A recent study reveals that dogs are much likely to steal food in the dark when humans cannot notice them, indicating they understand a human’s perspective. A series of experiments were conducted in different light conditions. In each test, the humans forbade the dog from eating the food. On conducting these tests, she noticed that the dog ate more food in the dark and that too quickly, as compared to when the room was lit.
Image Credit: Jennifer Vonk
Recent studies have indicated that animals have a greater grasp of basic math than previously believed (one 2008 study demonstrated the ability of some birds to grasp quantities up to 12). American black bears in particular seem to be more able to better gauge quantities than expected.
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Mike the headless chicken, October 1945. According to some accounts, the day the ax fell, Mike slept with his head under his wing.
September 10th, 1945 finds a strapping (but tender) five and a half month old Wyandotte rooster pecking through the dust of Fruita, Colorado. The unsuspecting bird had never looked so delicious as he did that, now famous, day. Clara Olsen was planning on featuring the plump chicken in the evening meal. Husband Lloyd Olsen was sent out, on a very routine mission, to prepare the designated fryer for the pan. Nothing about this task turned out to be routine. Lloyd knew his Mother in Law would be dining with them and would savor the neck. He positioned his ax precisely, estimating just the right tolerances, to leave a generous neck bone. “It was as important to Suck-Up to your Mother in Law in the 40′s as it is today.” A skillful blow was executed and the chicken staggered around like most freshly terminated poultry.
The breastfeeding by humans of animals is a practice that is widely attested historically and continues to be practiced today by some cultures. The reasons for the practice are varied: to feed young animals, to drain a woman’s breasts, to promote lactation, to develop good nipples, to prevent conception and so on. One example of the practice being used for health reasons comes from late 18th century England. When the writer Mary Wollstonecroft was dying of puerperal fever in 1797 following the birth of her second daughter, the doctor ordered that puppies be applied to her breasts to draw off the milk, possibly with the intention of helping her womb to contract to expel the infected placenta that was slowly poisoning her. Similarly, English and German physicians between the 16th and 18th centuries recommended using puppies to “draw” the mother’s breasts, and in 1799 the German Friedrich Benjamin Osiander reported that in Göttingen women suckled young dogs to dislodge nodules from their breasts.
The remote Arctic island in Siberia is believed to be the final place on Earth to support woolly mammoths as an isolated population until their extinction about 2000 BCE, making them the most recent surviving population known to science.