Trying to survive under Robert Mugabe: When an elephant dies of old age in a Zimbabwe national park, hundreds of starving villagers fight and stab each other for its meat:
Photographer David Chancellor said: ‘Just after dawn a villager spotted the carcass as he passed on a bicycle.
‘It was in the middle of nowhere, but within 15 minutes hundreds of people had arrived from all directions.
‘The women formed a ring around the elephant and the men stood inside, fighting and stabbing each other to get to the meat.’
He added: ‘The meat was taken back to homes. Some was eaten immediately but most was dried on washing lines and stored to eat later.
‘There were celebrations in the surrounding villages for the next two nights.’
Look at the photo. This is what Zimbabweans should do with Mugabe.
At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.
Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.
Her cunning has not stopped there. One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves, and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins.
Even baby dolphins are smart:
At a dolphinarium, a person standing by the pool’s window noticed that a dolphin calf was watching him. When he released a puff of smoke from his cigarette, the dolphin immediately swam off to her mother, returned and released a mouthful of milk, causing a similar effect to the cigarette smoke.
The skeletons of many dinosaurs changed so much as they grew up that scientists may have misidentified baby dinos of already known species (such as T. rex) as unique species. The video explains why it was useful for dinosaurs to have the shape of their skeletons change with age.
While others hunt for dinosaur DNA, a Canadian scientist is attempting to build a dinosaur inside a chicken egg by playing with chicken genes. He says he’s getting close to making a pet dinosaur for himself.
In the capital territory of Delhi, where cows and elephants also roam the streets, government buildings are overrun with rhesus macaques, probably the most common local monkey species. It is estimated that tens or even hundreds of thousands of monkeys of various species live in the Delhi metropolitan area. A large number of them live on Raisina Hill, where government offices are concentrated. Monkeys run through offices, attack workers, screech, and wreak havoc with the files. They have scattered top-secret documents and snapped power lines. On the streets, they snatch food from people, pick pockets, ride buses and subways, and drink alcohol. They have bitten people and threatened visiting foreign dignitaries.
New attention was brought to the issue in October 2007 with an especially disturbing incident. The deputy mayor of New Delhi, Surinder Bajwa, in an attempt to shoo a gang of monkeys from the balcony of his apartment, went after them brandishing a stick. He missed the monkeys and fell from the balcony into the street. Bajwa sustained serious head injuries in the fall and died the next day.
Shooting the pests would be the logical solution, but this is India, where monkeys are considered sacred. Which makes them more important than people, it seems.
The trio pictured here, in Brisbane, Queensland, appear to have worked out a clever system of adapting the water fountain built by humans for their own pigeon purposes.
After waiting for the fountain to be free, one bird jumped on the lever and pushed it down to fill up the bowl, while another kept watch and the third splashed in.
When it had drunk its fill and cleaned its feathers, the third pigeon hopped up to the handle and let his friends have a go.
The three birds continued their bathing ritual for ten minutes, entertaining passers-by in Post Office Square, in Brisbane’s bustling business district.
The cover of an album with photographs of Angora rabbit raising in Nazi concentration camps
It turns out that many of the same death camps where the Nazis methodically exterminated millions of Jews and other prisoners were also used to breed Angora rabbits. The rabbits were raised for their soft fur, which was used to make warm clothes for German soldiers. Like the extermination camps themselves, it was a well-organized, large-scale industrial operation run with typical German thoroughness:
The Angora rabbit project was an SS-administered program to breed rabbits for their soft, warm fur, one use of which was to line the jackets of Luftwaffe pilots. The rabbits were raised in luxury not far from the maltreated prisoners in 31 Nazi concentration camps in Germany, including Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau. The project was a showpiece for visiting dignitaries, as well as a constant reminder to prisoners of how little their lives were valued.
Somewhere, Mo Ahmadinejad is jumping with joy: he has his proof now! Death camps? What death camps? They were just rabbit farms!
An article (with an NSFW video gallery) discussing every hypothesis of why animals masturbate – except the most obvious one: because it feels good. Not scientific enough, I guess.
