Lessons for the New Year

To start the new year off right, a collection of stories demonstrating how to - and how not to - treat animals that are behaving badly.

YES:
- Man bites snake in India:

A gardener who was bitten by a snake gave as good as he got, or better. He bit the snake back, and kept chewing until he felt rather ill, vomited, and fainted, but came out on top in the end:

"I was angry when the snake bit me on my finger. I bit it back because that was my way of taking revenge," Ramesh told doctors after regaining consciousness.

His condition is stable. The snake is dead.

- A goat in Germany was jailed for disrupting traffic, and insulted as well:

The only remarks on the arrest papers were "smells very bad."

The goat is being fed bread and water and as is clear from the photo above, his accomodations are suitably spartan.

Traffic enforcement on animal violators seems to be taken more seriously in some places than others. We've seen a dog get away with crashing a car into a store in Australia and everybody making excuses for a crocodile in Turkey.

Let's resolve in the new year not to take those two cases as precedent and work harder to lock up goats and handcuff bulls and big birds who disrupt travel.

NO:
-On the other end of the spectrum from the police department's goat diet of bread and water, we have a report of a zoo hiring a children's chef to make a special Christmas meal for a fussy baby lemur:

Zoo keepers have tried to tempt the animal with a variety of treats, but so far the youngster has turned his nose up at almost everything on offer.

So Mrs Karmel was drafted in to ensure he eats his Christmas dinner.

"He's quite fussy, like most kids are," she said. "He doesn't like vegetables but he likes fruit. The trouble with him is that he is fickle - one day he likes something and the next day he won't eat it."

-Even worse, on the other end of spectrum from the snake-biting gardener, the past year saw victims of shark attacks, including a man who had his arm bitten off by a shark, lobbying for shark conservation.

Enough said. You know what to do.

Dog thinks he deserves a palace

When you're a world leader, you get used to a certain lifestyle, and it can be hard to adjust when your term is over. Apparently the same is true if you're the dog of a world leader, and at least in the case of the little dog belonging to former French president Chirac, this can lead to some pretty bad behavior.

BBC - Since stepping down from office in May 2007, Jacques Chirac has admitted he has found retirement hard going but apparently it is his dog, Sumo, who has suffered most acutely.

Used to roaming the large gardens of the Elysee Palace, the Maltese terrier has found down-sizing to an apartment on the Quai Voltaire unbearable and, according to Mrs Chirac, severe depression has turned him from an innocent white fluff-ball into a ferocious attacker of ex-presidents.

In January this year, Mr Chirac had to be hospitalised after the dog sank his teeth into an unnamed body part.

In this latest attack, Mrs Chirac said that Sumo had been lying quietly at her feet but flew into a violent rage on the approach of her husband.

The dog leapt up and nipped the former French leader in the stomach.

"I was very scared because there was blood. It's terrible, the small teeth like that. He was going wild. He wanted to jump up and bite again," she said.

I know, you want to laugh - it's just a little white fluffball. But speaking as the owner of a small dog with very high standards myself, I can sympathize. I don't want to think about what would happen if I caused her a disappointment of this monumental a nature.

The dog has reportedly been sent to live on a farm in the French countryside. At least, that's what the president's wife says and everyone believes her.

Bad Maltese by Flickr user Natalia Romay.

Department of Unprovoked Attacks

Even we here at Animals Behaving Badly can sympathize to some extent with the subjects of some of our reports. Biting a mayor or a zoo director might be the only way to express a legitimate grievance. And who among us can honestly say we've never wanted to pee on a president?

But what's going on when turkeys harrass postmen and innocent pedestrians, or cows knock over bicyclists?

And now we've got a woman from Austria, taking a swim on her yearly vacation to Wisconsin, attacked out of nowhere by three otters. While she had the sense to leave the water when they appeared, the otters followed her and bit her on the legs eight or nine times. She's now undergoing a series of rabies shots.

Wildlife experts had no explanation for this allegedly unusual event. But the next time you're excited to see some charming wild creature in the woods, remember this quote:

“I thought it was really cool,” she said. “I’d never seen an otter before. Then, all of a sudden, there were three of them.”

Sure it's cute, but look at the teeth on that otter from Misterqueue.