Animal of the Day: Aye-Aye

Beasts are all around us. Many of them are familiar and many of them are so odd and mysterious that they challenge the laws of what we find nonfiction. Each weekday on GUY, we take a look at one of them.

A warning: Some will be adorable. Some will make your skin crawl. Some of them will make you never want to leave the house.

Yesterday’s Animal: Mike, the Headless Chicken
Today’s Animal: Aye-Aye

If he lets go, all kinds of hell would break loose.

When it comes to Madagascar’s grub eating primates it’s safe to say that the Aye-Aye is the top of the heap, a small nocturnal creature that resembles a mixture of an opossum and a slaughterhouse. A member of the Lemur family, it looks like a target of the Van Helsing family.

The Aye-Aye creeps along with its creepy face, creepy hands, and creepy way of doing business. Lemurs are supposed to be cute and perky, not plodding Soul-Eaters with weird pretzel fingers. They’re most likely the Anton LaVay of the Lemur community. Feared. Baffling. Heartless.

The Aye-Aye has a face only a blind mother could love, though it is almost so odd and beastly looking that it comes all the way back around to cute. It’s cute in a I’ve been conjured by a banished warlock and can’t be real kind of way. The beady eyes help it see at night and also help it to scare the shit out of people. In Madagascar some folks believe the Aye-Aye to be a harbinger of evil. Maybe it’s the eyes. Maybe it’s the pointy finger. Regardless, they make Earth cry.

When one of these creepies strolls into human populations they are often killed preemptively. Just in case they’re evil. That’s harsh. Life has shown us that the prettier something is the more dangerous it is. Examples: The Coral Snake, The Lionfish, Cheerleaders.

The Aye-Aye by all accounts are not a pretty thing.

In reality the Aye-Aye are misunderstood little members of the animal kingdom. They have very simple goals. They climb around hitting trees and when they find a hollow spot, they burrow a hole and eat larvae. They sleep. They shit. They make little Aye-Ayes. They’re not unlike humans aside from the fact that they are terror incarnate.

A member of the Lemur family, it looks like a target of the Van Helsing family.

Quick Hits:

• If it were horse sized, we’d… SHIT OUR PANTS.
• If it had wings, it’d… FLY OVER US AS WE SHIT OUR PANTS.
• If granted human intellect, it’d… SHIT ITS PANTS.
• If ‘Day of the Animals’ happened, we’d… AS A SPECIES SHIT OUR PANTS.

Have a peek:

Adorable in an 'American Werewolf in London' transformation sort of way...