The Animals That Save Human Lives

One of the most popular monuments to animal bravery can be found in New York City’s Central Park. A little north of the Children’s Zoo, the statue of a Siberian husky named Balto stands at attention on a granite rock. In February 1925 Balto led the final team of sled dogs that battled through 674 miles of snow and ice to bring diphtheria serum to the stricken children of Nome, Alaska.

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What Does It Mean When Animals Suffer a Vast Die-Off?

Are die-offs occurring more often?  To the casual reader, it can certainly seem that reports emerge on a regular basis of thousands of animals of a species suddenly dying.  The latest victims are common murres in the Northeast Pacific. They have been dying for months, but estimates of the toll jumped sharply when David Irons, a retired United States Fish and Wildlife Service biologist walking a beach in Whittier, Alaska, found close to 8,000 dead birds in early January.

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Blind Dog Found Alive After 2 Weeks In The Cold

Eleven-year-old Madera, a Labrador retriever, had the odds against her when she wandered away from her Ester home in the midst of a cold snap earlier this month.Madera is completely blind because of an autoimmune disease, and the temperature was 40 below, said her owner, Ed Davis. Usually when it’s really cold out, she wants to come inside immediately after relieving herself. But for some reason, Madera ventured farther away when his wife let her out on Feb. 6.  Davis was at work at Pump Station 4 of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline when Madera went missing. He came back to Fairbanks on Feb. 19 without much expectation of finding his dog.  “My best hope was to walk those trails and look for a track that might be hers,” he said. “My best hope was to find a frozen dog.”

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Cat Survives 11 Story Fall

A house cat in Alaska learned the hard way not to chase mosquitoes after following one out a window and falling 11 stories.  The 2-year-old cat, named Wasabi, survived but suffered a fractured leg and broken bones.

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Wood Bison In Alaska: America's Largest Living Land Mammal To Be Reintroduced To Yukon River Area

North America's largest living land mammals could roam the Alaska wilderness again by 2014, a century after they vanished in the state, under an agreement announced on Thursday to reintroduce wood bison to the lower Yukon River area.

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Video: Baby Orphaned Walrus, Mitik, Coming To New York Aquarium After Alaska Rescue

A 234-pound baby walrus is coming to town! According to the Associated Press, an orphaned 15-week-old walrus named Mitik, who was rescued from the ocean off Alaska earlier this year, will arrive in the city this Thursday, where he'll be making a new home at the New York Aquarium.

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Video: Cat Has Been Mayor Of Alaska Town For 15 Years

National polls show that voters all over the country are losing faith in their elected leaders. But the 900 residents of Talkeetna, Alaska, say their mayor is doing a great job bringing in tourist dollars and has served in office for over a decade. "He's good. He's probably the best we've ever had," resident Lauri Stec tells KTUU. "He was just in the Alaska Magazine, and he's been featured in a few different things."

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Tourists Get Too Close To An Alaskan Brown Bear

Picture this. A brown bear saunters out of the brush along a highway. A car pulls over, followed by a pickup truck. Passengers jump out to take snapshots. They edge closer, crowding the bear, deriving comfort from numbers and their self-possessed superiority over other animals. Soon a bear jam is forming, with more vehicles veering off the road and more people snatching cameras and leaving common sense behind.

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VIDEO: Bear Cub In Grocery Store Aisle

Overpriced asparagus, apple avalanches and creepy people in sweaty workout wear are all things you might expect to see in the produce aisle of your local grocery store, but a roly-poly black bear cub cavorting about in the cabbage? Wha?! As you can see in the video below, this little black bear cub is believed to have wandered away from his mama and found himself in the produce department of a local Ketchikan, Alaska grocery store.

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