Primate political opinion?

LUSAKA (AFP) — A monkey urinated on Zambian President Rupiah Banda as he spoke to reporters outside his State House offices on Wednesday.

"You have urinated on my jacket," a startled Banda told the monkey, one of many that makes their home in the trees outside his offices.

"I will give this monkey for lunch to Mr Sata," he joked, referring to opposition leader Michael Sata, who Banda defeated in last year's elections.

Banda is reported to have spent most of the news conference discussing the state of the economy - apparently monkeys are no happier about the global recession than the rest of us.

Zambian monkey poised to express his position by Flickr user dornfeld.

Vacation Linkarama

While I'm off to the beach with two bad dogs, I will let Sir Pylkington-Smythe do my work for me with this post about vervet monkeys. Despite his lack of footnotes and that highly suspicious post about the cookie cutter shark, he's probably not making this one up.

Also you could check out the excess of excitement caused when a couple of cows got loose in Massachusetts. Not sure what the big deal is, but with the emphasis on how they went to New Hampshire, is there some kind of political undercurrent here? It's terrible when you raise a cow and find it wants to become a Republican, I guess.

Bad news for bad animal symbolism

Research with the sloth in captivity has shown that it sleeps an average of sixteen hours a day, validating its position as the cutest personification of a deadly sin ever.

But our animal symbols for bad behavior lead a precarious existence. Call the wrong person a dirty pig and you may find yourself watching a beautiful metaphor beaten to death by a load of ugly facts. Your pig expert will claim that not only are pigs clean animals that only roll in mud to cool off and protect their skin, but that they may even prefer a pool of clean water given the choice.

In another stunning reversal of conventional wisdom, the blog Not Exactly Rocket Science reports on some new research from the Panamanian rainforest:

A new study - the first ever to record brain activity in a wild sleeping animal - reveals that wild sloths are far less lethargic than their captive cousins. In their natural habitat, three-toed sloths sleep for only 9.6 hours a day, not much more than an average first-year university student.

It may be some comfort to our cliches, though, to know that they weren't exactly revealed to be racehorses disguised in shaggy algae-supporting fur:

Rattenborg managed to study sleepy sloths by fitting them with a small, lightweight cap that was loaded with brain activity sensors. Sloths make a good first candidate for such an experiment, as they are easy to capture and their slow lifestyles are unlikely to dislodge the recorders.

Photo, from Flickr user acodring of a baby sloth at the Avarios sloth sanctuary in Costa Rica, is of a two-toed sloth, not the three-toed in the study, because I think they are cuter. So sue me.

Dolphins: really not cute, seriously

Dolphins. I've already tried to convince you that they are attention whores and gang rapists.

But you probably still think they are cute, and mystical, and noble, and live surrounded by love and new-agey instrumental music. Would it change your mind to know that that 'dolphin safe' tuna results in the death of ten times more sea turtles than other methods of fishing? No? OK, how about infanticide? Dolphins not only kill the young of another species, the harbor porpoise, but their own:

The attacks on dolphins less than a year old have spawned numerous theories. "Probably my favorite is male infanticide," notes (researcher) Paul Thompson from Aberdeen. If a new suitor approaches a female that already has a youngster, "there's no point in hanging around for two years with the wrong male's calf," he says. Killing the calf might bring the female into a receptive state much sooner.

If you're not willing to believe laypersons like me and blogger Bad New Hughes:

Dolphins are all smiley and frolick-y and shit on TV, where they solve problems, rescue kittens and do flips. In the wild, they're as big as Volkswagens and twice as fast. Not to mention totally evil and smart enough to really fuck with you.

then go get it from an expert: this post on dolphins' dark secrets by marine biologist Miriam Goldberg, who notes:

The scariest part is dolphins can wreak havoc day and night without sleeping. A recent study found that dolphins could stay awake for five days straight with no loss of mental acuity. The dolphins didn't even need to make up sleep at the end of the study, though the scientists sure did.

If the dolphins ever evolve thumbs, we're in trouble. It will be like a slasher-film remake of Douglas Adams' So Long And Thanks for All The Fish. If I wash up with pulped innards and dolphin tooth marks, you'll know why. After all, you never hear about the people the dolphins push out to sea.

Looming, ominous dolphin by Flickr user gwen.

Bad Canine Roundup

If your dog spent the weekend getting into stuff that he shouldn't, here's a few stories that might make you feel somewhat fortunate in comparison.

In a tribute to Germanic dog training, a dog in Berlin that found a live hand grenade left over from World War II while on a walk was reported to have put it back down - carefully, we presume - on its owner's command.

But another dog, in liberal Seattle, was not nearly so well behaved, and learned his lesson. Fortunately, what he'd found wouldn't blow him up, but did blow his mind.

After a walk in the park where Lab mix Jack had off the path and disappeared for a couple of minutes, he began displaying odd behavior:

"His eyes were kind of glossed over, very out of touch, I mean, he didn't seem to recognize me at first," Nestor Waddell said. "When he was trying to walk, he was looking at his paw, and then looking at the ground and then trying to get his paw to reach the ground, but was unsuccessful."

Concern for Jack turned to relief when she heard the vet's diagnosis: Jack had swallowed a large amount of dried, harvested marijuana.

No word on whether the symptoms also included a ravenous craving for junk food - but after all, with a dog, how would you tell the difference?

And in other news of German canines redeeming themselves after behaving badly, a fox stole over one hundred shoes, but - unlike many dogs who get hold of an owner's footwear - allowed them to be returned in good condition:

A forest worker stumbled upon shoes strewn near the fox's den and found a trove of footwear down the hole which had recently been stolen overnight from outside locals' front doors...

Although many were missing laces, the shoes were in good condition and their owners were delighted to reclaim them, (a police spokesman) said, adding that no reprisals were planned against the culprit.

Photo from Flickr user Chicheaux.

Chimp takes a bite out of management

Every zoo I've worked at, we wanted to do something similar to most of our bosses, but only a chimp has the nerve to follow through:

BERLIN (Reuters) – The director of the Berlin Zoo made famous by the polar bear cub Knut has had his finger bitten off by a chimpanzee called Pedro.

Bernhard Blaszkiewitz, 55, was feeding Pedro walnuts as he showed a visitor round the zoo Monday when the ape grabbed his hand and bit off his right index finger...

Doctors sewed Blaszkiewitz's finger back on but said it was not clear if the operation would be successful.

(Zoo spokesman) Andre Schuele said the incident would have no repercussions for the 28-year-old Pedro.

Video (at the same link) says Pedro "almost" severed the finger... and that the doctors were considering whether the amputate the reattached finger that night if its condition got worse, because the zoo director "knows the dangers of infection from such a bite and he has travel plans that are important to him."

No word on where he's planning to go that's more important than sticking around and trying to save a finger, but maybe that location should add this story to its travel brochures.

(Photo of Pedro from Reuters.)

Parrot purloins passport

And gets away Scot-free...

SOUTHLAND TIMES, NZ - Te Anau police have identified a thief who brazenly stole a British man's passport, but will not pursue an arrest or attempt to recover the document.

A police spokeswoman said a Scottish man reported the theft of his passport from a bus heading into Milford Sound earlier this week.

The passport had been in a coloured courier bag that attracted the attention of a cheeky kea when the bus stopped at the Chasm on the Milford road.

While the driver was in a compartment beneath the bus, the kea grabbed the package. When the driver turned back, the startled kea flew off into the bush with the package. It has not been recovered and considering the size of Fiordland, is unlikely to be.

The Scottish man, who did not want to be identified, said he had been waiting for about a month for the passport to be returned from Wellington.

"Being Scottish, I've got a sense of humour so I did take it with humour but obviously there is one side of me still raging," he said.

"My passport is somewhere out there in Fiordland. The kea's probably using it for fraudulent claims or something."

The kea parrot is a well known troublemaker in New Zealand, although it is usually noted for its taste for delicacies like the rubber parts of tourists' cars rather than their passports, as you can see in this video.

Photo of the perpetrator by bus passenger Yvonne Richarson.

Tomorrow is Dead Duck Day

The only official holiday for an animal behaving badly that I know of, Dead Duck Day has been celebrated on June 5 for the past 13 years at the Natural History Museum of Rotterdam. It commemorates the victim of the first scientifically documented case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck, described in the abstract of the full original article thusly:

On 5 June 1995 an adult male mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) collided with the glass façade of the Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam and died. Another drake mallard raped the corpse almost continuously for 75 minutes. Then the author disturbed the scene and secured the dead duck. Dissection showed that the rape-victim indeed was of the male sex.

The research was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for Biology in 2003, and you can read about last year's celebration of Dead Duck Day at the Annals of Improbable Research, here and here.

Photo: a Drake mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) in full breeding plumage (left) next to the dead drake mallard (NMR 9997-00232) just after collision with the new wing of the Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam; b the same couple during copulation, two minutes after photo a was taken. [photo: C.W. Moeliker]

Squirrel disrespects American flag, fallen soldiers

A cemetery in Michigan followed its usual tradition this year, of putting small flags in the graves of almost a thousand dead soldiers for Memorial Day.

But the next day, cemetery staff found that many of the flags were gone, ripped off leaving nothing but bare sticks behind.

The mystery was solved by the supervisor of the cemetry - obviously an observant fellow but not a reader of this blog, because he found it hard to believe that an innocent wild animal could be the culprit:

If he didn't see it happen, Ron Ceglarek said he probably wouldn't believe it.

A squirrel -- weighing about 3 pounds -- got up on its hind legs, tore a small American flag from a small staff next to a grave stone, rolled it up and carried it up a tree to a waiting mate building a nest.

It happened not just once, but about dozen times.

"He plucks them right off," Ceglarek, superintendent of Mount Hope Cemetery in Port Huron, said of a rogue squirrel that is stealing flags. "If I didn't see it, and I didn't follow the squirrel, I never would have believed it."

Full story and pictures here.

Squirrel looking deceptively noble by Flickr user threefingers.

Dog files false police report

When they decided that 999 would be a good number to use for emergency calls, the British obviously didn't anticipate what a bad dog could do.

The Telegraph - A 999 operator worriedly returned a call from a suspected domestic violence victim only to discover that the caller was a dog that had stolen its owner's phone.

Officers traced the call, in which a man was heard screaming "Come out or else, I'm warning you", to Jodie Halfpenny's house in Withington, Herefordshire.

The operator, from West Mercia Police, immediately returned the call thinking that the caller might have been attacked after a muffled whine was heard before the line went dead.

But Miss Halfpenny, 20, answered and revealed that the call had been made by mistake – by her 14 month-old golden retriever Bailey.

Bailey had made the call inadvertently after making off with the phone and repeatedly biting down on the number 9 digit.

The muffled voices were Jodie and a male friend, who chased the dog behind their garden shed before wrestling the phone from Bailey's jaws at 4.30pm on Monday.

In this country you can go to jail for this sort of thing, but you know those bunny-hugging British - Bailey apparently got off without even a reprimand.

"After discussing the situation at length, we were satisfied the call was made by the dog and there was no danger."

Bigfoot with bad breath

Reported by mosnews.com under the headline "Siberians complain about Bigfoot's appetite:"

The local Shor people in Kemerovo Region, Siberia, are reporting that something is snatching up the wild leek crop that is a staple of their diet, Itar-Tass Siberia reports. The onion-lovers leave behind abundant large footprints with clearly defined toes, similar to the prints found in the area earlier this year, the news service continues.

Bigfoot sightings are common in this remote section of the taiga and they have received attention worldwide... Now local Tashtagol District administrator Vladimir Makuta notes that he has received 14 new written reports of yeti sightings near the cave and the nearby Mrassu River.

It's too late to travel to spend your holiday weekend participating in the investigation of this phenomenon, but you can leave mystifying footprints in the comfort of your own home with the pictured Bigfoot action figure. Not at all elusive, you can find it any time at Archie McPhee. It has stamps on the bottom of its feet and comes with a stamp pad, and is guaranteed not to steal your leeks.

Postal service tradition defeated by small dog

CLARKSBURG, W.Va. Associated Press – Cozmo the Jack Russell terrier has done what neither rain, sleet nor the gloom of night has been able to do — keep postal carriers in Clarksburg from their appointed rounds. Postal Service spokeswoman Cathy Yarosky said mail delivery to seven homes on Milford Street was halted because of the 20-pound terrier.

She said a carrier was injured after falling while trying to run away from Cozmo.

Cozmo's owners Jimmy and Justine Marino, said the dog has never bitten anyone. But they acknowledged he has gotten out of the yard a few times.

The Marinos have been told mail delivery won't resume until they get rid of the dog. Jimmy Marino said efforts to find a new home for Cozmo have been unsuccessful.

This blog may need two new categories: "Dogs and Traditional Sayings," for this one and the dog eat dog from last week; and lazy animals injuring people by no more effort than making them fall down: our own pets, this dog, and the nutria of our last post. Come on, at least get off your butt and bite people!

Toothy photo from Flickr user beardenb.

Invasion of the Super-Rats

The nutria is a large, semi-aquatic South American rodent that has escaped from fur farms and established itself in much of the southern US.

One naturalist says “It’s the John Dillinger of invasive species. It doesn’t just change habitat. This sucker eats habitat.”

You may feel safe from the nutria's huge naked rat tail and big orange buck teeth because you live in civilization, not wild wetlands. But not anymore. They're branching out, and the habitat where they're established may now include your local Wal-mart, according to the Associated Press:

NEW ORLEANS – A Louisiana woman is suing a Wal-Mart store over what she claims was a much-too-close encounter of the furry kind. Rebecca White says in her lawsuit that employees at a Wal-Mart in Abbeville let a rat-tailed rodent known as a nutria run loose and scare her. She says that not only did employees know it was in their store, but gave it a pet name, Norman, and failed to warn shoppers...

White wants compensation for pain, suffering, mental anguish, fear, disabling injuries, and medical expenses. Her attorney says the surgery bills aren't in yet, but other medical bills totaled nearly $2,000.

(Click here for the original story at the Abbeville Meridional.)

Don't miss a lovely short documentary on nutria in Louisiana here.

And don't bother moving out of the country to avoid them - that photo, of a nutria that demands a toll payment of food to cross the bridge, is from Flickr user gynti_46 in Germany.

Animal espionage dogs Iranians

The news business has fallen on hard times. How can you doubt it when you can't find any followup to this story from 2007:

Iranian Police Smash Squirrel Spy Ring

SKY NEWS UK Thursday July 12, 2007
Police in Iran are reported to have taken 14 squirrels into custody - because they are suspected of spying.

The rodents were found near the Iranian border allegedly equipped with eavesdropping devices.

The reports have come from the official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA).

The IRNA said that the squirrels were kitted out by foreign intelligence services - but they were captured two weeks ago by police officers.

A Foreign Office source told Sky News: "The story is nuts."

Of course the Foreign office would deny it, but outside experts were also dubious about the accusations against the squirrels. When asked by NPR about the possibility of training squirrels to be spies, professor John Koprowski, co-author of North American Tree Squirrels, suggested that it would be difficult to "channel their elusiveness" into "constructive activity" in the field.

Still, clearly there were squirrels lurking suspiciously near the border - and their fate seems to be unknown. But that hasn't stopped other species from getting into the game, since Iran also arrested some spying pigeons near a nuclear facility in 2008.

Asked to comment on the pigeon story, one diplomat told Sky News, "It's clear there has been some sort of coo in Tehran."

Perhaps there's a bright side to all the sneaky bad behavior on the part of animals in the Middle East. With all the zoos downsizing due to the state of the economy, maybe some of those unemployed keepers can get work as prison staff in Iran.

Squirrel by, once again, the excellent Misterqueue.

It's a dog eat dog world

X-ray of Alfie, a spaniel in England, who ate a toy puppy from a dollhouse.

His owners say "Alfie is back to normal now - running around like a lunatic."

No word on the exact bill for the 'couple of hours of surgery.'

(Detail of photo from Manchester Evening News via the Telegraph.)