TTANAO #4: Stuffed Animal Owls

It's a cold night. The clock strikes midnight. Frigid, you pull more covers over your body and curl up tight in your bed with your plush animal, a small owl doll...thing. Apart from the massive regret you have over buying such a horribly-themed stuffed animal, something feels slightly off. You can't help but think someone else is in the room with you. Someone... or something. Suddenly, the creature opens it's eyes, screeches fiercely and thrashes against your body.

A blend of stoic wisdom and terror.

It was an owl all along!

Did the toy salesman lie to you? Or did you accidentally wander into a weird pet store by mistake and, in your confusion, buy a drugged owl? You aren't sure because it's hard to think with an owl clawing at your eyes as you lay fighting for your life. Wait, you're still in bed? What are you doing, you imbecile? Get out of there!

The point of this all-too-familiar scenario is this: stuffed animal owls and real owls are two different things. The key difference is that a stuffed animal owl is not an owl. Forgetting this simple fact can cost you your eyes. But how can you tell what is an owl and what is a stuffed animal owl?

It's pretty easy, actually. Let's take a look at an example:

It doesn't taste as good as it looks. Trust me.

 At first, you may be distraught, thinking, "It looks demented! It's an owl!". While it may be true that most stuffed animal owls appear demented (it is a well-known fact that stuffed animal artisans are some of the finest craftsmen in the land), many have one particular trait which distinguishes them from real owls: multichromatic color schemes.

Owls are well-known for their dull appearance. Any deviation from this lack of bright coloration is a clear indicator that something is not an owl. If you take another quick look at the example, you should now notice the grotesque shade of pink covering the majority of the body. Owls aren't pink. Owls hate pink. If an owl saw something pink, it would probably go berserk and destroy that stupid pink thing.

But I digress.

Let's take a look at a few examples in one image:

Just owls bein' owls?

Orange, Pink, Blue, Green. We can conclude these are all stuffed animal owls. Each of these are not an owl. A real owl would probably just wreck that stupid pink one, too. Seriously, they hate pink to just an unreasonable degree.

What if, however, there were no bright colors to betray the possible stuffed owl? What if the insidious designers of the stuffed animal owls, determined to confuse the public as thoroughly as possible, created an owl using soft browns and grays?

In this case, we must never forget that owls do not have tags. Tags are the hands of the stuffed-animal-owl world. Here is an example:

Mint condition? It was sucked through a turbine. Don't trust Amazon user "ILuvOwls".

 Did you see the tags? They were circled in red. We feel like it was pretty obvious. If you didn't see them, you may be blind, in which case you probably wouldn't have been able to read any of this, so we think it's unnecessary to go into any more detail.

Congratulations! You can now successfully distinguish owls from stuffed animal owls. Let's review a few of these basic principles we just learned:

1. Always check if your stuffed animals are actually real animals before going to bed.
2. Owls are pretty much brown with a few grays and some white thrown in to spice things up.
3. Owls absolutely hate pink. We really can't stress this enough.
4. Owls don't have tags and probably aren't mass produced in China, Mexico or Taiwan.

Good luck out there, everyone! Happy owl identifying!