Photo by Micah Sittig
I’m posting cute animal pictures and facts throughout the day as a mental health service.
“How is your senator like a chinchilla?” asked reader Jeremy Bailin. Oh boy, do I have some punchlines for you.
Perhaps your senator lives in a colony with several dozen other senators, high in a mountain crevasse? The females are dominant and can be very aggressive — though they maintain control more through threats than actual fighting.
Or maybe your senator would make an excellent animal model for obstetrics research — better, in fact, than the typical rat or mouse models? Chinchillas, unlike rats and mice, have a placenta that’s similar to a human’s, and chinchillas usually only carry one fetus at a time.
Wait, here we go. Is your senator wildly inbred? Domestic chinchillas in the United States absolutely are — with almost all of them being descendants of just 11 individuals brought to this country from Chile in 1923.