Exciting Development in Exotic Breeding Program

In dramatic, simultaneous announcements in Europe and Melbourne last week, LHC, the world’s first underground zoo announced a breakthrough in its breeding programme.

The LHC Zoo, which focuses purely on breeding exotic species, and has already successfully bred quarks and leptons, has been criticized for its cost. In response, the zoo director, Professor Isosceles Finkelhammer,  said, “When you put a zoo underground, you have to dig a very big hole. And when you have a very big hole in the ground, it’s standard practice to throw money into it.”

“Furthermore,” he added, “this exotic species has an exquisitely complex breeding ritual. They only reproduce after charging around a vast circular track and headbutting each other at astonishingly high speed.”

“Like mountain goats?” this reporter queried.

“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” the director said.  ”What had us confused was that  producing a Higgs Boson needs two protons charging at each other, not two Higgs Bosons.”

At that point I thought I had it figured out. It’s the protons that are the mountain goats, and the Higgs Boson is the kid. Perfectly simple!

“In any case,” Professor Finkelhammer, author of the best selling, Breeding Exotics for Fun and Profit, continued. “We are delighted to announce that the zoo’s program has succeeded and we are, or at least we were, the proud parents of a tiny Higgs Boson.”

“A cute little chap it was too. Unfortunately, it survived the birth by only a microsecond, but we were able to take pictures. We’re especially pleased as this particular fellow, a member of the genus Particularis Unusualaris, is so rare that many in the field queried whether it actually existed. However, it turns out that they’re much more common than we thought.”

“In fact, they can be found pretty much everywhere. Once you’ve set up the right environment, – in our case, a twenty seven kilometre long sprint track – any old pair of protons happily headbutt a boson into existence in a flash. A bit quicker than a flash, actually.”

“And the the great thing about breeding Higgs Bosons is that they come with a small field that they quite happily share with all other exotics.”

When asked how sure the zoo was that the protons had actually created a Higgs Boson, Professor Finkelhammer just laughed. “We have saying in this business,” he said, “if it looks like a quark and it quarks like a quark, then it’s a quark.”

Not everyone, however, is pleased about  this event.

The World Wild Life Fund has commenced action to have the Higgs Boson placed on the endangered species list, due to its short life span, and are insistant that although breeding them is okay, the Boson should not be kept in captivity. WWF said that mass meetings would occur around the world once they had aroused public reaction.

Professor Finkelhammer was however quick to point out that WWF has it backwards. It is, in fact, meetings that produce Higgs Bosons, which in turn provide mass.

And that the whole thing can be done with no reaction whatsoever.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for  a research zoo in the US which also has a breeding program said, “We consider the CERN people to be a pack of WIMPS, and that entire announcement is nothing but spin.”