Bad animal classics

More new cases of traditional offenses:

-Reptiles on a plane: An Australian cargo pilot was making a solo flight when a snake slid out of the dashboard and along his leg. Australia being a place where a decent proportion of the wildlife can kill you with various venoms, he did not wait for a positive species ID, and quickly made an emergency return the airport.

His level head saved him, unlike the passengers of a flight where a small croc escaped from someone's luggage. In their panic they unbalanced the aircraft and it crashed, killing all but one of them.

-Cats vs Post: Yet another customer had mail service suspended in England because of his vicious cat. Similar to previous cases, (for example here and here) the owner claimed the accusation that his pet was a 'health and safety risk' was "utterly ridiculous," and a neighbor said 'Snowball is a lovely cat and friendly. I can’t imagine her ever attacking anybody.'

But you can't fight the post office, and delivery was only resumed when he built a cat-excluding cage around his letter slot.

-Bears where they shouldn't be: Officials in LA captured a bear that's been wandering a neighborhood for about a month, committing offenses like breaking into a refrigerator and eating frozen meatballs. The bear didn't go down without teaching one resident an important lesson: A man was caught on video nearly walking straight into the bear because he was texting.

Let this be a warning to keep those phones in your pocket when you're on the move, because you never know when you'll come face to face with a bad animal.


Cat waiting for the postman by Flickr user nonasuch.

More stuffed animals messing with our minds

Last week we saw several cases where emergency responders were called out to subdue a large wild animal that turned out to be a life-size stuffed toy. Normally I would not revisit this topic so soon, but two recent events suggest that that post may leave some with the wrong impression.

In Nottinghamshire, England, police were called when a passerby saw a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel asleep in the back of a car in what counted for England as extreme heat (according to The Sun, "temperatures soared to 18°C (64°F).")

This is indeed a potentially dangerous situation, and no one should ever leave a dog in a hot car. Unless, of course, as in this case, it's a stuffed toy.

And in Scotland, a woman called the SPCA when she found a five foot long snake in her attic. "I'd brought gloves and a pillow case to enable us to handle and contain the snake safely, but as soon as we spotted it we realised the equipment wouldn't be necessary," said an officer. In fact, it was a snake-print stuffed draft blocker of the sort that you lay along the bottom of a door in cold weather.

The Scottish officers were sympathetic - "It did look very snake-like and was folded over into a box," one said - and had a sense of humor about the situation: They've given the "snake" a name and a home in their office.

The Nottinghamshire police, however, remained prickly about the situation and blamed the owner of the car, saying “Officers believed a dog could be suffering. This is a perfect example of why drivers need to think about what they leave on view.” No doubt they are cranky because they now have to reimburse the owner for the damage to the car.

The lesson here is obvious: it's not just imitation megafauna that can cause this kind of problem. Much smaller stuffed creatures can be just as problematic.

So again: We've got enough trouble dealing with the bad behavior of real animals. So let's all try to just look a bit more closely before calling in the troops.

Midsummer serpent roundup

Some snake stories we've missed over the past few months:

-From Australia, a cat behaving badly because of a snake obsession: Loti has cost her owners almost $2000 because of her habit of catching venomous snakes. She almost died after being bitten two years ago, but as of February, she hadn't given up the habit, presenting her owners with another brown snake and another hundred dollar vet bill.

-Also in Australia, a canoe club was in danger of a ceiling collapse because of six scrub pythons up in the roof having an orgy. Two were caught, but four were continuing their activities in a low corner where they can't be reached, including a seven meter long female who eluded capture for the same offense a couple of years ago.

-And in England, another sad example of what can happen when people think that animals appreciate what we do for them.

Luke Yeomans founded a research and conservation center for king cobras in India, and kept a breeding colony of 24 at his home in England. But despite his alleged expertise, as you can see from the photo above, apparently he thought it was a good idea to kiss a cobra on the back of its head. And he was quoted as saying:

“These king cobras know I provide them with food and fresh water so they’re not going to go out of their way to do harm to me when I do no harm to them whatsoever."

Um, right. He was planning to open his cobra sanctuary to the public in July - but a few days before the scheduled debut, he died after one of the snakes bit him.

Short-attention-span bad animals

Today, we're just going to stick to the headlines:

Street's mail deliveries banned after dog bites postwoman

Rat Sends Plane Scurrying Back To Sea-Tac Gate

Man falls to death from rooftop after monkey attack

Female baboons are victims of domestic abuse

Taser fails to slow moose

Girl finds seven-foot snake in toilet

Rage-inducing chemical on squid eggs turns males into violent thugs

Looks like bad animals all over the world, of all sizes, shapes, orders, and families, are keeping busy victimizing all kinds of innocents in all kinds of ways. On the bright side, after reading that list, isn't it almost a relief to turn back to the human news?

Animals and Transportation week, part 1

Any successful species has to evolve suitable methods of travel. And some animals have come up with solutions that make humans jealous: who hasn't wanted to be able to fly without submitting to the indignity of airline security and cramped seating? Or swim or run effortlessly for hundreds of miles?

Humans, reduced to two legs and not even a tail for balance, have had to make up for these evolutionary sacrifices via technology. And some animals that don't know their place seem to think they can have their wings and take our planes too. We've seen this before, but recently there's been a rash of new cases:

-We saw a case of snakes on a train recently in Boston; now, in Poland, a three and a half foot long serpent escaped from a shipping cage and caused a panic, with passengers reportedly climbing on the seats and then fleeing when the train reached the station, where police and fire personnel captured it.

-You might feel those snakes can't be blamed, perhaps, but in England, there was much excitement when a ferret turned up at a train station on its own. Its owner was located living only a couple of stations down the line, so it did not make the whole 500-mile journey from London as intially suspected. However, there is no evidence that it paid for a ticket for a ride of any length, so it's still stealing.

-Most presumptuous of all of these, a penguin from Sea World took a plane flight, and strolled down the aisle while keepers lectured about it to the captive audience. And in case that hadn't sufficiently gone to the bird's head, video of the incident has over 450,000 view on You Tube as of this writing.

Still, at least those animals are using our technology for its intended purpose. Come back Thursday when we'll be perfectly indignant about some monkeys and their human enablers.


Another presumptuous penguin photographed waiting for a plane by Flickr user Stacy Lynn Baum.

Biting news briefs

- At the San Diego zoo, a keeper was rushed to the hospital after being bitten by panda Bai Yun. The LA Times notes:

Despite their cuddly appearance, pandas, in the wild or in captivity, are known for quick changes of temperament that can lead to aggressiveness, zoo officials said.

You've been warned. (And it's not the first time.)

-In Israel, a model famous for her ample artificially enhanced bosom was bitten by a snake during a photo shoot. Then, on the Internet, the story that the snake had died of silcone poisoning went viral.

However, the remark about the snake dying was actually a joke, as explained by the original site that started it all.

Here at this blog we can understand the impulse to jump on the rare story where a bad animal got what was coming to it, but check your sources, people.

(You can see video at that link, if you're into that sort of thing, you sicko.)

-Remember the dog we reported on earlier this month who ate three of his owner's toes?

Well, that cute little Shiba Inu is up for adoption!

Don't knock each other over in the rush!



Adorable shiba teeth by Flickr user Daniel Gipps.

Snakes on a train... and other inconvenient places

Some of this blog's best friends are snake owners, and admittedly its author can be found rooting for them in print on occassion.

But like any other animal, when you invite snakes to share your life you're asking for trouble. And it's not always the kind of trouble you might expect.

For example in England, a pet snake recently caused a house fire. Rearranging its enclosure on its own without following basic safety precautions, it moved a heat lamp so that it touched a piece of bark, starting the blaze.

Your pet snake problems may inconvenience others as well. In Boston, a remarkably inattentive woman somehow lost her boa constrictor on a subway train a month ago. They were reunited last Friday, after a commuter spotted the 3-foot-long snake and the train was taken out of service to search for it.

And while acquiring a pet from a reputable source is important no matter the species, snakes can present special issues: a man in New Jersey recently ended up in the hospital after being bitten by his pet cobra. The dealer claimed that its venom sacs had been removed, but apparently, not so much.

Those folks have only themselves to blame, but others are the innocent victims of uninvited guests. In Idaho, a house is for sale cheap after a foreclosure, but it's not the usual recession-related sad story. The owners abandoned it because it's infested with thousands of garter snakes. A herpetologist told Reuters that the house was probably built on the site of a den where the snakes return every year when the weather gets cold.

The realtor says he's looking for a very special sort of buyer: "I guess I need a snake lover; either that or someone with multiple mongooses."



Photo of sign from the New York City subway, where they are prepared for you to lose your snake (see far left) by Flickr user eston.

Humans behaving stupidly

In many of the stories on this blog, beneath an obvious tale of an animal behaving badly, there is a subtext: humans behaving stupidly about animals. Once in a while, it's only fair to bring that subtext to the fore.

In England, a woman feeding white bread to ducks in a part was chastised for not jumping on the whole foods bandwagon:

"Then a man in a fluorescent waistcoat who was holding a litter pick-up stick came over to me and said 'I know you mean well but giving them white bread is not good for them.'

“He said next time if I brought wholemeal, granary or bird seed that would be better for them.”

Elsewhere in England, police cleared the area and called for assistance when they saw a cobra coiled around the handlebars of a bicycle. As the snake expert who responded told the tale:

"I grabbed all the kit I would need to protect myself from a venomous snake, including a snake hook and my snake stick, which I need to grab snakes to stop them biting."

But when he arrived at the scene on Sunday lunchtime, the red-faced officers revealed it was a rubber toy.

A happy ending for all there, but in the Congo, herpetological ignorance and overreaction turned to tragedy when a crocodile escaped from a passenger's luggage:

The croc had been hidden in a passenger's sports bag - allegedly with plans to sell it - but it tore loose and ran amok, sparking panic.

A stampede of terrified passengers caused the small aircraft to lose balance and tip over in mid-air during an internal flight in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The unbalanced load caused the aircraft, on a routine flight from the capital, Kinshasa, to the regional airport at Bandundu, to go into a spin and crash into a house.

A lone survivor from the Let 410 plane told the astonishing tale to investigators.

Ironically the crocodile also survived the crash but was later killed with a machete by rescuers sifting through the wreckage.

Speaking as a former reptile-keeping professional, if you're ever in this situation, my advice: A crocodile that can fit in someone's hand luggage is WAY less likely to kill you than a plane crash. Please remain seated.

Bad Animals and Bad Guys

There is no honor among thieves, it is said. And bad guys can't count on bad animals, as drug dealers in widely dispersed parts of the world discovered recently. Luckily for the law-abiding among us, it's hard to know exactly how much to feed your animal employees to ensure their loyalty:

-In Canada, overfeeding bears with the munchies proved to be a bad strategy:

A pair of marijuana growers in Western Canada appear to have been using bears to protect their illegal crop, but the well-fed animals proved to be a bit lax in their guard duties, police said on Wednesday...

Officers were initially worried the bears might be dangerous, but quickly realized the animals were actually very docile and content just to sit around as the marijuana was seized, police said in a news release.

-And in Italy, going too far in the other direction backfired:

Police raiding a drug den in the Italian capital have been confronted by an aggressive albino python which was used to intimidate addicts.

Police had been tipped off that they would find "an animal" during the raid on the apartment in the centre of Rome, and when they opened the door they saw a striped yellow and white snake curled up on a heat mat.

The snake, which was three metres long and was kept hungry so that it would be more aggressive, was allowed to roam the apartment to scare addicts into paying for their drugs, police said.

Animal services were called to capture the snake, which was tempted into captivity using a whole chicken and sent to a nearby zoo.

Albino python with no known connection to the drug trade by Flickr user Tambako the Jaguar.

Sweet deal ends for rogue anaconda

At a park in Florida, ducks and geese had been disappearing for the past few months. "We would only find feathers all over the place," one witness said.

Waterfowl at the park are now safe again since a twelve foot long anaconda was evicted from its hiding place in a pond. It was captured last week by mounted police, according to the Orlando Sentinel. (No word on how the horses assisted.)

This snake must have thought itself pretty clever, living for free and feeding from the public trough. And this blog can only rejoice that it has been put in its place. But it's yet another case where the humans involved seem to have been asleep at the switch. It's no wonder animals get away with this kind of stuff: How do you not notice - for months - a twelve foot long snake?

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.

There's a double standard in everything...

...even cannibalistic parenting.

Eating one's offspring seems to be actually rather common in the animal kingdom.
There must be a reason for this behavior, or it wouldn't have evolved. But it's an interesting mystery because if the point of reproducing is to pass on your genes, it seems just a bit counterproductive.

A couple of recent studies of this phenomenon show that even in the animal kingdom, when it comes to child care, men don't have to work nearly as hard to be considered great for pitching in with the child care.

One study looked at sand gobies, a species of fish where dad provides all the care. Sounds enlightened, right? Not so fast:

"Overall, dad does a pretty good job of taking care of the eggs, except for one thing — he tends to eat about a third of them," said researcher Hope Klug, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland. "Based on previous work in this species, we know that the males aren't just doing this because they're hungry — even when they have excess food, they continue to eat a really large number of their own eggs."

There are many theories about offspring cannibalism that aren't too bad - for example, getting rid of defective or inferior young - but in this case, researchers concluded that the males's goal is to get back to partying:

The scientists found the males preferred to eat larger eggs — which take longer to hatch — from the second female they spawned with. They conjecture the fish do so to cut down on the amount of time spent caring for their young, thereby enabling the dads to reenter the mating game sooner.

Sand goby dads have to care for thousands of eggs "until they hatch — about one to two weeks — and during this time he isn't able to attract any new females," Klug explained.

In contrast, another study showed that rattlesnake mothers eat their babies because they're exhausted and starving after giving birth - and they only consume the ones that are already dead.

Isn't it always the way?

Goby photo by Flickr user Preview_H.

This is how they thank us: ungrateful brown tree snakes cause blackouts and crash barbeques

Humans did the brown tree snake a big favor. Sometime in the 1940s, they were given a free ride to Guam, probably in military cargo.

There were no predators of snakes on Guam, and no native snakes on Guam except a tiny, blind, insect-eating creature, so harmless that everyone thought it was some kind of worm.

So the native wildlife had no idea what a snake was and that it might want to eat them. The brown tree snake had a free buffet of innocent, defenseless, wildlife. They proceeded to wipe out most of the delicious bird species, cute fruit bats,and colorful little lizards.

You'd think the brown tree snake would at least appreciate all that humans have done for it... but no.

Among other problems, they're constantly causing blackouts, as the US Geolological Survey explains:

Power lines, wooden poles, and guy wires are no greater challenge for these snakes than a tree or exterior wall of a building. Snakes often cause problems by climbing guy wires leading to power poles supporting transformers, distribution lines, and high-voltage transmission lines. When the snakes simultaneously touch live and grounded conductors, they create faults, short circuits, and electrical damages. This results in frequent losses of power to parts of Guam and even island-wide blackouts. Such power failures, brownouts, and electrical surges, occurring on average approximately one every three days, damage electrical appliances and interrupt all activities dependent on electrical power, including commerce, banking, air transportation, and medical services. Power outages caused by snakes have been a serious problem on Guam since 1978, and the incidence of snake-caused outages continues to cause significant problems. Records show that more than 1,600 snake-caused outages occurred from 1978-1997.

Attempts to control this problem include turning off one utility line identified as a major source of snake-caused faults. Since 1985, this line has been shut down from dusk to dawn, the hours when the snakes are most active.

The USGS quotes an estimate of $4 million per year for research and control of the brown tree snake - including searching outgoing aircraft for stowaways that might invade other islands - and that's not counting damages and losses from blackouts or wildlife and environmental problems.

And, adding insult to injury, now they're expecting humans to provide MORE food:

Having nearly depleted the bird populations on Guam, larger snakes have been found scavenging garbage and even sneaking in to steal a hamburger off the barbeque!

Read more at the wonderful USGS brown tree snake website. And in case you ever have a chance to get back at them, don't miss the recipes (scroll down here).