Sealion Has Marathon Mating Session, Collapses and Dies…
A male sea lion from California called Mike has died of exhaustion after over-exerting himself during the mating season in an animal park in Nuremberg, the city said on Tuesday.
The 19-year-old father of 12 offspring through three different females – Farah, Tiffy and Soda – showed signs of tiredness at around midday on Monday, the southern city said in a statement.
“Mike could no longer get out of the pool and was brought ashore by staff. The extremely weakened animal was treated by a vet but died from acute heart failure around 3:30 pm,” it said.
“Mating season is a common time for fatalities when bulls often stop eating for days to devote themselves fully to mating. For sea lion bulls with a harem this is the most exhausting time,” it noted.
The statement added that Mike’s offspring can be found in zoos as far afield as Berlin, Spain and the Netherlands, and that the 285-kilo (550-pound) animal was so “good natured” that people could touch him.
“He will be remembered fondly by visitors of the animal park for his appearances during shows in the dolphinarium where he had close contact with the dolphins,” it said.
The record age for a sea lion in captivity is 30. In the wild they have a life expectancy of 17.
Categories: Mammals Tags: farah the sealion, mike the sealion, Nuremberg Animal Park, sealions, soda the sealion, tiffy the sealion
150 Dead Dogs Found In Michigan Man’s Freezer
Police said about 150 dead dogs were found packed in freezers in the basement of a Michigan home where more than 110 live dogs, mostly Chihuahuas, were rescued this week.
Investigators in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn said the two-story house was littered with feces and trash. The 54-year-old man who lives there was taken to a hospital for observation. Police said the man appeared confused and disoriented.
Dearborn Police Chief Ronald Haddad said Friday that 112 live dogs have been removed from the home, and police believe about five more may be hiding inside. He says a criminal investigation is under way.
The rescued dogs were taken to a shelter, where many residents have donated food and filled out pet adoption applications.
It’s possible the man may be considered an animal hoarder, where people who are actually pet lovers take in large amounts of pets that need care, but don’t have the resources to provide them with a proper and habitable living environment. Animal hoarders typically think they’re helping the animals out, but in the end are actually doing far more harm than good.
It’s impossible to track exactly how many hoarding incidents there are. Some researchers believe there could be as many as 2,000 hoarding cases per year, and an estimated 250,000 animals a year suffering at the hands of hoarders.
Without treatment more than 95 percent of the time hoarders go right back to collecting animals. And if one state forbids them from keeping pets, they’ll often move to another where they can begin their abusive behavior all over again.
Categories: Mammals Tags: dearborn, dogs, michigan, pet hoarder, ronald haddad
5 Legged Puppy Rescued From Carnival Freak Show…
From mermaids to flying pigs check out these pictures of off-beat, interesting happenings from around the world.
Allyson Siegel, 45, of Charlotte, N.C., outbid a Brooklyn freak show operator to buy the pup because she couldn’t bear the thought of the Chihuahua-terrier mix ending up at the sideshow that featured disfigured animals, the Charlotte Observer reported.
Sideshow owner John Strong, who heard about the puppy through a friend, had paid Owensby $1,000 as a deposit on a $3,000 agreement so he could add the pup to his “Freaks of Nature” show.
“I told him it was an amazing animal show with freaks and oddities,” Strong told the New York Daily News. “I told him the puppy was very rare, but someone offered more money.”
Otherwise healthy, the puppy was born in a litter of six at Calvin Owensby’s Chihuahua Diamond about six weeks ago. Owensby, an electrician unemployed since December, said he needed the money.
“[Precious] wasn’t a freak, she was just a dog born with five legs,” Owensby told the News. “My girlfriend decided she didn’t want to see her in a freak show.”
Siegel changed the puppy’s name from Precious to Lilly and plans to spend an additional $2,000 to have the extra appendage removed. Surgery is set in two weeks. The fifth leg, which trips Lilly as she tries to walk, hangs limply between the puppy’s two back legs.
“I called Calvin and I said, ‘I understand this is about money,’ and I just said, ‘How much?’” Siegel told the New York Daily News. “She’s beautiful, she’s not a freak, she’s a normal little puppy dog and she should be just like all the others.”
Following the surgery, Siegel — who already has six cats — plans to give Lilly to her sister in Charlotte.
Strong, who got his deposit back, said he would have given Lilly a good life. Though he’s disappointed, he said, “Sometimes, you just gotta say, ‘OK, I still have nine live, two-headed animals’ and move on.”
Categories: Mammals Tags: 5 legs, allyson siegel, chihuaha-terrier mix, coney island, freaks of nature, john strong, puppy
Cats Know How To Control Humans, Study Shows…
Humanity catches up with what Cat owners have known all along…
If you’ve ever wondered who’s in control, you or your cat, a new study points to the obvious. It’s your cat.
Household cats exercise this control with a certain type of urgent-sounding, high-pitched meow, according to the findings.
This meow is actually a purr mixed with a high-pitched cry. While people usually think of cat purring as a sign of happiness, some cats make this purr-cry sound when they want to be fed. The study showed that humans find these mixed calls annoying and difficult to ignore.
“The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response,” said Karen McComb of the University of Sussex. “Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom.”
They know us
Previous research has shown similarities between cat cries and human infant cries.
McComb suggests that the purr-cry may subtly take advantage of humans’ sensitivity to cries they associate with nurturing offspring. Also, including the cry within the purr could make the sound “less harmonic and thus more difficult to habituate to,” she said.
McComb got the idea for the study from her experience with her own cat, who would consistently wake her up in the mornings with a very insistent purr. After speaking with other cat owners, she learned that some of their cats also made the same type of call. As a scientist who studies vocal communication in mammals, she decided to investigate the manipulative meow.
Tough to test
Setting up the experiments wasn’t easy. While the felines used purr-cries around their familiar owners, they were not eager to make the same cries in front of strangers. So McComb and her team trained cat owners to record their pets’ cries — capturing the sounds made by cats when they were seeking food and when they were not. In all, the team collected recordings from 10 different cats.
The researchers then played the cries back for 50 human participants, not all of whom owned cats. They found that humans, even if they had never had a cat themselves, judged the purrs recorded while cats were actively seeking food — the purrs with an embedded, high-pitched cry — as more urgent and less pleasant than those made in other contexts.
When the team re-synthesised the recorded purrs to remove the embedded cry, leaving all else unchanged, the human subjects’ urgency ratings for those calls decreased significantly.
McComb said she thinks this cry occurs at a low level in cats’ normal purring, “but we think that cats learn to dramatically exaggerate it when it proves effective in generating a response from humans.” In fact, not all cats use this form of purring at all, she said, noting that it seems to most often develop in cats that have a one-on-one relationship with their owners rather than those living in large households, where their purrs might be overlooked.
The results were published in the July 14 issue of the journal Current Biology.
Categories: Mammals Tags: cats, household cats, human beings, humans
Latest Fad In Tokyo- Cat Cafes
What an interesting world we live in… GlobalPost
I followed the instructions of the watchful cashier and took off my shoes, sanitized my hands, placed my bag in a locker and dangled an ID card (“customer #18”) from a lanyard around my neck. The cashier then gave me a once over and a shallow bow, and I padded quietly into the sitting room of the cafe.
“She’s the prettiest girl we have at our cafe. Everybody wants to touch her, but we ask that customers only do so if she doesn’t resist you,” a waitress told me.
She didn’t resist. And since I was paying for the privilege, I leaned in and stroked her cheek. She was as lovely as the waitress had promised: a big-eyed, silky soft, compliant 2-year-old Russian Blue cat.
I was at Calico, one of Tokyo’s increasingly popular cat cafes, where customers seeking human and feline companionship pay to sip tea and stroke one of the 20-odd resident cats, representing 17 different breeds.
In an increasingly childless and aging nation, cat cafes fill a void. The more fortunate Japanese are the middle-aged couples who cradle Dachshunds like grandchildren at car dealerships and the young women who hand feed their Maltese puppies on park benches. For those who live with long work hours, no-pet apartments and work-related travel, there are cat cafes.
I first heard of Calico cat cafe when it opened in March 2007, but then it was an oddity and the preserve of lonely women and cat fanciers. It is now staggeringly popular. This March it opened a second branch in the high-rent Shinjuku business and shopping district. Last October it published a glossy coffee table book featuring its “feline staff.” The original branch is so packed that reservations are recommended on weekends.
Browsing in a bookstore, I found 39 establishments listed in the “cat cafe yellow page” section of a magazine. Calico advertises itself as a great “date spot,” a place to make “friends” — both cats and humans — and a “fun place” to swing by after work.
Tokyo wasn’t always like this. When I grew up here in the 1980s, people had both children and pets. But in the past decade, the Japanese have chosen to have fewer children, while they keep more pets. The fertility rate, or average number of children born to a woman, was 3.65 in 1950, but had dropped to 2.13 by 1970. By the time I was born in 1980, it was 1.75. The rate now hovers at a little above one child per woman. The estimate for 2009 is that an average woman will bear 1.21 children.
When I visited Calico cat cafe on a Saturday afternoon, it was packed almost to capacity with young couples on dates, older married couples making an afternoon of it and young women in ones and twos. One shy man struggled to draw attention from the cats, the people and even the staff.
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A bored husband slept, mouth gaping and fingers loosened around the cat toy in his lap. Men and women jockeyed for prime positions near the waking cats and took photos on cellphone cameras of cats snoozing in baskets and lapping at water bowls.
A waiter handed me a laminated page of rules: wear your cat-access pass around your neck at all times; no one under 5th grade may enter; cats too young to be held have scarves around their necks; do not hold or stroke a cat if it resists you; never wake a napping cat; bringing cat nip or cat food to the cafe is strictly forbidden.
“Is this a rare breed, this one that looks like a poodle?” a woman asked a waitress while her husband snapped a photo of the sour-faced cat.
“Oh yes, Kukuru is very rare. She’s one of around only 20 in all of Japan,” the waitress replied. The husband grunted, impressed, and stroked the sleeping cat.
A few yards away, two young women waged a near silent and very polite battle over a complimentary plastic bag of six pieces of dried cat food. (Customers were permitted to use the food to try to lure cats to come closer.)
All but three of the cats were asleep when I left the room full of adults vying for their attention, crawling on the floor with cat toys shaped like miniature fishing rods and brandishing their cellphone cameras. As I paid up, the cashier bowed and offered me a complimentary postcard-sized photograph of cats that had been made into a sticker.
It had been a bargain, albeit a strange one: An hour of commitment-free cat stroking cost me only $9.
