Girl Donates Birthday Money to Help Animals

On a day when most children savor getting gifts and lots of personal attention, Zoe Marcum thought of others, especially some four-legged friends.  Zoe, who turned 8 on Monday, celebrated at Young-Williams Animal Center by stopping by the animal holding areas and giving each animal a gift. She paid for the gifts with her birthday money.  "I was thinking about all those animals, and I really like animals. And, I really enjoy pets. I really have a bunch of stuff already and I kind of wanted to take a break from getting more," she told 10News.

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Ridiculously Good Looking Gorilla Is Very Popular in Japan

All ladies are swooning, but this time it's not over a man. Well not a human one at least. Believe it or not these women have eyes for a gorilla.  With a chiseled face, smug smile and sunken eyes, the attractive primate named Shibani lives at Higashiyama Zoo and Botanical Garden in Japan.

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Latest Tool to Help Save Tigers From Extinction

Conservation scientists have a new tool in the battle to save tigers. They have found a way to track the animals via their scent spray, which is—no kidding—a citrus-scented mix of urine and anal gland secretions that tigers use to mark their territory and tell other cats when they’re in the mood for love.  Scientists typically use scat to trace tigers. But tiger spray is two to eight times more frequently found than scat, generally as an oily sheen on certain bushes about five feet above the ground. In the new research, published in the June issue of the journal Conservation Genetics Resources, scientists showed that the DNA in tiger spray was better for tracking and identifying individual cats than the genetic material in scat, which breaks down in humid climates.

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Lion Among 23,000 Species Threatened With Extinction

The mighty lion, reclusive cave crabs and the world's rarest sea lion are among nearly 23,000 species at risk of dying out, a top conservation body warned on Tuesday.  In an update to its "Red List" of threatened species, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature hailed some clear advances in saving endangered species like the Iberian Lynx.  But, it warned, those successes have been overshadowed by declines in a range of species, with 22,784 species of animals and plants threatened with extinction.  "Our natural world is becoming increasingly vulnerable," warned IUCN chief Inger Andersen, urging increased efforts to save species teetering on the edge.

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Do Animals Laugh? Tickle Experiments Suggest They Do

How do whales hear music? They listen to orca-stras!  I told that joke to a lizard and got crickets. It made me wonder the same thing as Eid Muhammad Afridi, who asked Saturday's Weird Animal Question of the Week, "Do animals laugh?"  So far, apes and rats are the only known animals to get the giggles.  Koko, the western lowland gorilla famous for her facility with sign language, "thinks that me being clumsy is funny," and will make laughing noises, says Penny Patterson, president of the California-based Gorilla Foundation.

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Meet the Brave Cat Who Won a ‘Hero Dog’ Award

For the first time, a Los Angeles shelter’s Hero Dog award has gone to a cat.  In May 2014, Tara the cat fought off a dog that attacked her 6-year-old owner as he rode his bicycle in the driveway of the family’s Bakersfield home.  Tara body-slammed Scrappy, a chow-mix that lived next door, when the dog got out of his yard, ran for Jeremy Triantafilo, grabbed his leg and started shaking from side-to-side. Tara chased the dog toward its home. It was later euthanized.

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Deaf Dog Learns Sign Language While Waiting For Someone To Love Him

Gordon's world is a silent one.  Totally deaf and abandoned on the streets of London, Gordon would have reason to withdraw from the world around him.  For Gordon, who has been looking for a forever home since last year, being deaf has hurt his chances of being adopted.  Still, Gordon is an incredibly sweet individual, and people at the shelter Gordon currently calls home are not quick to give up on finding him a real home, and a way to communicate — through sign language. "Our staff are teaching him sign and rewarding him with treats," Raffy Hamid, of The Mayhew Animal Home, told The Dodo.

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The World's Most Famous Utilitarian on Animal Rights

Most philosophers dream of having one big, deeply influential idea. Peter Singer has had three. His 1975 book Animal Liberation served as the founding text of the animal rights movement, and provided a powerful ethical rationale for vegetarianism. In Practical Ethics and Rethinking Life and Death, he challenged traditional ideas about personhood and offered a vigorous defense of abortion and, in some cases, infanticide. His 1972 essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" used a simple thought experiment to back up a powerful conclusion: people in rich countries, he thinks, are morally obligated give away a big portion of their income to poor people in the developing world.

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Healthcare for Wild Animals Could Stop the Next Pandemic

The virus was swift and lethal, claiming 162 lives in just three months. It left behind corpses covered in skin lesions and showing signs of severe pneumonia.  Had the victims been human, the 2011 outbreak would have dominated the 24-hour news cycle. But, since the dead and dying were harbor seals washing up on the shores of New England, the story didn’t capture the nation’s attention, let alone the world’s.

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Humans Are Not The Only Animals With a Sense of Self

Self-awareness is something often described as unique to mankind, but a team of researchers at the University of Warwick believe it is felt by many more animals.  In a study published in Current Zoology entitled 'From foraging to autonoetic consciousness: The primal self as a consequence of embodied prospective foraging', they argue through their findings that any animal which can simulate environments and conceive the future must have some form of self-awareness.

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Giant Tortoise Slowly Walks Tokyo's Streets

A huge reptile is on the prowl through Tokyo's streets -- but unlike Godzilla, who stomped across Japan's capital in a blaze of destructive energy, Bon-chan the giant tortoise isn't doing anything very quickly.  The metre- (3-feet-) long African spurred tortoise, which tips the scales at 70 kilogrammes (150 pounds), is a regular sight on the streets of Tokyo's Tsukishima district, as he and owner Hisao Mitani take their snail-paced daily walk.  "My wife just fell in love with him when she saw him at a pet shop, so she brought him home," Mitani, who runs a funeral home, told AFP.

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Dog Recovering After Protecting Blind Guardian

The service dog who threw himself into the path of an oncoming mini-bus to shield his blind owner has come out of surgery and is on the mend.  A staffer at Middlebranch Veterinary in Southeast on Tuesday said the dog — who witnesses at the scene called Bigo but who is actually called "Figo," the staffer said — is "on the mend and doing extremely well."  The golden retriever's right front leg is in a splint, said the staffer, who declined to give her name.

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Man Resuscitates Lifeless Sea Turtle

One man went to great lengths to save a badly injured sea turtle, and his incredible effort can be seen on the latest episode of NBC's "The Island."Benji Lanpher and Matt Getz were catching fish when the sea turtle accidentally drifted into their net. Getz was quick to release the turtle, but noticed it was lifeless and gasping for air. Eager to save the protected species, Lanpher followed his instinct and administered CPR.

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World's Weirdest Animals and Where To See Them

As a bright green worm-like creature is filmed in Taiwan, we look at other bizarre members of the animal kingdom, and show you where to find them

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Animals Look Like Humans In These Pet Portraits

These emotive portraits show animals in a new light - displaying seemingly human feelings.  Belgian photographer Vincent Lagrange's project Human Animal seeks to capture such moments.  "Today most people photograph just people," he said. "But only a few photograph animals.  "I tried to photograph the animals as humans, depicting their emotion and human-like characteristics in a sombre way."

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Dolphins Go Wild in Project to Free Captive Marine Mammals

A new report on the successful rehabilitation and release of wild-caught dolphins could well become the how-to manual for other efforts to “rewild” marine mammals at aquariums around the world.  The paper documents in step-by-step detail the Born Free Foundation’s two-year project in which it rescued two dolphins from a squalid facility in Turkey, prepared them for life in the sea, and monitored them after their release.

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Chimpanzees Would Cook if Given the Chance

Chimpanzees have the cognitive ability to cook, according to new research, if only someone would give them ovens.  It’s not that the animals are ready to go head-to-head with Gordon Ramsay, but scientists from Harvard and Yale found that chimps have the patience and foresight to resist eating raw food and to place it in a device meant to appear, at least to the chimps, to cook it.

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Animals Having a Killer Hair Day

These animals are just having a killer hair day.

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Video: Animals in Mirrors Hilarious Reactions

There can be no better or worse sight than your own reflection, but these vain animals seemed very keen to admire themselves.

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Seven Unique Animals That Call Minnesota Home

From a killer songbird that impales its victims to a strange-looking mole that can smell underwater, Minnesota is full of unusual wildlife. Here are seven odd Minnesota-dwelling creatures you may not have known about.

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