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| There's always been something a little different about Dave the Animal, immortalized above in the logo for the third annual Bacchanal to the Future. |
By Ariel Mutha-Tafoya
FSN Sports
In a startling development that sent shock waves throughout the NFFA and beyond, Cambridge Animals owner and university professor Dave the Animal admitted Monday morning that he is not fully human.
DTA’s stunning admission came via a series of tweets, all written in verse. The first one reads: “In a time of racial reckoning / The truth is out there, beckoning. / I can no longer hold it back / Many human genes I lack.”
DTA went on to admit that he had kept the secret even from his own children, Wilder the Animal and Zuma the Animal, and from Sir QCurl Sharif, who was raised alongside him during part of their childhood in an orphanage in Kolkata, India.
“I’ve been living a lie / but you’re bound to know why,” began another tweet in the series. “My conscience begged with me / To reclaim my integrity.”
The admission had immediate repercussions politically. Within the hour, President Donald Trump announced that he was firing DTA from his position as “drug czar” heading up the administration’s Covid-19 task force. “Lying is unacceptable,” Trump tweeted. “When I heard about it, I said terminate the SOB. Terminate WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE!”
Later, at a hastily called White House news conference, Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said, “Mr. Animal really made the decision for the president when he fraudulently passed himself off as a white male to claim white privilege that never was his. Last time we checked, there’s a reason it’s called WHITE privilege. By definition, it applies only to white people, not non-white non-people.”
Controversy also erupted on the campus of Fairly Ridiculous University, where DTA holds endowed professorships in Poetry and Pharmacological Philosophy. By Monday afternoon, the Union of Concerned Graduate Students was calling on the university to strip DTA of his tenured status. “This is really about irrevocable erosion of trust,” said Heather Heatherton, president of the FRU chapter of the UCGS. “With so many white people trying to pass themselves off as Black as a way of engendering sympathy and trying to conceal their privilege, if you were one of those white people, what a clever strategy it would be to claim you lied about being human so you could then lie about being non-human and then engage in all kinds of cultural appropriation in your work. Isn’t it obvious what Professor DTA is doing? If the houndstooth jacket with elbow patches was a lie, then everything is a lie. Students looked up to him because he said he travelled here from the future to tell us that everyone in the future was gay. Now our faith in the future is diminished, and we are bereft.”
FSN has learned that DTA’s revelation came in the wake of an as-yet-unaired episode of “Finding Your Roots,” the PBS program hosted by longtime Animals fan Henry Louis Gates in which historians and genealogists research the ancestry of famous personages. According to two sources within PBS, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter, a routine analysis of DTA’s DNA revealed only a 92% match with the genome of homo sapiens. “He’s not just post-racial like he has always claimed,” one source said; “he’s actually post-human. You might say that Dave the Animal really is Dave, the animal.”
