A very rare white alligator was born this month at Gatorland, an alligator-themed park in Orlando, Florida. The gator is a girl, born along with a normal-colored twin brother.
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All in Animal Welfare
A very rare white alligator was born this month at Gatorland, an alligator-themed park in Orlando, Florida. The gator is a girl, born along with a normal-colored twin brother.
We have noticed rare lobsters before. An even rarer specimen – a half-red, half-blue, bi-gendered creature – has wandered into a Maine lobsterman’s pot.
Jonathan the giant tortoise turned 191 years old (or so) this week, reaffirming his title as the oldest-living land animal. He’s been living large on St. Helena, a British territory in the South Atlantic, sharing the grounds with the island governor at Plantation House since the Victorian era. (And the ghost of Napoleon who died here just 51 years of age in 1851).
In August a mysterious canine illness broke out in Oregon, affecting at least 200 dogs. Since then, the respiratory ailment has spread to 14 states, and vets still don’t know what’s causing it.
In western Thailand just outside Kanchanaburi, an elephant sanctuary is home to a few dozen rescued domestic elephants. They’ve had a difficult time, either born into a brutal life of logging or retirees from the slightly less degrading tourism trade.
In 2019, Cyclone Idai swept through Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park, which was bad for the animals but good for researchers. The 1,500-square-mile park is one of the most ecologically diverse preserves in the world, as well as the most technologically sophisticated.
If you’ve never witnessed the birth of a rhinoceros, do we have a video for you. This month the Chester Zoo in Cheshire, England announced the birth of the extremely rare Eastern black rhino.
The orcas were still at it off the coast of Spain on Halloween when a small but persistent pod of the killer whales harassed a boat for a solid 45 minutes, causing enough damage to sink it.
No one had seen the extremely rare Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna since 1961, so it was assumed that the weird, egg-laying mammal was extinct. Earlier this month the beast that looks like a spiny anteater was rediscovered in Indonesia’s Cyclops Mountains, likely the only place on Earth the creature exists.
It’s been four decades since drug kingpin Pablo Escobar smuggled four hippopotamuses out of Africa to populate his lavish estate in Colombia with exotic animals. Escobar has been dead a long time but his hippos have flourished, with more than 150 of the beasts stomping throughout the Magdalena River basin.
On August 19, 71-year-old hiker Richard Moore of Pagosa Springs, Colorado, and his 12-pound dog Finney had set out to climb Blackhead Peak just east of town. He never returned, and a several-days-long search did not find the missing man.
Last year at this time we reported the virgin birth of zebra sharks at Chicago's Shedd Aquarium. Now comes news that an epaulette shark at Brookfield Zoo – also near Chicago – has performed the same trick.
An Asiatic black bear named Na spent the last 20 years in a tiny cage in Vietnam. Now she will get a second life in a large, open habitat in a sanctuary with other bears.
We have been following the charmed life of Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who flew the coop in the Central Park Zoo nine months ago and has lived in freedom ever since. This week Flaco took off again, this time to a garden in the Lower East Side and beyond. Wherever he lands next is up to Flaco.
A private golf course in Sedona, Arizona is under siege as dozens of javelinas – the wild pig-like peccaries of the Southwest – have been tearing up the grass in search of tasty grub worms. Seven Canyons Golf Club in the state’s Coconino National Forest has not yet figured out how to deal with the marauding beasts.
A sheep named Sugar, who had escaped from an Australian farm five years ago, was spotted living in a mob of wild kangaroos at a reservoir 20 miles from Melbourne.
Among the 6,400 extant species of mammals, it was long believed that only humans and four species of toothed whales experience menopause. Now wildlife biologists have observed “the change” in chimpanzees, and the discovery is challenging a long-accepted hypothesis for why it happens at all.
The depth of human tragedy attendant to the Hamas-Israeli war leaves little emotional bandwidth for animal welfare, but animals – dogs, cats, and other pets – still need care. Animal rescue goes on, within and near Gaza, even under extremely dangerous and stressful conditions.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service has taken nearly two dozen animal species off of the endangered list, and that’s bad news because it means there’s no hope for them. The animals – one mammal, 10 types of birds, two species of fish, and eight types of mussels – are too far gone to warrant protection.
Nearly a thousand birds were killed in a single night in Chicago this month, as they flew into the side of a single building, the McCormick Place Lakeside Center. It was both horrifying and frustrating, because the tragedy could have been prevented with some fairly simple precautions.
