Welcome to my blog.
Dolce & Gabbana has just rolled out a new product called Fefé, a perfume for dogs. According to their website, Fefé is “an olfactory masterpiece featuring the cocooning and warm notes of Ylang, the clean and enveloping touch of Musk, and the woody creamy undertones of Sandalwood.”
The US women’s gymnastics team completed a strong Olympics this week, capturing 10 medals in Paris. The thrill of victory and its agonizing opposite can be stressful in the extreme, but the team has had a comforting presence on their side: a four-year-old golden retriever named Beacon.
At the end of July, a fire broke out outside Littleton, Colorado spreading to hundreds of acres and forcing the evacuation of dozens of homes. Among the survivors is a cat that had the good fortune of having been doused with flame retardant.
The Cheshire zoo has announced the birth of an onager, or Asiatic wild ass, the world’s rarest equid. The foal, a male named Jasper, was born to Azita following a year-long pregnancy. Mother and son are healthy and thriving.
A team of scientists led by Mary Hagedorn, a research scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute, have proposed an extreme idea to save endangered species: by storing them frozen on the moon. The proposal appears in the journal BioScience.
The smell of human stress affects dogs’ emotions – and their decision-making – according to a study conducted by the University of Bristol, Cardiff University, and the British charity Medical Detection Dogs. Their research appears in Scientific Reports.
Birders and other wildlife enthusiasts on Eastern Long Island have been treated to a special sight : a lone American flamingo relaxing in the Hamptons. The gorgeous bird was seen wading, floating, and flying over East Hampton’s Georgica Pond.
A Great Dane named Kevin, the record holder as tallest living dog, died less than two weeks after earning the title. Guinness World Records said Kevin, following an unexpected surgery, had “tragically died just days after his record-breaking achievement was announced to the world.”
It may not sound like much to go from “endangered” to “vulnerable,” but for the Iberian lynx, the change augurs very good news for the species. Though still among the rarest cats in the world, the lynx’s rebound from near-extinction just two decades ago is evidence that conservation works, especially when all stakeholders are included in the effort.
Earlier this year a pair of male lions swam nearly a mile across the Kazinga Channel in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park. “Hippos and 16-foot crocodiles inhabit the channel,” as the New York Times recounts the crossing, not to mention that one of the lions is missing a leg.
In April 2019, a pet donkey named Diesel ran off during a hike in the Cache Creek Wilderness, a rugged area northwest of Sacramento. Diesel’s owners, Terrie and Dave Drewry, searched high and low for their pet, literally – on foot, on horseback, and via drone – but for naught.
This week a pair of beluga whales were rescued from an aquarium, the NEMO Dolphinarium, in war-ravaged Kharkiv, Ukraine. Marine mammal specialists from Oceanogràfic de Valencia, Georgia Aquarium, and SeaWorld pulled off the rescue that took weeks to plan.
Five axolotls were recently seized by the US Fish and Wildlife Service as they were being smuggled into the United States. Fortunately for the amphibians, they have been taken in by San Francisco Zoo & Gardens.
Researchers in the Pacific Ocean encountered a rare – and bright – octopus squid, a bioluminescent creature said to have the world’s largest biological lights. A team from the Minderoo-UWA Deep Sea Research Centre plunged a camera into the depths when a deep-sea hooked squid (Taningia danae) mistook the device for a snack.
Hawaii’s birds are seriously imperiled by avian malaria, which spreads, like the more familiar variety of the disease, by mosquitoes. The counterintuitive solution to this dire problem involves releasing millions of mosquitoes into the wild.
Seven Przewalski's Horses – the last true wild horse in the world – have been returned to their native stomping grounds, Kazakhstan’s Golden Steppe. An operation to reintroduce the horses to their natural homeland is the culmination of decades of work by a consortium of zoos and other conservation groups.
Our drugs are making brown trout addicted to meth and female starlings less attractive to potential mates. These are among the disturbing effects documented in a new paper in Nature Sustainability.
The New York Times just dropped a new 6-part podcast called “Animal,” featuring writer Sam Anderson. Backed by the resources of the Times, the production goes out into the world – Iceland, Mexico, Japan – to teach us about animals and our relationship to them.
Envigo, the company that had to put 4000 beagles up for adoption because its breeding facility was shown to be a squalid hellhole, has gotten its comeuppance in the form of a $35 million fine.
A researcher in Brazil investigated why some snakes bite humans and others don’t using a very unusual– not to say totally nuts – methodology: he stepped on them, thousands of times. João Miguel Alves-Nunes of the Butantan Institute published the results of his experiment in Scientific Reports.
