Milestones

1993: Ramon Nootles graduates from San Dimas Community College with a degree in Questionable Journalism, the first degree of its kind offered in America, and a minor in Poontang Studies.

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Iron Monkey. We saw the movie and thought the ancient Chinese legend might be the guy to get the ninja we hired out of our offices. Lame-ass ninja, poison-darting Lefty the mail clerk and skittering across the tops of the computer towers.

The animals of the Gaswell farm decided to do away with people entirely. No more oppression of the whip, the sustaining of an entire system of government with the single purpose of raising and selling crops for the benefit of the human. The whole thing was done away with, Farmer John, and his lovely daughter, were murdered in their beds (in his daughter's case, six traveling salesman had to be done in as well). The time of the whip and yolk was gone, the old pig had told them. Now was a time of equality.

Sure, that was all well and good when it happened, three hours ago. But the realistic concerns of a world market that needed crops and animals who needed feed made things infinitely more complicated. Should the animals just eat the crops as they grew in the field? Not a very good idea. Some animals would eat more than others; some animals might not even get to eat at all. Not to mention that not one of them had the foggiest notion of how to farm, or what to do if the crops they didn't have were destroyed by an early frost. All of that was of no concern during the wide-eyed, naïve revolutionary days of three hours ago. But now they had bigger concerns, concerns that wouldn't answered simply by a deregulated system of farming.

It was the pigs who first came up with the idea of pigs being in charge. Along with the founding heifers, the horse Broccoli, the donkey Pat, and the various other animals of the farm, they came up with the original solid idea of the two-species system of government. Pigs would form one party, and the litany of barn cats would form the other. They considered a parliamentary system, where each possessed the amount of power proportionate to their votes among the population, but that sounded like an awful lot of math to do. The two-species system gave them a chance to practice representative farming and not have to count as much.

The pigs won the first election in the first-ever landslide, running on a platform of feed for everyone, lower taxes, and safer pens. The cats bungled it all by disagreements within the species, as some cats promoted the idea of de-micing the barn and a few outsider cats ran with the single principle of finding the can-opener. The donkey, Pat, didn't help matters by running on a third-species ticket and taking away significant votes from the ducks and geese.

Once the pigs were in power, things changed almost instantly. They changed their focus from domestic issues, like feeding the populous, to foreign issues like securing more tractors from neighboring farms and spreading Animalocracy to animals everywhere, even the ones who didn't have a strong feeling about it one way or another. The pigs instituted longer work days and reduced the minimum feed wage per hour. Chickens were required to produce more eggs under pig rule than they had under humans, partially because eggs were needed for the war effort against the zoo, but also because pigs had learned to work the frying pans. This succeeded largely because the chickens were too disenfranchised to participate in the elections, but also because the pigs smartly controlled the dogs, the main source for the spread of information on the farm, and called them unpatriotic anytime they were critical of the pig administration.

The pigs were just about to unleash their most insidious advance yet—the establishment of corporations for privatized control of the feed—when the whole farm was torn down to make way for a Republican National Campaign headquarters for humans. Everything was demolished, including every trace of irony.