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I love animal stories and judging by the number of pages dedicated to them, loads of other people do too. On this page I've picked out some of my favorite amazing stories of animals and their unusual friendships they have developed - friendship you just wouldn't believe until you saw them. Who could imagine a friendship between a hippo and a turtle, or a giraffe and an ostrich, cats and dogs, an organutan and a dog, an elephant and a dog and a crow and a kitten? Yet here they are, astonishing stories that will make you go Awwww.Vote for your favourite in the poll and take the quick quiz on the collective terms for animals. Before you go be sure to give me a thumbs up, and leave a comment telling us how you scored in the quiz.
We could learn a lot from the animal kingdom. Generally, we expect species to stick to their own species, but isn't it heartwarming when you see it need not always be the case? Here are a number of examples of how it is possible to cross boundaries, to ignore convention and make friends where ever you can find them.
Be sure to check out all the wonderful animal pictures and animal videos.
Thanks to the know-it-all from second grade, we're all aware that dolphins and whales are mammals, not fish. But it's probably been a while since you've pondered just how incredibly, mind-blowingly weird it is that you and whales were the same animal more recently than whales and sharks. Or to put it in chart form, you and whales split up somewhere in the big tangle of bio diversity up top labeled "Age of Mammals" while whales and fish haven't been the same animals since way the hell down here where you see the word Selacchi. So how is it that our evolutionary cousins ended up with flippers and fins exactly where fish have them and we ended up needing swimming lessons?
Turns out it's the same reason birds and bats both ended up flying around on wings: convergent evolution, the smarmy term for when completely unrelated species develop similar traits. It happens because, related or not, evolution is going to favor the folks with the best equipment. Here are some critters that prove sometimes evolution is just trying to screw with your head
Turns out it's the same reason birds and bats both ended up flying around on wings: convergent evolution, the smarmy term for when completely unrelated species develop similar traits. It happens because, related or not, evolution is going to favor the folks with the best equipment. Here are some critters that prove sometimes evolution is just trying to screw with your head.
One day, Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox and Brer Coon and Brer Bear and a lot of other animals decided to work together to plant a garden full of corn for roasting. They started early in the morning and raked and dug and raked some more, breaking up the hard ground so it would be ready for planting. It was a hot day, and Brer Rabbit got tired mighty quick. But he kept toting off the brush and clearing away the debris 'cause he didn't want no one to call him lazy.
This is a discussion on The definition of cute - Puppy howling within the General Dog Discussion forums, part of the Keeping and Caring for Dogs category; Don't know if this has been posted already.For the 1920s there’s Juliette, the imagined companion of Coco Chanel resplendent in pearls and a tweed jacket; the 1940s envisages a pug called Sydney dressed in a tuxedo complete with bow tie as Charlie Chaplin’s ideal pooch, and 1990 sees Fernandez the dog wearing a polo neck jumper as the companion of the late Steve Jobs. However they are classified, it is accepted that the NGSD is the most primitive "domestic" dog, brought to the island by humans at least 6,000 years ago. Kept pure due to isolation from other types of dogs until the 1950s, they are like a living fossil. Almost all of the NGSD in North America have descended from the original Taronga Zoo pair. Offspring of this founder pair were widely distributed to zoos in America and Europe.In this sense, 2013 got off to a good start in Europe and the United States. On January 1, a European Union directive came into effect banning the use of individual sow stalls from the fourth week of pregnancy until one week before the sow gives birth. Millions of sows must now have the elementary freedom not only to turn around, but to walk. Nor can they be kept on bare concrete without straw or some other material that allows them to satisfy their natural instinct to root. By the end of January, 20 of the 27 EU member states were at least 90% compliant with the directive, and the European Commission was preparing to take action to ensure full compliance.
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphMeanwhile, in America, active campaigning by the Humane Society of the US has led to about 50 major pork buyers announcing that they will phase out their purchase of pork from suppliers who use sow stalls. (Some, including Chipotle and Whole Foods, already have.)
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphStill, Europe is far ahead of the US on farm-animal welfare. The ban on sow stalls there continues the progress made to ameliorate the most extreme forms of animal confinement.
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphIndividual stalls for veal calves were the first to go, in 2007. Last year, the standard battery cage for egg-laying hens was banned, ensuring somewhat better conditions for hundreds of millions of hens (though they can still be kept in cages that severely restrict their movement).
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe new standards are compromises that are premised on the assumption that Europeans will continue to eat animal products and do not wish to see a sharp rise in the cost of their food. Predictably, therefore, animal-welfare advocates are not – and should not be – satisfied, even if, as the European Commission’s scientific and veterinary advice indicates, the new standards will reduce animal suffering.
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphAnother European directive came into effect on January 1, banning medical research on chimpanzees. It went unnoticed, because there has been no European medical research on chimpanzees since 2003. During the past 20 years, other countries have also stopped using chimpanzees for medical research; indeed, only the US and Gabon continue to do so, with the US by far the larger user.
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphLast month, the National Institutes of Health, the US government agency responsible for biomedical research, approved a report recommending the cancelation of the majority of NIH-funded projects involving invasive biomedical research on chimpanzees. The report also recommends that most of the chimpanzees owned or supported by the NIH should be “retired” from research and moved to sanctuaries.
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe NIH will retain only one colony, comprising roughly 50 chimps, and any research carried out on these apes will have to be approved by an independent committee that will include public representation. The report also recommends special requirements for keeping the remaining chimps: housing in groups of at least seven, with a minimum of 1,000 square feet per chimp, room to climb, and opportunities to forage for food. The NIH action still needs to be ratified by the director, Francis Collins.
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphWith billions of animals still leading miserable lives on factory farms, more space for pregnant sows and the release from labs of a few hundred chimpanzees may not seem like much to cheer about. But the larger picture is worth celebrating. For centuries, humans in industrialized countries have treated animals as units of production, rather than as sentient beings with a moral status that requires us to take their interests into account. (In more traditional societies, relations between humans and animals have often been closer, but not always better for the animals.)
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe struggle to liberate animals from oppression is a moral campaign comparable to the struggle to end human slavery. Indeed, the enslavement of animals, for labor and for food, is more pervasive and more central to our way of life than the enslavement of other humans ever was. With some isolated and short-lived exceptions – for example, in India under the Emperor Ashoka and in Japan under the Tokugawa shogun Tsunayoshi – laws to protect animals from cruelty are less than 200 years old.
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphIt is therefore bound to be a long struggle. But, if the gains made so far seem to be dwarfed by the wrongs that humans continue to do to animals, we can find hope in the fact that, as January’s developments show, the pace of change is accelerating perceptibly.
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