Great news, Texas! We’ve officially become the sketchy neighbor that nobody wants to invite over. Canada has immediately banned virtually all animal exports from the Lone Star State, including cattle, horses, pigs, and even bison. If an animal has so much as stepped foot in Texas over the last 21 days, the Mounties are turning it right back around at the border. Why? Because we’ve managed to welcome back the New World screwworm, a lovely little parasitic fly whose larvae literally burrow into living animals and eat their flesh. Our $41 billion cattle industry is teetering on a massive crisis, but hey, at least federal food safety experts promise the ground beef at the grocery store won’t crawl off your plate. Yet.
Naturally, the political finger-pointing is operating at peak Texas efficiency. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins immediately tried to blame the outbreak on Joe Biden’s border policies and drug cartels smuggling illegal cows across the Rio Grande. However, the Texas Animal Health Commission completely ruined a perfectly good conspiracy theory by pointing out that the real culprits are likely infected local wildlife, like armadillos, rabbits, and opossums. That’s right—while politicians were busy grandstanding about border walls, a bunch of heavily armed, flesh-eating Texan rodents apparently waltzed right past security.
The brilliant government strategy to eradicate these pests involves breeding 500 million sterile flies a week to essentially blue-ball the wild population into extinction. Unfortunately, the feds are currently producing a pathetic 100 million flies a week out of Panama, and our shiny new $750 million fly factory in Edinburg won’t even open until 2027. We are facing an astronomical shortage of impotent bugs because the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cut the exact international budget used to monitor the screwworm, right around the same time the administration slashed 20% of the USDA’s staff and abruptly allowed Mexican cattle back across the border without USAID monitoring.
So while Canada enjoys a lovely, parasite-free summer, Texans get to look forward to a multi-year shortage of horny, useless flies while trying to avoid eye contact with local opossums. But hey, at least we can still boast that everything is bigger in Texas—including the government incompetence and the maggots chewing on our livestock. Who knew the apocalypse would be delivered by a radioactive armadillo?
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