Could a Child Really be Raised by Animals?

I recently became a first-time mother. In addition to my daughter, Myrtle, I share my home with a motley collection of rescued animals including dogs, cats, horses, chickens, and pigs. This multi-species, multi-generational co-habitation—along with the release of a new adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book—left me thinking about the phenomena of feral children, a topic I had considered in my book about human-animal interactions more generally. Certainly in some exceptional circumstances I can now appreciate how it might be possible for a human child to be cared for by a non-human surrogate.

http://tinyurl.com/hf2v6df

How Zebras Got Their Stripes

How did the zebra get its stripes? It sounds like the theme for a “Just So” story that Rudyard Kipling never got around to writing. You would think that someone would have come up with the definitive answer by now, but, in fact, the reason zebras have stripes remains a biological mystery. The laws of evolution suggest that the random emergence of stripes on the ancestors of modern zebras must have had some sort of advantage that allowed them to reproduce more prolifically than their unstriped brethren. The striped animals would have become more common with each generation, ultimately outlasting the ones without stripes.

http://tiny.cc/97jiex

-Igor Purlantov