Nature sometimes enjoys playing strange tricks on us. Sometimes it is as simple as rain on one side of the street, other times it is as complicated as two children joined together at birth. Many animals are born every year that have some sort of mutation. Some of these mutations are slight, while others are gross or extreme. But what exactly is a mutant animal? It is usually one where the genetic code is different from other animals of the same species.

An example of what I call a slight mutation, was a mouse that was born with a coat of hair that was chocolate colored. Every once in a long while a cow gets born with two heads. As a matter of fact, side shows that used to feature human freaks have fallen out of favor in a lot of places and animal freaks have replaced the humans in these shows. The calf with two heads is just one of the many exhibits in one of the shows. One of the animals that I have seen photos of is even more bizarre. It is a Siamese twin turtle that shares one shell and four feet. It looks like something from a horror movie circa 1950. The amazing part is that this creature, or should I say creatures, seems to be in good health. The live duck with four legs is a very strange sight, but he doesn't seem to care, or even notice for that matter, that he is different. That is one good thing about the animal kingdom, they never seem to care about what another animal looks like, they just treat each other all the same.

We, as humans, are also part of the animal kingdom in a loose way. I mean that after all, we are also mammals. It is true that we are at the top of the food chain, thank goodness, or we would be hunted every day as food. Mutations are also produced quite often among us. I guess when you consider how many billions of us there are, mutations are inevitable. We have our Siamese twin births, dwarfs, midgets, giants, and various other alterations to the human design. Maybe someday this will become a thing of the past as we improve our understanding of DNA, let hope so?

Not all animal mutations are genuine. Over the years many hoaxes have been perpetrated upon the public. The Fiji Mermaid, a famous mutant animal exhibit, turned out to be two different animals that had been sewn together very skillfully. Some of those giant squid exhibits were also phonies as no doubt many side show exhibits were. But among all this bunko, there was the true mutant. Sometimes it was still alive and wowed the crowds as it still does today, while other times it was dead and put on display. In the midwest sometimes you can find mutations among the reptiles. One such mutation is the two headed Bearded Dragon. A really creepy thing to see is the two headed Python. Its bad enough being attacked by one with one head. One unusual mutant that I have seen photos of is the Albino Red Foot Tortoise. It is actually quite attractive, for a tortoise that is. Lizards with two tails are a quite unusual sight but do exist. Some have a tail that is like a fork. The fork appears at about mid length in the tail and the tail branches down both sides. A six legged cow is quite a sight to behold. The extra set of legs on the one that I saw were right under the neck, just before where the head is attached. They sort of just dangled, not providing any support to the animal. Pikes are fish that live in fresh water. A two bodies, one head animal was caught on the Ottertrail River near Wahpeton, ND. There seems to be many births of snakes with two heads. I would be interested in knowing why, as a matter of fact the whole reptile family of animals seems to be more susceptible to mutations, but I could be wrong about this.

In line with my reptile observations, an albino alligator was spotted at Parrot Jungle and Gardens in Miami, Florida. I think almost everyone has heard about the deformed frogs. It is becoming a problem on a grand scale and no one knows why it is happening. A Burmese Python was found that weighed 403 pounds and was 26.5 feet longs. It is at Serpent Safari in Gurnee, Illinois.

Now the question is, are there more animal mutations than ever before, and if the answer is yes, then why? This is an area where it is hard to find statistics on this question without investing a great amount of time and even then, I am not sure you could find any decisive figures. One thing is for sure, the amount of small amphibians such as frogs seem to have an increased amount of mutations. Science is scrambling to find out the cause. It could be because of pollution, different types of waves that are all around us in the air or maybe it is caused by either the ozone hole or global warming. As our society progresses, it is putting out more dangerous waste products. These products are more dangers for several reasons, some of those being the fact that the waste can take tens of thousands of years to become harmless, as in the case of radioactive waste. It can also be more potent, a drop can contaminate thousands of gallons of water, such as some of the biological agents we are discarding Mutations can also appear in the natural order of things.

Whatever the cause of these animal mutations, lets hope that they will decline. The last thing we need is a bunch of three legged frogs flopping around on the ground trying to hop over a group of two headed tortoises.