Corn-Flavored Wegovy
Since the 1950s and the dawn of neighborhood social climbing, homeowners have dealt with the scourge of deer chewing up meticulously manicured lawns. The go-to solution has been to chase them away using motion-activated sprinklers but, because of the Hill Country’s drought restrictions, it only works Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical company, decided to tackle the problem from a different angle — what if the deer weren’t so hungry? Yes, they’d still chew on the landscape but less.
The company set up a skunkworks to discover the best way to suppress the appetites of deer. And they did! Unfortunately, performing gastric bypass surgery on each deer would be far too expensive for the average homeowner. “It would be tens of thousands per deer and health insurance policies don’t extend to animals roaming your property,” explains Mr. Canson, Novo’s VP of Critter Research. “We basically hit a wall. Happens. That’s the drug development game. Although it’s not really a game, it’s more a business. You understand.”
The company was about to shut down the project when somebody remembered they make GLP-1s. Perhaps they can give them to the deer. “Why not try? It’s not like we had anything else to work on.”
Initial results proved encouraging. The deer ate less, lowered their diabetes risk, and most importantly, the cost was cheaper than surgery. But a new problem arose — the deer stubbornly refused to give themselves shots each week. Again the project hit a wall. Happens. A different wall but still. As they were about to close down the project a second time somebody (not the same person. This one was male) accidentally dropped his corn on the cob into an open jar of GLP-1 pills and Corn-Flavored Wegovy was born.
Although clearly a breakthrough in landscape maintenance, two things stand in the way of guaranteed commercial success: for starters, the cost is still too high — $900 a month to save a lawn? Luckily Congress is considering passing the Medicare Part G Bill (Supplemental Garden Policy), which would allow vermin to be added to Medicare policies. And then there’s the smell — GLP-1 causes burps, which have a rotten-egg smell due to gas buildup in the digestive tract. Multiply that by 15 deer and the neighborhood will smell like the restrooms of a sulfur mine.
Billiam Coronel is a multiple Emmy-winning comedy writer who now lives in the Texas Hill Country. He was on The Tonight Show multiple times and wrote on a dozen sitcoms including FAMILY GUY.