I keep asking “is this a joke?” because these stories must be or we’ve slipped right off the reservation.

An enterprising New Zealand inventor came up with worm-driven composting toilet that utilizes a colony of worms to filter solids from the toilet waste, leaving the leftover water to filtered into underground trenches. Kinda cool, eh?

Well, a local bureaucrat-ista worried that the system would ‘traumatize’ the worms, so she asked the inventor for an expert’s report on the mental impact on the worms. Mental impact on worms!

“She felt that the worms were being unfairly treated, being expected to deal with human faeces, and that it could affect them in a psychological way,” Bell told the newspaper.

“I said, ‘Well, what do I do about that?’ and she said, ‘You have to have someone with the necessary qualifications to say the worms are happy’.”

Fortunately some qualified individual found the worms were “in excellent health and breeding happily”.

Sweet fancy Moses.