Reminder: Animals are huge and smart and cool

There are many, many animals on the internet each week, but you are busy and can only click on so much. And yet it’s hard to go into the weekend thinking: Could I have done better? Were there animals that deserved my internet traffic that did not receive it? In this important recurring feature, we recap some of the most important animals from the internet that you may have missed.

This occurred at West Midland Safari Park in the U.K., where you literally just drive around, feeding the animals. There you are in your, uh, “lorry,” about to toss a handful of—one moment here—oh yeah, leaves, those things that a giraffe has evolved a fucking six-foot neck so as to pluck from trees, and so of course said evolutionary marvel cranes his enormous beautiful head into your Honda Civic to grab those leaves right out of your cup-holder. How do you respond? Do you give the giraffe the leaves? Do you abandon your car, freed from the contraptions that bind us humans to the earth, aglow with the revelation of the animal kingdom’s majesty? Or do you roll up your fucking window, as if to test the might of the great beast who has invaded it?

You have already watched the video. You know how this ends. Let’s take a look at another one.

Dogs are crazy. They can be trained, they can be loving, but they are inherently crazy, hyper-athletic beasts that should stand in stark contrast to our doddering, top-heavy human children. Watch with slack-jawed wonder as this hot-wheeling maniac rears back and soars into the air in a gorgeous athletic feat while some little kid gets knocked into next week.

Alligators, meanwhile, as we all know, developed their enormous jaws, which snap with a strength greater than any other animal on earth, largely so they could smash the shit out of watermelons rolled to them slowly across a manicured lawn:

The connective thread binding these animals on the internet is that in each case a human thought, “I am going to involve myself with this situation,” and in each instance the animal did something righteous and cool as a response. This is because animals are smart, and humans are not. In New York, a report of a tiger running wild through the streets of Manhattan, one of the most populous cities on the earth, sent authorities and social media into a tizzy. When police arrived on the scene, they found not a massive jungle cat but a goddamn raccoon.

Perhaps Manhattanites should’ve still been afraid. In Toronto, an army of hungry raccoons has plagued the city for years. In 2015, mayor John Tory unveiled a series of massive new garbage cans that were designed to be impervious to their bandit-like faces and razor-sharp claws. “We are ready, we are armed and we are motivated to show that we cannot be defeated by these critters,” he actually said in a statement at the time. How did that go?

It didn’t fucking go well, that’s how it went. As the video’s creator, Graeme Boyce, writes on Facebook, the raccoon not only foiled the trashcan’s built-in safeguards but also shoved a damn sled off the thing to get after it. You cannot stop a raccoon from eating trash.

You also cannot stop a black swan from being an asshole. Motherboard tracked down the videographer behind the very good and informative YouTube channel DokuNaut, which for 7 years has documented the interactions between humans (shitty and dumb) and a noble assemblage of black swans who have made their home in a centuries-old German castle (awesome and good).

“All [these] funny scenes happened in front of my living room window and so I decided to film it, because I found it very interesting to watch this interaction between civilized humans and uncivilized animals,” the channel’s creator told Motherboard, but we would beg to differ. Give the castle to the swans, let them run it and establish their own civilization within the ruins. We will come only to the edge of the property and leave small offerings in the grass, wet with dew and our own tears.

Anyway, look. Sometimes humans and animals get along in magical ways. Take this little guy. He’s doing just fine, thanks in no small part to the intervention of humans.

We hope for more positive animal news on the internet next week. Let’s all start by not fucking with them, please.