Out Of Place Animals Week, part 1

A while ago someone started a Tumblr called Animals In Places They Shouldn't Be, and I was pleased at the possibility of handing off responsibility for covering at least one kind of bad animal behavior. Unfortunately, it's not updated nearly often enough to keep up with how common this offense is. Fortunately the admirable Cats. Where They Do Not Belong is much more on the ball on the out-of-place feline beat, but to make sure that other species are not getting away unblogged, we'll spend this week catching up on some cases from the last few months.

Last week a New Zealand farmer got a call from an employee saying that his cows were "acting a bit funny." He went to take a look and found that what had disturbed them - in their paddock 15 km from the ocean - was a fur seal.

The seal had apparently swum up a shallow drainage channel, and its well-being seemed to be of more concern than that of the cows. "He barked at me a couple of times, but seemed fine apart from that," the farmer said, and the animal was monitored by conservation officials before disappearing from the farm a few days later.

We've seen other out of place seals lately, even closer to home: first on someone's porch and then, brazenly, right on a woman's sofa. But a wild animal on your sofa is nothing compared to what a woman in England experienced: she awoke in her own bed to find a fox sitting on her chest.

"I thought it was a cat at first when I felt it clawing at my face.... I just leapt from the covers and screamed, I’ve never moved so quickly." Despite the screams, it was hard to convince the animal it wasn't welcome: after being chased out of the house it tried to get back in a few minutes later.

And in the "husbands behaving badly" department, the victim also said: "Tony’s first instinct was to grab his camera rather than see if I was OK. He got a good picture of the fox in our upstairs study."

Traditions and trends news briefs

It's a time of year when traditions take center stage. Some prefer precise repetition, with every ornament on the tree in the same place; others want to push the envelope, stuffing the turkey with new-fangled ingredients instead of using Mom's old-time recipe.

Bad animal have traditions, too, and like us, some of them are old-school, and some are pushing the envelope:

-Dogs shooting their owners with guns: it's so common that it made it into the subtitle of the book - and they're not stopping now.

In Utah, a dog in a boat with some duck hunters jumped onto a shotgun and shot one of them in the butt. The man was taken to the hospital, where he was treated and released. Those of you who object to hunting will no doubt be pleased by local news reports that "The dog and any ducks within range at the time of the accident were uninjured."

A more serious case occurred in Florida, where a bulldog named Eli in shot his owner in the thigh with a rifle while in a truck on a hunting trip. Reports called the shooting "unintentional" despite the fact the dog had to release the safety before being able to shoot the gun. The 78-year-old victim was shot in a major artery and and as of last Tuesday was still on a ventilator.

-Bears scavenging for garbage and even breaking into homes is nothing new, but they're taking it to a new level. I thought I was impressed by the bear in Vancouver that actually hitched a ride on a garbage truck (video here) until I read about the bear that had been living for weeks in a basement in New Jersey.

The animal had built a bed of leaves and branches and was ready for a comfy winter till a cable TV guy came to make a repair. He heard a growl and turned to find himself facing a 500 pound black bear:

"I just freaked out, threw my tools, ran out of the basement."

It took a hour-long chase for animal control officers to tranquilize and capture the bear. The homeowner plans to start keeping his basement locked, and maybe you want to check all your doors as well.

-Finally, what may be a new trend: we recently saw a seal trying to get into someone's house in Australia.

That one didn't make it, but seals seem to be taking this as an ongoing project, and the second attempt was a success. No doubt realizing our weakness for the cute, this time the seals sent a baby to perform the mission. After making its way from the water across busy roads, up a long driveway, under a gate and through the cat door, it made itself at home on a sofa.

Fortunately, they chose a victim that had more sense than most. The New Zealand woman at first thought she was hallucinating, then, she said:

"Then it looks at me with those huge brown eyes. It was so cute, but I didn't touch it because you don't with wild animals."

Another adorable aquatic menace

What is it about being an aquatic mammal that messes with people's minds? Dolphins are not the only one of these sleek wet creatures whose reputation is far more positive than the reality. When you think of seals and sea lions, you no doubt think of cute circus tricks or those adorable fuzzy white babies - the ones that people all over the world banded to together to save from cruel slaughter for their fur.

This positive attitude is encouraged by gushing articles like this one, where a nature photographer thinks it's just perfectly adorable when a seal chews on her diving flippers and tries to eat a camera.

That article compares the seal to a playful puppy. Sure, the kind of cute puppy who drags helpless five-year-old children into the water, and kills scientists who've dedicated their lives to studying marine biology.

The private lives of these animals is also far from adorable. Like dolphins, they make a regular practice of sexual assault and infanticide. In one highly endangered seal species, one of the main threats to their survival is that the males have the habit of ganging up on females in breeding season so violently that they kill them. Not the best strategy if you're trying to perpetuate the species, guys.

And a couple of recent stories show that their more of their bad behavior is heading our way. In Prince Edward Island, Canada, Chris MacLeod and Mary MacDonald took their dogs to swim at the same beach they always do, but this time it led to tragedy:

On Aug. 27 one of their dogs, Dipstick, swam into the water. MacLeod said seals surrounded his dog, and stopped her from coming back to shore. MacDonald made an effort to swim out and clear a path for the dog, but failed.

"The seals were actually meeting Mary, and not letting her, more or less, go any farther and Mary was kind of scared," said MacLeod.

Unable to rescue their pet, the couple could do nothing but watch as the seals mobbed the dog for two hours till it drowned. And adding the usual insult to this painful injury, a naturalist consulted by the news media just made excuses, rationalizing that "seals are curious creatures and that might explain their behavior" and insisting that they "almost never" attack humans or dogs.

And it seems you're not even safe from these creatures anymore if you avoid the shore. In Victoria, Australia, a man looked out his window to see something shocking peering back:

A sea lion swam on to Dendy Beach in Brighton, made its way up the sand and beach stairs, waddled along the Esplanade, then crossed the road into the garden of Esplanade resident John Battersby.

Note that while Australia has a wide range of exotic wildlife, this is not a common occurrence. The neighbor who spotted the animal crossing the road at first thought it was a bear, which was apparently only a slightly less ridiculous theory than the truth. This is a part of the country where sea lions are spotted at most once or twice a year, and never - till now - on someone's front porch.

So if you live on the coast, watch your back. If they gang up with the dolphins, we're really in trouble.


PS: You'd know all that stuff about seals if you read the book. Also, that hard-won law that made it illegal to club baby seals to death? It only applies until they are twelve days old and start losing the white fur. I'm sure they think we've done them a HUGE favor.

Science filling in the details of bad animal behavior

If you think bad animal behavior is just a lark, suitable for blogging and a laugh, you're wrong. It's a serious scientific pursuit. I may get nothing out of this business, but some South African researchers lately got an actual publication out of it: a report in the Journal of Ethology about a seal trying to rape a penguin.

As the BBC reports:

The brazenness of the seal's behaviour left those who saw it in no doubt as to what was happening.

(Researchers) De Bruyn and a colleague were on Trypot beach at Marion Island to study elephant seals when they noticed a young, adult male Antarctic fur seal, in good condition, attempting to copulate with an adult king penguin of unknown sex.

The 100kg seal first subdued the 15kg penguin by lying on it.

The penguin flapped its flippers and attempted to stand and escape - but to no avail.

The seal then alternated between resting on the penguin, and thrusting its pelvis, trying to insert itself, unsuccessfully.

You have to give credit to both the scientists and the BBC for having a much more realistic view of animal behavior than most. They don't express surprise at the mere fact of attempted animal sexual assault, which we've seen on this blog with animals as varied as frogs and dolphins:

Sexual coercion among animals is extremely common: males of many species often harass, coerce or force females of their own kind to mate, while animals are also known occasionally to harass sexually a member of a closely related species.

They even realize that these incidents aren't confined to members of the same species - as we've seen, again, with dolphins and with a parrot who've had humans as the objects of their attentions. So, the researchers are quite precise about what's unusual about this incident:

But this is thought to be the first recorded example of a mammal trying to have sex with a member of another class of vertebrate, such as a bird, fish, reptile, or amphibian.

This is what is comes down to: bad animal sexual behavior is so widespread, you've got to get that specific to get a scientific "first" out of it.

The researchers consider various possible motives for the behavior, from aggression to playfulness. But if it was a misdirected attempt at cross-order romance, he's definitely doing it wrong:

After 45 minutes the seal gave up, swam into the water and then completely ignored the bird it had just assaulted.

Really, at least send flowers - or some fish - if you're not going to call, you know?


You can read the whole article here, if you're into that sort of thing.

Thanks to Sir Pilkington's weirdimals Twitter for the tip. Photo of a different unnatural arrangement of a seal and a penguin by Flickr user shaindlin.