I love unicorns as much as the next guy, as per my favorite socks, but I find it mildly unsettling when they make their way into educational toys.

For instance, this alphabet toy. It has animals for every letter – great way to help kids learn not only their letters, but animals too. It has a few obscure animals like Newt and Vulture – fun opportunity to teach kids about a wider array of species.

But the animal it has for U is Unicorn.

Is there not an actual living creature we can put here instead? Couldn’t this be misleading – insinuating that unicorns are part of the same animal kingdom as cows, leopards and elephants?

Here he is again in this preschool workbook by Mead.

Is this just me? Am I spending far too much time at home playing with toys? Very possible. But wouldn’t it be odd if there were jackalopes in these learning toys?

So I went looking for alternatives. Side note: I google’d “animals that start with u” and got numerous websites discussing this topic. Is that not fascinating in an incredibly boring way that so many people have cared enough to address it? Who the hell is writing the Internet anyway.

Urial, unau, uakari, uraster… I have no idea what any of these are. Isn’t at least one of these part of the human bladder? I’m so confused. What was the purpose of this blog post again?