Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, medical marvels, scientific wonders, strange facts or just plain weird, weird goings-on.

This week: Weird goings-on

hecklerspray has been married a number of times because we’re so easily smitten by love, and we’re trying to get into Guinness Book for most marriages by a website ever. Once it was to a Mayan princess because our father wanted a truce with her people. On the third day of the honeymoon we realised she’d been dead and decomposing for centuries, and her empire had long since crumbled. We had it annulled as soon as we could be bothered. It wasn’t easy though, as she had looked positively stunning when her father’s mummy dragged the pieces of her decayed corpse down the aisle. It took him three trips.

Yes, marriage can be lovely, what happens though, when people marry animals? You can ward off the evil eye, and give a goat an husband to help her raise her probable embryonic half-human baby. Keep going – you read that right.

There have been lots of strange reasons for marriage through the
years. You’ve got your prearranged marriages, which were intended to
bring warring families to peace. Long ago tying the knot wasn’t
uncommon as a way to alleviate debt, as a father might give away a
daughter to do so. More recently you have marital reasons like the
internet, where even ugly people stand a chance at diving blissfully
into semi-functional wedlock.

And then there are reasons like trying to combat the grave
misfortune of having one’s adult top teeth come in before the bottoms,
which is the case in our first example. In the Santhal ethnic group in India,
it is considered a terrible omen if a child’s upper teeth come in
before the lower, as is the case for one unfortunate Santhali girl.
It’s considered a precursor to horrible misfortune awaiting both her
and her family. The only preventive measure that can be taken to fix
this problem, apparently, is marriage to a dog. 

The girl’s father stated the only reason for this union was to: "remove the evil eye”.
He also said it was a temporary fix, and the girl would be free to
marry a man later. In this case hecklerspray has only one piece of
advice for the unfortunate child, and it can be summed up in one word:
Prenup. If you want any of the dog’s rubber chew toys when this is
over, you gotta act now.

Our next, and only other example of human/animal marriage is far more disgusting, vile, reprehensible, lewd, abominable, unholy and the least amount of sexy as is possible. In Khartoum, Sudan, Mr Alifi was checking on his goat when he caught Mr Tombe and the goat with Barry White
playing on a cassette player from beneath a pile of hay. Well,
technically there was no Barry White, what we were alluding to there
was that Mr. Tombe got caught in the middle of some serious goat
humping. Mr. Alifi, the goats owner, describes it all like this:

"When I
asked him: ‘What are you doing there?’, he fell off the back of the
goat, so I captured and tied him up. They said I should not take him to
the police, but rather let him pay a dowry for my goat because he used
it as his wife.  We have given him the goat, and as far as we know they
are still together."

It was the local council of Elders that recommended the goat lover
pay the dowry, which cost him 15,000 Sudanese dinars – an equivalent to
about $50. Rumour has it that both hilarity abounded as Tombe tried to
carry his new goat bride over the thresh hold, and his parents still won’t set her a place at the Sunday dinner table.

hecklerspray‘s 32,000 member staff are all suckers for romance,
love, and anything else generally considered boring and crappy. We
watch a Diana and Charles 32-minute wedding video at the beginning and
ending of every office party, tissues in hand. Not withstanding being
so romantically inclined, we can only place this one into the
Off-Putting category, as we’ve never seen an attractive goat, dog, or
hybrid there of. And it’s serious animal abuse.

Read more:

Man forced to marry goat – AllHeadlineNews

Girl marries dog for superstitious beliefs – AllHeadlineNews

[story by Shawn Lindseth]