Giraffe Able to Afford Staggering Psychiatric Bills By Yurivich Gruskenvald

Hello again fans of animal psychology! For the past few weeks it's been business as usual helping my furry clients sort through their emotional instabilities. I felt compelled to write about one such session I had recently, because it was highly unusual.

You see, the Food Chain may be an accurate representation of who's who in the Animal Kingdom, but I find the Economy Chain much more useful. Where lions and bears would normally be on top, having no natural predators (except the charming human race of course), they actually land about lower middle class in the Economy Chain. However, some of nature's weakest, such as the Wildebeest and Gazelle (my pals on the Serengeti call them the hors d'oeuvres of the wild), seem to be running most major companies and living in plush hotel-sized mansions.

Anyway, it is a widely known fact that Giraffes are dirt poor. I've seen many a giraffe at my city's local leaf and shrub kitchen. The saddest is when I see one lying in his own filth with a paper cup and a cardboard sign saying "Please Help" on the 12th Street Mall. Remarkably, just a week ago, I had my first session with Terry, a giraffe that could actually afford my outrageous psychiatric bills!

Now I make sure to keep the strictest confidence with all of my clients so as not to release private information to the general public. For instance, during the duration of this article I will not refer to Terry by his full name, Terry Joseph Richterstein, but just as Terry. I also prefer not to reveal any diagnosis I have made regarding any patient's health because the public simply doesn't have the right to know.

Pictured here is me with Terry (I'm the one with the clipboard). Now Terry suffers from a chronic condition that results in violent outbursts of embarrassing laughter and loss of bladder control in open spaces. Here are some of the questions I asked Terry during the course of our session:

And so on. After not long Terry and I tried a word association exercise, where I would say a word and he would say the very first word that popped into his head. Here's a little of how that went:

After this little romp through psychosis I was afraid to be in the same room as this crazy giraffe! Of course I just told him it was a chemical imbalance in the brain and that some pills that ended in the letter "X" such as dorilax or talifax would fix it right up. After writing the fastest prescription I've ever written in my life, I leaped out of my office window to safety!

In short, when an animal on the bottom of the Economic Chain has bladder and laughter problems and can afford to pay for topnotch psychiatry, being within ten feet of that nut case of an animal can be very hazardous to your health.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

-Yurivich Gruskenvald, Animal Psychologist, and so much more!