According to a report I saw on CNN, passing out Halloween candy could be harming orangutans in Malaysia and Indonesia where the vast majority of the creatures live and the most palm oil is farmed.

To get the palm oil you burn down trees in the orangutan forest and plant new ones that produce palm oil, the favored ingredient of candy manufacturers these days because it contains no transfat.

I think it's great that candy manufacturers are putting palm oil in their product now instead of just using industrial buckets of lard, although there is still the issue of putting tons of bags of sugar in candy because that's the thing that makes candy good — not the palm oil.

I wonder, however, if this isn't just another ruse in the name of research to get us to feel bad about enjoying good things.

Scientific research never really makes us feel good about ourselves. It's always something to make us stop doing something we like to do and I fear pretty soon researchers are going to run out of making good things bad, reverse themselves and make the bad things good again just to mess with our heads.

And it's not that I'm anti-Halloween. I just don't care about it all because it's an extortionist's holiday. Halloween is the one holiday where we teach the young'uns to dress up as someone like Miley Cyrus and threaten to do ghastly things to good people, like twerking, just to get a piece of orangutan-killing candy.

The boy young'uns should stay away from the Miley Cyrus attire lest they just want to be teased by their friends and go for the bearded, Duck Dynasty look, the look that says I'm fooling you into thinking we're just ordinary folk when we could buy and sell you with our millions and millions of duck call and reality TV dollars.

People have put Duck Dynasty so high on a spiritual plane that I fear because I've never watched it I might have to spend an eternity in Hell watching Miley Cyrus shake and bake as haloed duck hunter angels mock me with their duck calls.

This, of course, really has nothing to do with orangutans, just that you shouldn't be giving out Halloween candy that could a thousand years or so from now harm them.

That's why I find this report highly suspect — it only deals with Halloween candy, not Christmas or Easter candy, which makes me wonder just how many Peeps had to suffer when stuffed into those little cardboard boxes and suffocated when covered in cellophane.

This is the kind of stuff they fail to mention in these so-called scientific reports — nothing on the grisly disembowelment of the hollow chocolate Easter bunny or the harm people are doing by giving fruit cakes and Danish cookie tins as gifts on Christmas.

I really have no answers for the orangutan issue and I wouldn't say I'm anti-orangutan, except for the one that made an obscene gesture to my father when we went on a trip to the zoo. I don't like that orangutan and he was probably hopped up on palm oil when he did it.

All I know is that as long as there are little hellions dressing up as Miley Cyrus and wearing Duck Dynasty beards, using Ouija boards to map out their route for candy extortion, the orangutans are in for the fight of their lives — Lance Martin