Humans have this weird tendency to place animals on a pedestal. 

There have been many examples of this throughout our history. Remember Laika, the Soviet space dog who was the first animal to be launched into outer orbit? Or our very own queen of Texas A&M, Miss Rev — an icon who has a chokehold on our university. 

There are many animals who have made a real, substantial contribution to the fabric of our society and have pushed us to become a better version of ourselves. 

However … 

Every Feb. 2, families around the world are glued to livestreams of a groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil — yes, that is his real name — to see his prediction of what the weather is going to look like for the foreseeable future. 

The holiday ritual, known as Groundhog Day, is performed in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania and is celebrated mostly in the northeastern portion of the United States and parts of Canada. 

If Phil sees his shadow, he will go back to his burrow for six more winters. If he doesn’t, he proclaims we will have an early spring. 

Punxsutawney Phil — or as I refer to him, a fraud — has allegedly been alive for 138 years. Which is weird, because the average lifespan of a groundhog is only two to three years in the wild. 

According to the Inner Circle, the group of tuxedo-and-top-hat-clad men who take care of Phil, he is only able to live for so long because he lives off an “elixir of life.”

While a normal person may take this at face value, I am no normal person. If this so-called “elixir of life” actually did exist, Big Pharma would have already claimed to have discovered it. Pets all around the world would be living for years. It makes you wonder — is Punxsutawney Phil actually immortal? 

Now that we know the Inner Circle’s claim that Phil is 138 years old is dubious at best, the real question is why they lie to begin with. 

If you take a look at all 128 known predictions made by Phil over the course of his “life,” you’ll see an interesting pattern. Ten out of the 20 “rare” early Spring proclamations have been made during the short period of time between 1990 and today. 

This lines up with the release of the movie that put his city on the map, “Groundhog Day.” This film sees the main character, portrayed by the one and only Bill Murray, experiencing a time loop while covering the Groundhog Day festivities. Like me, he is an avid hater of the event. Notably, in one of these time loops, Murray’s character actually murders Phil in a fiery car crash. 

Throughout the plot of the movie, Murray grows to love the town and becomes part of the cult of personality that the most influential groundhog in the world rules with an iron paw. 

It is interesting to see how, after the creation of “Groundhog Day,” more people were watching the event and more reporters were creating news articles about Phil’s proclamations. If you were a member of the Inner Circle, would you want to make the events of Groundhog Day even more interesting by stating that Phil had predicted an Early Spring? 

When Punxsutawney Phil makes these so-called “proclamations,” he communicates to the Inner Circle and they decipher his spoken language, “Groundhogese.” 

The Inner Circle makes the claim that Phil’s predictions are never wrong, even though he only has a 40% chance of actually being right. Apparently, the only reason the predictions are perceived to be wrong is because the translation of Groundhogese to English is wrong. 

You would think that after 128 proclamations the Inner Circle would actually be able to translate the divinations of a 138-year-old groundhog from Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania who is nourished by an unknown liquid referred to as the “elixir of life.”

Using the words of my favorite professional hater, Kendrick Lamar, this is a message to my OPP and the biggest fraud in all of Pennsylvania: Punxsutawney Phil. 

I hate the way Phil walks. 

I hate the way Phil talks. 

I hate the way that Phil always gets the weather wrong. 

Wyatt Pickering is a business honors and finance sophomore and opinion writer for The Battalion.