travel Channel said, ‘The world’s most dangerous animal is …’ There was a pause and then a drum roll and then he shouted, ‘The snake!’
    I almost fell out of my chair. The snake? What kind of dumb show was this anyway? The snake kills only 100,000 people each year. What I was sure was the world’s most dangerous animal didn’t even make the list!
    Just to make sure I was right and the Travel Channel was wrong, I went to my mother’s computer and typed in
murders
. On Wikipedia it said there were about 500,000 people murdered in the year 2000. That makes humans five times more dangerous than the snake! If you count the murdering of other animals too – which should count because the Travel Channel included interspecies killings – the human kills billions each year. Do you know how big a billion is? It would take a person sixty-seven years to count to a billion if he counted two numbers every second. The human is the most dangerous animal in the world! Stupid, bleeping, crappy channel.
    This just made me even angrier. I wasn’t getting good information anymore. If I kept watching channels like that, I was going to get stupider and stupider, and then how was I going to know everything I need to know to save animals from extinction? To make it even worse, on one of the channels I was allowed towatch, there was an advertisement about a program that will be on the Green Channel tomorrow. It’ll be all about symbiotic relationships in the animal kingdom. But I can’t watch it. The only thing that made me feel a teensy bit better is that I already know a lot about symbiotic relationships.
    A symbiotic relationship is when one animal gets something from another animal and that animal gets something back from it. An example of that is the oxpecker and the ox. There are two species of oxpeckers, the red-billed and the yellow-billed. They live in the African savannah and have