sapient beings with a stereotypical behavior, such as the violent Wolf; the sneaky Fox; the cocky, cowardly Hare; the strong, simple-minded Bear; the multi-dimensional Hedgehog; and the Lion, king of the animal kingdom. In the Russian language all objects, animate and inanimate, have a (grammatical) gender – masculine, feminine, or neuter. The reader should assume that the Wolf, the Bear, the Hare, the Lion, and the Hedgehog are males, whereas the Fox (Vixen) is a female: The Bear, the Wolf and the Vixen are playing cards. The Wolf warns, shuffling: "No cheating! If anyone is cheating, her smug red-furred face is going to hurt!" "If something has spilled from somewhere, then that must mean that something has poured into somewhere else," the Drunken Hedgehog mused philosophically when the campers quarrelled over a broken bottle. ("Drunken hedgehog" is a kind of multipurpose Russian cliché.) Animals in Russian jokes are and were very well aware of politics in the realm of humans: A bunch of animals including the Cock are in prison bragging about why they were sent there. The Cock doesn't take part in this. Someone asks: "And what are you in for?" / "I am not talking to you, criminals. I am a political prisoner!" / "How come?" / "I pecked a Young Pioneer in the arse!" Animal jokes are often fables, i.e. their punchline is (or eventually becomes) a kind of a maxim. The Hare runs like crazy through a forest and meets the Wolf. The Wolf asks: "What's the matter? Why such haste?" / "The camels there are caught and shod!" The Wolf says: "But you're not a camel!" / "Hey, after you are caught and shod, just you try to prove to them that you are not a camel!" This joke is a suggested to be an origin of the popular Russian saying "try to prove you are not a camel" in the sense "try to prove something to someone who doesn't want to listen", used in relation to violations of the presumption of innocence by Russian law enforcement agencies, or when someone has to fight the bureaucracy to get official papers proving that one has lost a leg or is even alive. The Hare and the joke itself were used to illustrate the hassles of a Soviet lishenets in a 1929 issue of a satirical magazine Chudak. Mikhail Melnichenko, in an article about Soviet political jokes