Chinchilla's with Swords
So I was reading some reddit when I came across this weird idea. Ill quote:
"Take a few healthy chinchillas. Feed them some sort of soft food; pellets soft enough to be easily punctured with a small plastic sword. Let the chinchillas get used to this for a few weeks.
Then add another cage inside the chinchilla cage. One with holes large enough for the food pellets to get through, but far too small for a chinchilla to squeeze through. In the center of this cage-within-a-cage, place the food pellets. Have them just out of reach of the chinchillas little arms. Puncture each pellet with a small plastic sword, sized for the chinchillas' hands. Have the hilt of the swords poking out through the cage, within easy reach.
Soon, the chinchillas will realize that to get their food, they must grasp the swords and pull their food out.
Wait awhile, until the chinchillas get very used to this idea. Then remove the swords from the food, setting them instead just outside the food-cage. Hopefully, (and this is the crucial part of the experiment) the chinchillas will remember the swords and use them to puncture the pellets themselves. The pellets will then be able to be pulled out by the chinchillas and eaten.
Again, wait until the chinchillas get used to this method of feeding. Eventually, start placing the swords in other, less obvious places.
After the chinchillas are proficient at using the plastic swords as food-getting tools, replace them with metal swords of the same size. After a little while, replace those swords with sharpened metal swords.
Now, throughout this entire process, slowly replace the food pellets with a new type of pellet: one that contains meat. Just a little to start with, but eventually the chinchillas will be used to a fully meat diet. It's possible that because of this part of the experiment, we will have to begin with a very large number of chinchillas. For, unfortunately, most chinchillas will probably die before switching to an entirely meat diet. So we'll just have to prod along a little bit of dietery evolution, breeding the chinchillas for a few generations until they are nicely carnivoristic.
Take away the cage-within-a-cage food supply, and instead begin placing animals even smaller than chinchillas in the cage. Perhaps small mice.
If all goes correctly, the chinchillas will slaughter the mice with their swords and feast upon their sweet flesh!
Hopefully, these skills of sword-use and hunting would be taught to the chinchillas' young by the original "students."
Eventually, you could begin putting chinchillas into arena combat with one another. Chinchillas fighting each other with their swords!
I've read that chinchillas live together in small 'packs' in the wild. (Though not nearly as organized as a pack of wolves.) Imagine the effect if we were to release our new sword-wielding omnivorous chinchillas into the wild! They would have a clear advantage over their unaltered brethren, and soon they would conquer and possibly subjugate the entire natural chinchilla population.
Extensive tool use would begin to stimulate the development of higher brain functions. Hunting would begin to require strategy, with would stimulate the use of inter-chinchilla communication. As the new breed of chinchilla grew, different aspects would begin to be genetically favorable; aspects such as intelligence.
Perhaps this would be the start of an entire chinchilla civilization!!!
A meat-eating, violent, tool-using civilization!"
-Shadmeres
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Originally Posted by Hypermug
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