Improve the livelihood of yourself and your pet with this new animal companionship idea!

Background:

In ancient times, most animals were kept around for specific functional purposes (e.g. “eat the mice” or “guard the village” or “be eaten by me, the human.”). However, these days, most animal-owners have pets that don’t actually have a specific job to do.

Proposal:

We should be able to enhance the lives of both humans and their companion animals by giving those animals a job to do. Some animals are obviously more suited to having “jobs” than others: for example, a monkey or dog has a very flexible set of capabilities, while a fish or snake is substantially more limited in most circumstances.

In this case, we’ll focus on adapting the humble bat to practical human companionship. This is a great idea for several reasons:

  • Many species of bats already dwell in large groups, so they should be basically pre-adapted to live in a social environment.
  • Bats that sleep on cave ceilings won’t require any additional square footage to live in. This makes them the ideal pet for a downtown apartment where floor space is at a premium.

But the best part of the bat is its practical utility, as seen in Fig. 1 and Fig 2.:

Fig. 1: This bat also serves as a shoulder-covering shawl-like garment. Since the bat is warm-blooded, it should also have the bonus property of being self-heated (like heated seats in a car!).
Fig. 2: A bat’s waterproof leathery wings should also work well as a makeshift umbrella. This particular variety of bat has, presumably, been bred to select for extra-long bird-like legs.

Conclusion:

This type of multi-use pet wouldn’t be limited to bats, either. Almost any medium-sized mammal (mink, cat, ferret, etc…) could work as a self-heating furry scarf. A snake could be used as a safe method of changing out-of-reach light bulbs and getting items off of high kitchen shelves. The opportunities are endless!

PROS: Brings a new sense of purpose to people’s currently-unemployed pets.

CONS: If these animals get too good at their jobs, they might overthrow humans and give us the Planet of the Apes treatment.