Grass Mud Horse

" Chinese character invented by Netizens for "Grass Mud Horse" The Caonima, literally "Grass Mud Horse", is supposedly a species of alpaca. The name is similar to a profanity (), "fuck your mother". The comparison with the "animal" name is not an actual homophone: the two terms have the same consonants and vowels with different tones, and are represented by different characters. According to the original, anonymous article from Baidu Baike, Grass Mud Horses originate from an area known as the "Mahler Gobi" Desert (, which resembles ). Some variants of the animal are known as "Fertile Grass Mud Horses" (, which resembles ). The Grass Mud Horse can only eat fertile grass (, which resembles ). Other subspecies are known as , which are considered the "kings" of the Caonima. The initial image found in the original Baidu Baike article was a zebra, but it was replaced with an alpaca in subsequent revisions. ==Habitat==

carving work. The character is a combination of three characters, made by Chinese netizens as a satire of Chinese internet censorship. Because the Grass Mud Horse is said to be the dominant species which lives within the Mahler Gobi Desert, the region is also called the , which is close in pronunciation to ). The animal is characterised as "lively, intelligent and tenacious". However, their existence is said to be threatened by "river crabs" which are invading their habitat. The river crab () symbolises internet censorship in China. Its pronunciation resembles the word for "harmony" (), in reference to the "harmonious society", to which the Chinese leadership professes to aspire, and which Chinese internet censors use to justify internet censorship. As a result, when a post on a microblog is deleted, the censorship notice says that the post has been "harmonized" (), so the netizens say that the post has been eaten by the "river crab". The term "crab" itself is rural slang, meaning "a bully who uses power through force", and the "river crab" has become a symbol of crude censorship backed with the threat of force. ==Formats==

Music videos and cartoons about the Grass Mud Horse started appearing on the internet in 2009. The original Grass Mud Horse music video's musical arrangement of a children's choir has been compared to ''It's a Small World'', and it scored 1.4 million hits in its first three months. A cartoon about the Grass Mud Horse attracted a quarter million views, and a nature documentary on its habits received 180,000 more hits in the same amount of time.