New frontiers in bad animal behavior

Sometimes I think it's high time to shut down this blog. How many more times can we read about bears breaking into food shops, animals with drinking problems, deceptively cute creatures who commit vicious attacks?

But then a story like this comes along and I decide it's worth carrying on after all:

A Chinese couple claim their home was ransacked by a fishy intruder - a giant catfish.

Xu Xianmin and his wife claim the fish sneaked into their home, in Changji, Xinjiang Province, when their backs were turned.

They thought their one-room home was empty when they locked up to leave for their jobs as sanitation workers at 4am.

But when they came back at 9.30am, it had been trashed. They thought they had been burgled until they saw something moving on the floor.

"I thought my home had been ransacked by thieves. The table was turned over, and stacked plastic bottles were everywhere," said Xu.

"When I was picking up things from the other side of the table, I suddenly touched something cold and slippery, and it was moving!"

After asking neighbours for help, they found a huge catfish on the floor.

A baffled Xu added: "No thieves would leave a giant fish in the house while stealing nothing. And it's not possible that someone threw the fish in through the window, as the door and windows were locked.

"All we can imagine is that the catfish somehow sneaked into the house in the time between us opening the door and then leaving for work."

To add to the mystery, the couple's home lies in a residential area with no river or pond nearby.

A local aquatic expert said the catfish was at least three years old and would be able to survive out of water for a relatively long time.

Headlines of the Week

Fox and boar help kangaroos escape

Three kangaroos staged a daring escape from a wildlife park near Frankfurt by going under rather than over the fences - thanks to the work of fox and wild boar accomplices.

Skippy, Jack and Mick made it under the first fence of their enclosure by using a hole dug by a fox, said Michael Hoffmann, assistant head of the Hochwildschutzpark Hunsrück west of Frankfurt.

One got stuck there, but two were brave enough to use a hole dug by a wild boar under the exterior fence to make it to freedom.

One of the kangaroos remained missing on Monday.

Several people nearby have reported seeing the missing kangaroo, but so far he’s managed to stay one jump ahead of zoo officials.

Suggestions that a fox and boar are being questioned in relation to the escape could not be verified.

Amorous bull damages deputy's patrol car

Sheriff's deputies were dispatched to a residence on Jade Lane in Sherwood after callers reported a bull running loose through yards in the area.

According to the report, a deputy arrived at the home and noticed a man slapping the bull on the head and leading him across the yard.

The report says the bull then mounted the man and "tried to mate with him," pinning him between the patrol unit and causing minor damage to the vehicle.

Man frees moose trapped in swing-set

The bull moose’s mishap Sunday was captured on video and shows Sgt. Lane Findlay of the Weber County Sheriff’s Office trying to free the creature’s antlers after getting entangled with the swings.

WeberCountySheriff via YouTube Utah Division of Natural Resources stated swing sets and volleyball nets are very hazardous for the animals.

The video was taken with Findlay’s cell-phone camera and was first uploaded to YouTube on Tuesday. The sergeant said he wanted the encounter filmed just in case the rescue went awry.

“If something happens to me, give this to my wife,” he told the person shooting the video.

More Bear Break-ins

In Norway, they're drunkards:

A family of bears is suspected of having broken into a cabin in northern Norway and polished off over a hundred cans of beer.

"They had a hell of a party in there," cabin owner Even Borthen Nilsen told NRK. "The cabin has the stench of a right old piss up, trash, and bears."

The bear, and three cubs, are reported to have forced their way into the cabin by ripping a wall off.

"The beds and all kitchen appliances, stove, oven and cupboards and shelves were all smashed to pieces," he said.

And furthermore the bears had finished off all the food and drink in the house - including all the marshmallows, chocolate spread, honey and over 100 cans of beer.

And as we've seen before, in the US, they've got a sweet tooth, like this bear in Colorado who broke into a candy shop:

“He ate nine Rice Krispie treats, four of those cookie bears and two or three Balls of Joy, which are fudge balls, and four peanut butter cups before he left. And a lot of English toffee,” said store owner Jo Adams.

It's gotten to the point that the trend has been noticed by the mainstream media, like this Associated Press article that mentions another candy store break-in and other bear troubles in New York State and elsewhere.  Experts quoted there attribute the crime wave to the lack of natural food because of the drought, but readers of this blog know that bears have a love of junk food even in easier times.

The junk food habit can be even worse for their health than it is for ours - another Colorado bear was shot when a man found it sitting on his couch eating popcorn. But apparently it can be good for human business, according to the owner of the Colorado candy store:

“At least five times a day people come in to order the exact same things the bear ate, I love it, we’ve been making extras of these particular treats just to keep up with the demand!”

Sharks are tired of the paparazzi

 

Friday is the start of yet another Shark Week on a certain cable TV channel. You'd think that sharks would be happy that they get so much publicity - 25 years of this, in fact. But the shark in this video is clearly tired of being in the spotlight: it stole one of the filmmaker's cameras.

Maybe you can't blame them. The media attention hasn't done sharks much good - and it hasn't done us much good either. They may be camera thieves, but their bloodthirsty reputation is much exaggerated. As we saw last week, a human is much more likely to be killed by a cow than a shark. People think that sharks are ruthless killing machines, when in truth we're far more dangerous to them than they are to us, since humans kill millions of sharks every year.

The filmmakers did get the camera back and finish their documentary. I haven't seen it, so I can only hope that it's not another of those shows that makes us waste time being afraid of the wrong animals.

Bad animal identification gone wrong

As we saw in the previous post, it's a common problem for people to be afraid of the wrong animals. And this problem is compounded by the fact that - as we've also seen many times before - some people can't even tell whether something is an animal or not.

Two recent cases show people getting it wrong in both directions:

- A Swiss office building was evacuated when a giant bird-eating spider was found on a table. Police were called and when they arrived with an animal expert, it was quickly discovered that it was a fake spider. Employees were subjected to a 20 minute lecture on how to tell real animals apart from toys.

Reports don't mention whether this lecture also included the fact that these spiders are not in fact particularly dangerous to humans - certainly not justifying the evacuation of an entire building. Seriously, folks: just empty a trash can and turn it upside down over the spider before calling for help.

- On the other end of the spectrum, a no doubt distracted mother of two toddlers spent at least three days living with a boa constrictor in her bathroom because she mistook it for a banana:

Stacey Way, 28, said: "I was wiping the bathroom floor when I noticed what I thought was a mouldy banana my toddler had shoved down the side of the water pipe.

"I know it sounds ridiculous, but I thought 'I'll get that in a minute with my gloves on' and then just forget all about it.

"Three days later I was bathing my two little ones and wiped around the floor again when I saw that this thing was sticking out more than before but as I got closer it went back in.

"I was so shocked, I couldn't believe it. I looked closer and realised that the banana, or now snake, had a mouth."

People: The photo up above? Closeup of an albino boa constrictor. This photo, on the other hand:

That's a banana. Make note of it.

Sharks are the wrong animal to worry about

It's beach season, and some recent news about shark attacks combined with the sensationalism of a certain cable station's Shark Week may have you questioning your travel plans. If so, you're committing the common error of being afraid of the wrong animals.

In fact, if you're not careful, moving your vacation to some bucolic inland spot may just put you at more danger. If you've read the book, you know that cows kill an average of twenty people a year in the US. With sharks to blame for at most 1 to 3 deaths per year, that means that you're much more likely to be killed by cows than a shark.

What's more, with cows, it's personal. Sharks just think you're a delicious seal and mistakenly take a taste. But here's some detail from the CDC report on bovine murder:

In about 3/4 of the cases “the animal was deemed to have purposefully struck the victim.”

One of the murderous bulls had been hand-raised and bottle-fed by the victim and his family.

If you don't believe it, check out this story of a vengeful bull in India:

The bull apparently kept a watch on frail Bhoop Narayan Prajapati, 65, and attacked him when he was having his morning tea, a day after he had thrown hot water on it for sitting in front of his hut. Prajapati ran inside his thatched hut to escape, but the bull followed him, pushed him to the ground twice and gored him. 

Apparently there was a long history between this man and this bull:  Six months earlier, he hit the animal with a stick and it retaliated, landing him in the hospital for a month.

And not only did the animal plot its revenge for months, it made sure its attack had been successful, and after he died, it returned to gloat:

The bull followed the man when he was being taken to a hospital and later appeared at the crematorium during his funeral.

All I can say is, there's something a shark would never do - I'm definitely going to keep vacationing at the beach.

Cow warning from Switzerland passed on by Flickr user Kecko.

People who don't read this blog

OK, maybe it's too much to expect everyone to sit down and read the entire archive of this blog back to 2009, as well as the book, although you'd definitely be safer if you did.

But some people really ought to at least check out the most recent posts before heading out into the wilderness. Just a few days after my post about murderous mountain goats, this report surfaced from Utah:

A man spotted dressed in a goat suit among a herd of wild goats in the mountains of northern Utah has wildlife officials worried he could be in danger as hunting season approaches.

Wildlife officials were contacted by a concerned citizen who observed and photographed something odd:

Coty Creighton, 33, spotted the goat man Sunday during his hike. He said he came across the herd, but noticed something odd about one goat that was trailing behind the rest. “I thought maybe it was injured,” Creighton said Friday. “It just looked odd.”

He said he pulled out binoculars to get a closer look at the herd about 200 yards away and was shocked. The man appeared to be acting like a goat while wearing the crudely made costume, which had fake horns and a cloth mask with cut-out eye holes, Creighton said.

“I thought, ‘What is this guy doing?’ ” Creighton said. “He was actually on his hands and knees. He was climbing over rocks and bushes and pretty rough terrain on a steep hillside.”

Officials wanted to warn the man of the danger, but initially he clearly didn't want to listen. After the incident made the news, they got an "agitated" anonymous phone call saying “Leave goat man alone. He’s done nothing wrong.”

Eventually, the goat man was convinced by a friend to come clean. He explained that he was trying out an idea for a hunting disguise. The man's name was not released, nor any explanation for how he expected to look enough like a goat to fool the goats and yet not get shot by his fellow hunters.

People, don't try this at home. Or in the field. As a Utah wildlife official said:

“People do some pretty out there things in the name of enjoying wildlife. But I’ve never had a report like this,” Douglass said. “There’s a saying we have among biologists — You don’t go far enough, you don’t get the data. You go too far, you don’t go home. The same is true with some wildlife enthusiasts.”

Midsummer Linkarama

"SuperSlug" invades England:

“Too many slugs can cause problems, not just for gardeners. In Austria, they have had incidents of car accidents because the numbers have built up on the road and formed this horrible slimy slick and cars have skidded off.”

Stupid vacation ideas:

Unsuspecting Silvana Straccia paid $100 to swim with the creatures at Bavaro Beach in Punta Cana, wearing a bikini with a metal ring on it that irritated the dolphins.
Moments after she entered the enclosure, a dolphin locked on to her and whipped her in the face with its tail before hitting her in the stomach - sending her to the hospital with broken cartilage and requiring 8 weeks of bed rest.

 Beaver bites girl; another authority who doesn't read this blog is quoted:

“I’ve been around a long time, and I’ve never really heard of anybody getting bit by a beaver,” said Lowe, a 23-year veteran of the Sheriff’s Office.

 And finally for your entertainment, a relatively authoritative take on who would win a fight between a lion and a tiger.

Tiger with an ice treat at the National Zoo... don't assume this will make him keep his cool.

Presented without comment

from RT.com:

VIPeed: Circus tiger gives audience a real show

A group of top businessmen got more than they bargained for from a night at the circus when a tiger urinated on their VIP box. Fortunately, their spirits weren’t dampened.

­The tiger, nicknamed Kesha, answered the call of nature right in the middle of the night’s performance  in the Kazakhstan city of Ekibastuz, reports Interfax citing an eyewitness.
“The jet launched over two meters and hit the VIP box,” the witness said.

“The tiger was sitting atop a stand when the tamer cracked his whip. But instead of performing the act, the tiger lifted his leg and targeted the people occupying the expensive seats,” another witness told Novosti-Kazakhstan news agency.

The ludicrous incident provoked quite a lot of laughter around, but didn’t interrupt the show. None of the guests who suffered the surprise left the circus.

The animal is part of the Old Moscow Circus troupe, which is touring Kazakhstan at present. It has been performing in Ekibastuz for about two weeks.

Heat wave linkarama

Too exhausted by the weather to keep up with all the bad animals, who are apparently unaffected, or perhaps even inspired, I offer this reading material from around the internet:

Interview with a Nutria

Cow stampede in England with video

Your cat wants you to die: toxiplasmosis and suicide

And finally, what happens to people who don't read this blog: They should have known since 2009 that otters are a danger to swimmers, but instead when this woman is attacked in Minnesota, alleged experts are all "I've never seen or heard of it before."

Looking at that fine set of teeth photographed by Flickr user Peter Trimming, how could anyone be surprised?

Our own worst enemies

Apes can make plenty of trouble on their own. But instead of watching our backs, human scientists like to make excuses for them, like the ones who argued that poop-throwing is a sign of intelligence.

And worse, some even go out of their way to teach them dangerous skills. That's a picture of Kanzi the bonobo, the most famous resident of the Great Ape Trust in Iowa. Kanzi's language skills are terrifying enough - these animals are physically stronger than us, the last thing we need is for them to also be able to win a verbal argument.  And now they've given him another potential weapon: they've taught him how to make fire.

The photo above is a closeup of him lighting a match, and you can see a whole slideshow of Kanzi cooking a meal at The Telegraph. Yes, I'd be the first to say that more animals should be able to make their own meals. But we should be teaching them to use the microwave, NOT a skill that can be used in such dangerous ways.

What's more, Kanzi is now teaching his offspring how to start fires as well. All I can say is that whatever happens next at the Great Ape Trust, those researchers have got it coming to them.

A narrow escape

A member of the Animals Behaving Badly household is on a hiking vacation in Washington State, and earlier this week, I received this picture and an excited phone call from the wilderness about this wildlife sighting.

In the course of the conversation I turned to Google to confirm my recollection that the mountain goat is not a true goat and is related to the musk ox. In just the first few search results, what I found made me turn the conversation away from classification and say instead "Get the heck out of there!"

This is what was going on on the next mountain over:

Several reports of aggressive mountain goats have prompted Olympic National Forest officials to close a popular trail on Mount Ellinor for at least two weeks.

"Nobody has been hurt by the goats. But a number of people have felt threatened."

And well they should, because this is a headline from a few short months ago:

Hiker killed by mountain goat in the Olympic National Forest

In October, an experienced hiker had stopped for lunch with friends when they were approached by a mountain goat. Although they tried to retreat, he was gored. A park ranger struggled to shoo the goat away from the injured man, and eventually he was extracted from the situation, but died later at a hospital.

Officials seemed to downplay the danger, attributing this crime to one crazed individual:

Officials said this is the only known fatal attack by a mountain goat in the park's history. About 300 mountain goats live in the park.

Barb Maynes, park spokeswoman, said the ram involved in the attack was known for its aggressive behavior, and the park had been monitoring the ram for "the last several years," she said.

The perpetrator was tracked down and executed, but the family of the victim is suing. And still, typically, when asked for comment on the current trail closing, wildlife experts make excuses for the animals:

While mountain goats are powerful and inquisitive they aren't generally aggressive, said Kurt Aluzas, a wildlife biologist. He told KING that the recent behavior is likely related to this year's deep snowpack that has confined the goats to trailside areas close to people. There's also the possibility that female goats are protecting their young.

The blog recommends that vacationers in Washington State not trust their lives to the opinions of wildlife biologists. One friend of the blog suggested that there are many safer alternatives:

The only time I was in Seattle I saw the Indigo Girls, frisbee dogs and a lot of boats. No one was ever killed by the Indigo Girls.

Enabling bad primates

- In Indonesia, a zoo is preparing to move an orangutan to rehab, out of the reach of those who supply her habit. An island exhibit far from visitors is the only way to get Tori to quit smoking:

Tori learned to smoke 10 years ago by imitating zoo visitors, who would throw their cigarette butts into her open cage. She has been smoking ever since, according to activists. They say she holds up two fingers to her mouth to indicate she wants a cigarette and becomes angry and throws things if none are readily available.

"It is very common in Indonesian zoos for people to throw cigarettes or food [at animals] even though there are signs to not feed or give cigarettes," says Baktiantoro. "It happens all the time. [In Tori's case], people will throw cigarettes in, watch her smoke, start laughing and take pictures."

- And in South Africa, one of the most prestigious wildlife media organizations in the world is under fire for encouraging bad baboons. Regular readers of this blog are familiar with the baboons of South Africa who break into cars and houses to steal food.  Now National Geographic has given them their own reality show:

For the new Nat Geo Wild show, "Big Baboon House," a house near Pringle Bay, about 50 miles from Cape Town, was modified to allow hidden cameras to film a troop of Chacma baboons, creating a Big Brother-style show. Windows and doors were left open to let in the baboons.

On "Big Baboon House," the animals are anthropomorphized to within an inch of their lives, given human voice-overs and different names and personalities.

Local conservationists are appalled, but National Geographic was ready with rationalizations:

According to the Cape Times, National Geographic said in a statement that the baboons were not lured into the house, but "ultimately entered it of their own volition."

Meghan Gleason, digital media content producer for National Geographic Channels, wrote on an official blog that Nat Geo Wild had “undertaken a simian social experiment of a lifetime” to understand baboon behavior “so we can learn how to keep them out of homes and coexist peacefully with their human counterparts … all while having a little fun along the way as we observe these baboons having free rein over a posh house."

We suggest that National Geographic executives watch this video sent in by a faithful reader that shows what can happen to people who take the side of bad monkeys. Yes it's a cartoon, but remember that fiction can express profound truths.

Terror and lies from the depths

Still only tenuously connected to the 21st century, so if you're better off than I am, go read these two stories of aquatic evil:
A dolphin terrorizes the suburbs of New Orleans
Cuttlefish communicate via patterns in their skin - so of course they lie that way too.

Interruption in service

 

Pug poses with storm damage

Till we return to the 21st century here at Animals Behaving Badly headquarters, I recommend this story of chimps who don't appreciate everything Jane Goodall has done for them, and this patient explanation of how normal it is for chimps to kill their babies.