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The winner of Britain’s ugly dog contest – a 4-year-old Pug and Chinese Crested cross named Peggy – last week received her prize: a pampering makeover session and professional photo shoot at a grooming salon in Beverley, East Yorkshire.
A startup company in the UK is making dog food with a novel ingredient: larvae of the black soldier fly. Tuggs is the brainchild of Harry Bremner, whose 2021 master’s dissertation-cum-business proposal on dog food was so good, his advisor offered to fund it.
Birders in New York City are out in force in Central Park, braving the coldest temperatures of the winter for the chance to spot Flaco, a Eurasian eagle owl that had escaped from the Central Park Zoo. The majestic bird had been sprung from his enclosure on Thursday night, apparently by vandals with cable-cutters.
It probably sounded like a cute idea – what if we paint a pigeon pink for our gender reveal party? But when the idea was realized, the outcome was very bad for the pigeon. Adding stupidity to ignorance, the bird was released somewhere near New York city’s Madison Square Park, where a good Samaritan found the disoriented creature and brought it to the Wild Bird Fund, the city’s go-to for wildlife rescue.
Authorities in the city of Chilpancingo say the local zoo has been selling, trading, and eating some of its animals on the orders of the zoo director, José Rubén Nava Noriega. Nava was replaced last month, following the death of a deer.
A new study tracks the movements of Australia’s endangered northern quoll, a small carnivorous marsupial. Researchers found that the males are losing so much sleep looking for mates that it’s killing them.
Two nonprofits in Georgia, one that helps abused people and one that rescues abused animals, had an idea. What if they got together for mutual support? The results have been promising. Hope for Hooves takes in neglected and abused equines and equine-adjacent creatures: horses, donkeys, llamas, cows, pigs, sheep, goats. The GLM2 Foundation (“God Loves Me Too”) is “dedicated to eradicating the damage caused by sex trafficking and domestic violence by building and providing safe dwelling places and long-term aftercare for women, and their children.” Both groups are in Augusta.
Valentine’s Day isn’t just for sharing chocolate and flowers, it’s also a time for feeding your ex to a meerkat. Zoos are offering exes a chance to name cockroaches and other vermin after their departed partners.
There are 66 known emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica. The most recently discovered group, about 1000 adults with chicks on the West Antarctic coast, gave away their position to satellite cameras — with their guano.
Japan’s endangered Amami rabbit has entered into a strange relationship with a parasitic plant called Balanophora yuwanensis. Researchers at Kobe University recently documented the symbiosis between these odd bedfellows.
A Japanese Youtuber devised an elaborate setup in his aquarium that allows his fish to play a certain Nintendo video game. It was all going swimmingly until the fish went off the reservation, so to speak, and charged a few items to the credit card linked to the game.
New Yorkers were thrilled this week when a couple of dolphins swam up the Bronx River and were seen cavorting as far north as Starlight Park. “This is great news,” gushed NYC Parks on Twitter. “It shows that the decades-long effort to restore the river as a healthy habitat is working. We believe these dolphins naturally found their way to the river in search of fish.”
Scientists from Tel Aviv University have created a monster, but it might be a useful monster: a very sensitive odor-identification device built of electronics, artificial intelligence, and the antenna of the humble locust.
The smallest, and probably the rarest, rabbit in the world is on its last legs in the Pacific Northwest. The Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit thrived for thousands of years in the sagebrush steppe of what is now central Washington, but massive habitat loss has pushed the species to the brink of extinction.
A nearly blind, somewhat deaf chihuahua in Camden, Ohio is recognized this week by the Guinness World Records. At 23 years and 44 days old [as of January 20], the dog named Spike has been crowned the world’s oldest canine.
It turns out The Birds was not Tippi Hedren’s worst animal encounter in a movie. That would be Roar, a film that involved close contact with more than 150 untrained lions, tigers, leopards, and cheetahs. It has entered Hollywood lore as the most dangerous movie ever made.
Some good news for sharks: The US has banned the odious shark-fin trade, a move conservationists hope will help protect millions of sharks butchered every year. The Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act, introduced in 2021, is now law, making it illegal to possess, buy, sell, or transport shark fins or any product containing shark fins. Violators (who are truly vile) face up to $100,000 in fines.
“When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.” The last entry in Dian Fossey’s diary is poignant enough without its proximity to the primatologist’s brutal murder in 1985. Fossey was killed in her cabin in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda, where she had observed and lived among the silverback gorillas for decades. The killer was never satisfactorily identified – poachers? gold-smugglers? Fossey’s own assistant? – but let’s “dwell less on what is past” and remember her life this week, when she would have turned 91.
Prison guards at the Pacific Institution in Abbotsford, British Columbia were stunned last week when a pigeon arrived carrying contraband: about an ounce of crystal meth. The bird was attempting to smuggle the drug inside its wee backpack.
The critically endangered western chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus) gained a new member recently when a baby boy was born at Chester Zoo. The new arrival is far from his natural habitat – Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, and environs – but he is already at home in the zoological gardens just south of Liverpool.
