Adventures in Babysitting
One swing and we can find out how quickly evolution can make that baby fly.
Kids tend to picture the circus as a place of whimsy and wonder, as anyone who threatened to run away and join one as a child can tell you. That's because kids are idiots. Of course, in reality it is a job like any other, but only because it involves more shit-shoveling and carny talk than your average numbers-crunching cubicle job.
It's also pretty much a round-the-clock job, so a parent working the circus scene wouldn't always have spare time to spend with their kids. And that's when things got awesome for the children of olden times. Why waste money on a babysitter when you can have a coworker look after your child for you? One you can trust because you've trained her yourself?
And that, friends, is how we ended up with the above picture of an elephant named Kam calmly pushing his trainer's daughter around a London train station, no doubt to the delight of other passengers. We're not sure if the trainer was crazy good or just negligent as hell here, but we'd like to think he also taught Kam how to change the baby's diaper and give her a bath.
Or, at the very least, that game where you throw your baby up in the air and then catch her.
Man, we know it's wrong, but we kind of want to see a picture of that now.
Meanwhile, in India ...
Yep, that's a big-ass gun mounted on a camel.
The Indian Army has a rich history of using camels in warfare, up to the point that when other countries' armies started throwing around big words such as "modernization" and "practicality," India just calmly took all the new technology and strapped them on their damn camels.
No matter how impractical that contraption is, you've got to give some props to that guy. Sure, his camel is likely to bolt the second he fires that thing, and sure, that's going to be the least of his worries once he's searching for his balls that the recoil sent flying farther than the actual mortar ever could -- but right now he's on top of the world, riding a goddamn armed camel.
And, of course, there was no reason to stop at a mere rifle. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the Camel Cannon:

Because there's no kill like overkill. Practical? No. Awesome? Hell yes. And judging by the smug look on that camel's face, he damn well knows it. He's the Dromedary of Death now, and you will all bow to him. Or else.
Hakuna Ma-Murder-a
"JESUS CHRIST THERE'S A BABY ON MY BACK."
If you like cats, you'll loooooove lions. At least that's what Mr. Charles Hipp thought when he bought himself a lion cub from the Dallas Zoo in 1953. And apparently the zoo agreed, because they had no problem selling a baby big cat to an oil tycoon turned amateur circus putter-onner. Then again, pregnant women also smoked like chimneys back then, so take the zoo's wisdom with a grain of salt.
Once Hipp got the baby lion home, he did what any man with the balls to buy a pet lion would do: let the beast live in his house and routinely put his family in mortal peril for the sake of taking some sweet-ass photos. The picture above is of his granddaughter (a beastmaster-in-training if we ever saw one), riding a lion like it ain't no thing. When Hipp wasn't busy ensuring his grandkids had the most badass baby pictures in history, he gave the neighborhood children rides:
No Animal Ever Looked Sadder
Hey, past! What would be even more impractical and badass than having a lion as a pet?
What? A domesticated rhino? Come on. Now you're just fucking with us.
That sweet beast is Rupert the Rhino in his South African home. In 1960, Rupert was saved from a flood by a vet who then adopted him, because naturally a mere veterinarian couldn't understand the risks of living with a freaking rhino. Rupert repaid the courtesy by deciding to adapt the Disney stratagem instead of the more natural "gore them all the first chance you get and run to the wild" one. He grew into his pet role well and acted not unlike an overgrown guard dog, only occasionally putting his family in mortal terror and committing property damage.
He also ate a ton of bananas.
And fingers.Rupert was, however,
never fully domesticated, presumably because rhino toilets are about as expensive and impractical as they look, and also because he looks like Eeyore in rhino form. The monthly Zoloft bill was even more expensive than the bananas, so Rupert was eventually released back into the wild.
Still, we think cleaning up a living room full of rhino shit was well worth it for the family, because it enabled them to have a family album full of pictures like this:
Because Purse-Sized Dogs Are for Pussies
For a while there, celebutants had fun using little teacup-sized dogs as fashion accessories; they'd carry them around in their bags or on their arms, pose with them at publicity events and generally flaunt how great it is to not care that an animal is shitting in your Louis Vuitton purse.
But today's celebrities have NOTHING on flagrantly using animals to get publicity. Because the starlets of yesteryear bought cheetahs. As pets. The picture at the top is actress Phyllis Gordon shopping in 1939 with a cheetah she had flown in from Kenya, presumably so that she could terrify store clerks into giving her discounts.
Our knee-jerk reflex is to write Gordon off as a solitary eccentric, but she was actually far from being the only actress of her era to own a cheetah. The famous Josephine Baker had Chiquita:

And here Joan Blondell takes the unusually cruel step of color-coordinating with her pet:

We could go on -- cheetahs were basically the go-to pet for famous actresses in those days. If it weren't for the whole animal welfare thing, we almost think it would be pretty awesome to see Paris Hilton try to walk around with one of these on her shoulders.