So why are they laughing?

Maybe to keep from crying.

Last night, having perused all 1,357,398 cable channels and finding nothing to capture our interest, we settled on

Weird, True and Freaky

on Animal Planet.

This particular episode sounded especially...ah...intriguing.

"Disturbing deliveries, gruesome newborns, and slithering killer infants. Strange babies born to strange moms in the strangest ways. Counting down the animal kingdom's most bizarre births."

Hey...disturbing, gruesome and bizarre is right up my alley.

The fact of the matter is, most of it was pretty ho-hum, though a hairless Sphynx cat giving birth, indeed looks a lot different than your ordinary, run-of-the-mill house cat doing the same thing. No bikini waxes needed for those particular felines...all their lady cat-parts are right out there for all the world to see.



And then there was the

Surinam Toad

The partners rise from the floor while in amplexus and flip through the water in arcs. During each arc, the female releases 3-10 eggs, which get embedded in the skin on her back by the male's movements. After implantation the eggs sink into the skin and form pockets over a period of several days, eventually taking on the appearance of an irregular honeycomb. The larvae develop through the tadpole stage inside these pockets, eventually emerging from the mother's back as fully developed toads, though they are less than an inch long (2 cm).



Think of popping bubble-wrap...or ginormous zits (ewwwww!)...except a baby toad comes out of each bubble/zit. Yea...it was like that.

There were several other animals highlighted, but the one that made both Ziggy and I sit up...well, it made me sit up...it made da Zigster cringe...and take notice was the hyena.

Didja ever wonder how hyenas mate and give birth. Nah...me either. I figured it was like every other mammal.

Boy was I wrong.

Get this...a female hyena. Pees, mates and gives birth. Through her clitoris.

You gals out there...think about that for a minute.

Now you male readers, think about this....the female hyena's clitoris looks exactly like the male hyena's penis.

Unlike trying to insert an "outie" into an "innie", hyena mating is more like trying to insert two outies into each other.

"Because of the female's awkward genitalia, successful mating for hyenas is tricky to pull off. It takes careful positioning for the male to crouch behind her and somehow get his penis to point up and backwards to enter her clitoris."

OWtie...OWtie...OWWWWtie!

Giving birth, however...well basically, it's like trying to push a watermelon through a garden hose.

But providing the extra hormones takes a toll on the mother. The dose of androgen that she received from her own alpha mother damages her ovaries, making it difficult to conceive.

It also causes female reproductive organs to grow. A lot. Her clitoris, which contains the birthing canal, protrudes 7 inches from her body.

"Imagine giving birth through a penis", said study co-author Kay Holekamp of Michigan State University. "It's really weird genitalia, but it seems to work."

Although giving birth through a penis isn't a trivial problem.
The clitoris' birth canal is only an inch in diameter, and the tissue often tears as a 2-pound cub squeezes through the narrow opening. The rip can be fatal, as evidenced by the high death rate for first-time mothers.

Now, I could go into a whole spiel about androgen being a hormone and whores moaning...but I'll spare ya. Suffice to say, during birth, sometimes the hyena has to tear her clitoris/penis...peniris?...with her teeth to open up the birth canal.

Behold...the Russian female bodybuilder's version of a hyena:


In an effort to learn more, I also found

this

Now go forth, dear readers...enlightened and knowing far, far more than you ever needed to know about hyena sex.

And let us all be thankful for our own, human innies and outies.