Americans Love Animals More Than They Used To

There are 48 days until the presidential election, and it often feels as if we Americans are at each other’s throats. Sometimes it seems as though all we can agree on — or agree to click “like” on — are dog and cat videos, right? Actually, that’s not so far from the truth. Americans do broadly have positive feelings about dogs and cats — and they also feel warmer and fuzzier about wild animals, such as sharks and wolves, than they did four decades ago.

http://tinyurl.com/guc486v

Watch Shelter Animals Get New Beds

Stop what you're doing because we've found it — the most "aw" inducing animal video ever. The RSPCA animal shelter in Victoria, Australia, recently put out a call to animal lovers to donate their old pet's beds to the charity. The hand-me-down beds were then gifted to 100 cats and dogs still awaiting their "forever homes." The resulting video is bitter sweet — at once cute and heartbreaking. Somebody adopt these precious little guys!

http://tinyurl.com/znybsk6

Biggest Animals in Ocean More Likely to Go Extinct

What happens when you remove all the biggest animals from the ocean? Stick around for the next few thousand years and you might find out. A new study finds that in our modern era, large marine animals are significantly more likely to go extinct than small ones. It’s a disturbing pattern that has the potential to wipe out many of the top predators in our oceans, and the researchers say it has never been seen before in the history of our planet. After analyzing marine fossil records that go as far back as 445 million years, the authors report that in the past extinction rates have been fairly egalitarian, affecting ocean animals of all sizes equally.

http://tinyurl.com/zvy4unx

Smart Animals: Ground Squirrel Use the Sun for Navigation

A new study revealed that ground squirrels temporarily rely of the position of the sun to roughly serve as a navigational aide to find the storage place of their foods. The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, showed that ground squirrels either moves towards or away from the sun, with its horizontal angle of their direction deviated slightly from the direction of the sun, when searching for a suitable hiding place for its spoils.

http://tinyurl.com/hq8r3bf

Pioneering 'Diaries' Reveal The Secret Lives of Animals

How do you tell if an elephant is having a good day? Or spy on the nocturnal squid-catching skills of the albatross? This week at the British Science Festival, Prof Rory Wilson of Swansea University has been divulging the secrets of the animal kingdom, including penguin diving habits, albatross hunting methods and the emotional states of elephants.  "The problem with animals is we often want to know things about them that they don't want to tell us or that aren't easy to find out. The only way to do it is to put something on [the animal] that will accompany it," Prof Wilson said.

http://tinyurl.com/zwuqt4w