I went to a reputable medical school, you know – the sort of place where they loved a good bit of comparative anatomy. They’d have us studying all sorts of curiosities: comparing the jaw of a human to that of an ape, scrutinizing the giraffe’s peculiar neck bones, peering at obscure joints and arches. And the place was brimming with specimens, the way you might imagine a Victorian curiosity cabinet might look if it were ever scaled up to the size of a university. Skeletons, pickled organs, the odd stuffed bear; you name it, we had it. Except, as it happens, for a lion.
One day, the local zoo rang up the medical school. They had a lion – an elderly fellow – who was clearly nearing his grand finale. In fact, he was beyond “last legs”; he was flat on the ground and semi-comatose, hanging on by a whisker. They graciously offered him to the medical school, on one condition: we had to be the ones to finish him off. So that’s how, late one night, I found myself in the body store with about twenty of my mates, each of us there to witness what amounted to a rather unusual procedure.
Now, this presented us with a logistical conundrum: how on earth do you dispatch a lion without damaging the body? You see, we needed the lion in one piece, skull and all. You couldn’t just bop it on the head – that would fracture the skull, and that simply wouldn’t do. Electrocution was a non-starter as well; it would send fur flying like confetti. And as for strangling – well, you’d break the delicate bones in the neck, which we needed intact.
Then, out of the back of the room, a hand shot up. There’s always a bright spark, isn’t there? Someone always has a solution to every problem, however ill-advised it may turn out to be. This chap piped up, “I’m an anaesthetist. We’ve just got this brand-new sedative – very powerful stuff. We’ve practically got buckets of it lying around; you can’t give it away. Why don’t I administer a paw full of this, and Bob’s your uncle?”
Now, unbeknownst to us at the time, this “very powerful sedative” was, indeed, potent in humans. But, rather critically, it had the exact opposite effect on cats – it was a stimulant for the feline family. So, our eager anaesthetist administered what we now know to be the equivalent of a double espresso to this poor lion.
There we all were, huddled around, watching with bated breath. And wouldn’t you know it, the lion opens one eye. And we all go, “Ahh…” Then it opens the other eye, and there’s a collective “Ooh.” And then, ever so deliberately, the lion stands up. That’s when we all went, “Oh, shit!”
What followed could only be described as a scene out of a Tom and Jerry cartoon. There we were, twenty people trying to shove ourselves through a single tiny door, a whirl of flailing arms and legs, as if physics itself had taken the night off. Just as we were on the brink of mass catastrophe, the lion let out the mightiest roar you ever heard – so potent, in fact, that it managed to finish itself off. The poor beast simply collapsed; the roar having spent what little energy he had left.
Afterwards, as we stood in the hallway, hearts pounding and laughing from the absurdity of it all, my friend turned to me and said, “What was with all that pushing and shoving? You couldn’t possibly have outrun the lion.”
I replied, “I didn’t need to outrun the lion. I just needed to outrun you.”
