Who needs silver when you have chocolate?

This has been bothering me for a while now. Humans can have a whole slew of allergies to chocolate, right? And dogs are really, reallyallergic to chocolate, right? Well, if dog(human) = werewolf, and allergic(allergic²) = allergic³, then it follows that a chocolate cake would be just as lethal as a silver bullet to your typical lycanthrope.   

Hear me out. First, let’s consider one trait all werewolves have in common: shape-shifting. To change shape on that scale, a body would have to rapidly generate new tissue and/or rearrange all or most of the cells in the existing tissues. Both processes put the body under manageable, but considerable, strain.

This is where the chocolate comes in. The compound in chocolate that kills dogs is theobromine, a close relative of caffeine. The wonderful scrub brush that is the human liver is more than capable of processing out theobromine before it can get up to too much mischief, but a dog’s liver (or, say, a liver that was busy rearranging its cells to fit into a new, more dog-like body) processes theobromine much more slowly. This means a substance that can stimulate the heart enough to cause seizures in dogs would be hanging out in a werewolf’s body while his or her cardiovascular system was already under stress.   

But that’s not even the best part. While scholars debate whether or not lycanthropy can be inherited, most people agree that it is transmissible by bite. Something in that bite does a serious overhaul of the human genome, giving the newly-afflicted werewolf’s cells the instructions they need to morph into a functioning organism, instead of a giant tumor.

Maintaining a new genetic code would be too much to ask of a venom, but retroviruses  hijack their host’s molecular machinery, going so far as to insert new instructions into their host’s DNA. So, this retrovirus forms a mutualistic relationship with its host, providing genetic info that makes the host stronger, faster, and generally less killable, in exchange for a safe place to live and a means for establishing new populations.

Then along comes theobromine, which (I kid you not) acts as a mutagen on single-celled organisms.

Chocolate simultaneously destroys both the werewolf’s cardiovascular system and the virus that’s keeping the werewolf running. All a silver bullet can do is poison him and make him bleed a little.

So, to any werewolves reading my blog, stop eating those death-chip cookies! Maybe the first couple didn’t get you, but they will!