Dog Diary vs Cat diary...brilliant!!!! (sourced from somewhere on the internet)

The Dog's Diary

8:00 am - Dog food! My favorite thing!
9:30 am - A car ride! My favorite thing!
9:40 am - A walk in the park! My favorite thing!
10:30 am - Got rubbed and petted! My favorite thing!
12:00 pm - Milk bones! My favorite thing!
1:00 pm - Played in the yard! My favorite thing!
3:00 pm - Wagged my tail! My favorite thing!
5:00 pm - Dinner! My favorite thing!
7:00 pm - Got to play ball! My favorite thing!
8:00 pm - Wow! Watched TV with the people! My favorite thing!
11:00 pm - Sleeping on the bed! My favorite thing!

The Cat's Diary

Day 983 of My Captivity

My captors continue to taunt me with bizarre little dangling objects. They dine lavishly on fresh meat, while the other inmates and I are fed hash or some sort of dry nuggets. Although I make my contempt for the rations perfectly clear, I nevertheless must eat something in order to keep up my strength.

The only thing that keeps me going is my dream of escape. In an attempt to disgust them, I once again vomit on the carpet. Today I decapitated a mouse and dropped its headless body at their feet. I had hoped this would strike fear into their hearts, since it clearly demonstrates my capabilities. However, they merely made condescending comments about what a "good little hunter" I am. Bastards!

There was some sort of assembly of their accomplices tonight. I was placed in solitary confinement for the duration of the event. However, I could hear the noises and smell the food. I overheard that my confinement was due to the power of "allergies." I must learn what this means, and how to use it to my advantage.

Today I was almost successful in an attempt to assassinate one of my tormentors by weaving around his feet as he was walking. I must try this again tomorrow, but at the top of the stairs.

I am convinced that the other prisoners here are flunkies and snitches. The dog receives special privileges. He is regularly released, and seems to be more than willing to return. He is obviously retarded. The bird must be an informant. I observe him communicate with the guards regularly. I am certain that he reports my every move. My captors have arranged protective custody for him in an elevated cell, so he is safe. For now ...

Doggone menace (Times of India)

16 May 2009, 0000 hrs IST, BRINDLE
Woof! I'm Brindle, the street dog who adopted Bunnylady and Jugfellow some years ago. The reason I'm writing this is because Jugfellow is too upset
to write his column himself. Why? Because, once again, some misguided residents of the National Media Centre, the cooperative housing society near Gurgaon where we live, have started off on the so-called 'stray dog menace'. This happens with unfailing regularity, not just in the NMC but also in that macrocosm of the NMC that we call India. From Kochi to Kolkata, Bagdogra to Bangalore, someone or the other will bring up the stray dog menace, causing a whole lot of innocent, perfectly harmless street dogs to be rounded up and, more often than not, put to death in the most inhumane and cruel manner. People never seem to understand that the Indian street dog (please don't call us strays) are hardy, intelligent, affectionate creatures, often much more so that their pedigreed, imported counterparts, who have been viciously inbred by exploitative breeders. Street dogs have to be all these things in order to survive. Far from harming people, they are - when properly vaccinated against rabies and other diseases - man's best pals, to coin a phrase. They act as excellent guards for the neighbourhood, alerting everyone to the intrusion of strangers by barking. Yet people keep on wanting to get rid of them. Not realising that nature abhors a vacuum and if you get rid of one lot of street dogs, another lot will inevitably take their place. There is no such thing as a 'stray dog menace'. There is only a 'stray human menace'. Who is it that has strayed from the straight and narrow of God's plan (and please don't tell me that God is dog spelt backwards, because if i've heard that once i've heard it for the umpteenth time)? Is it dogs, who live together amicably in the casteless, creedless democracy of doggydom, who have strayed? Or is it humans, with their caste conflicts and their religious wars, their whites and their blacks, their Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs and Christians, their Maoists and their monarchists, their Indias and their Pakistans, their terrorists and their victims, who are the real strays? And the real menace. Not only to each other, but to all of the rest of creation as well. It wasn't dogs who created 9/11, and 26/11, and al-Qaeda, and the Sri Lankan civil war, and the Taliban, and not one but two world wars. All these are human creations. And what wondrous creations. Can you imagine a dog creative enough to devise 65,000 nuclear warheads capable of killing every living creature on this planet a hundred times over? No. Only humans are creative enough to have done that. Though they have yet to prove themselves creative and clever enough to find a cure for the common cold. Or AIDS, or cancer, or a score of other killer diseases. Humans have been too busy doing other things. Like polluting the planet and destroying its environment. The world's forest cover has been thinned from 7.6 billion hectares in the pre-industrial age to 2.8 billion hectares. And that's fast disappearing. Between 1700 and 1900, thanks to human activity, more than 20,000 species of plants, 593 species of birds, over 400 species of animals and 209 species of amphibians became extinct. Today, humans wipe out one species every day on an average. Tell me about the 'stray dog menace'. Unlike humans, who think the universe and everything in it was created only for their benefit to do with as they will, we dogs believe in the co-fraternity of all living things. And that includes cats. Cats? Oh, lor, what have Bunnylady and Jugfellow done? They've let Himal into the place. And Himal is a cat! Who insists on literally rubbing shoulders with me. Yuck. So, while there's no such thing as a stray dog menace, if you were to talk about a stray cat menace, you might get me to agree. Or maybe not. For the basic dharma that doggydom teaches is to live and let live. Which means cats too. Where's that damn Himal gone to...? http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/jugglebandhi/

Urban Thai Monkeys Get Help (National Geographic News)

Nearly a thousand long-tailed macaques live in Lopburi, near Bangkok, Thailand. Volunteers care for the monkeys when they are sick or injured.© 2009 National Geographic (AP)
Unedited Transcription
It's estimated that more than a thousand long tailed macaques live in the town of Lopburi, near Bangkok.
Volunteers do what they can to help them.
SOUNDBITE: (Thai) Manad Vimuktipun, Volunteer monkey caregiver. "In my opinion, monkeys are the symbol of Lopburi. If the monkeys have skin diseases or are unhealthy, it will look like people here do not take care of them."
Manad mixes parasite medicine with bread and canned milk for the monkeys, because in the summertime, many of the animals develop skin infections caused by parasites.
Manad isn't trained as a veterinarian, so he focuses on what he calls preventative medicine.
Sometimes when Manad looks the other way, the monkeys open his bag and steal leftover food.
SOUNDBITE: (French) Saluatrice Di Natale, Tourist from Brussels, Belgium. "They come close and even climb on our knees or our necks. You can take photos of the monkeys. The contact with the monkeys is really special and enjoyable. Some are gentle and others are more aggressive. Some seem afraid although they come close. It's really enjoyable."
Manad's next stop is what is known as the monkey temple.
It is one of the few places in the world where monkeys roam freely next to humans.
The monkeys know Manad well and eagerly greet him.
Nearby, a volunteer veterinarian is skillfully giving a tranquilizer injection to a critically injured monkey.
She recently found the monkey in the town centre after someone had stabbed it.
SOUNDBITE: (Thai) Juthamas Supannam, Veterinarian. "The monkey is the symbol of Lopburi Province and many have been abused and killed. If no one steps forward to take care of them, there may not be any monkeys in Lopburi in the future."
Before she can return the monkey to its community in the town, she must be sure the monkey is fully recovered.
She first cleans the animal's wound. Then she carefully removes the stitches.
With the monkey asleep, she checks its teeth and gums, eyes and ears. She also checks its hands and fingers to see it doesn't have any broken bones.
She is patiently teaching her adopted monkey to climb trees.
When her pet monkey was three months-old, a Thai tourist found him for sale in a market near the Thai-Laos border and brought him to her.
The monkey's leg was broken and she put a plaster cast on it and treated it.
The monkey's leg is now better, but he still holds it seemingly to get her attention.

Giant Dinosaurs Stuck Their Necks Out, Not Up? (National Geographic News)

Long-necked dinosaurs didn't graze treetops, according to new research that suggests the prehistoric animals were better off holding their necks horizontal, not upright. Lifting long necks at steep angles would have put intense pressure on sauropod hearts, requiring dramatic expenditures of energy to keep blood pumping to the brain, a new study of dinosaur circulation says.

Sauropods were giant, long-necked, long-tailed, four-legged plant-eaters that lived about 200 to 66 million years ago (prehistoric time line).

Since long-necked modern animals, such as giraffes, tend to browse on leaves in tall trees, paleontologists have assumed that sauropods—whose necks could be as long as 30 feet [9 meters]—must have done the same.

But Roger Seymour, of the University of Adelaide in Australia, found that sauropods would have spent as much as 75 percent of their bodies' energy to keep their heads held high.

Most mammals use about 10 percent of their energy to circulate blood through their bodies. Giraffes use about 18 percent of their energy to keep blood moving through their long, upright necks.

"Would the increased availability of food in tall trees be worth the cost? This seems doubtful," Seymour said. "It would probably make more energetic sense for [sauropods] to feed with their necks close to horizontal."

By moving their necks side-to-side horizontally, sauropods would have been able to feed on a very large area of plant material without having to move their bodies.

That may not seem like a much of an energy-saving tactic. But in animals that may have weighed 30 to 40 tons, the energetic difference between taking a few steps and not taking a few steps may have been as huge as the animals themselves.

Expensive Treats

Still, some scientists not involved with Seymour's research argue that, in extreme cases, it may have been worth it for saurpods to spend the extra energy to lift their necks.

The bones and joints in some of these animals show that they could lift their necks between 30 and 60 degrees above horizontal, paleontologist Martin Sander, of the University of Bonn in Germany, said.

When food availability at low and medium heights became scarce, the cost of raising the head to get valuable resources may have been worth it, Sander said.

Richard Cowen, of the University of California, Davis, noted that other animals sometimes expend enormous amounts of energy on food.

Cheetahs, for example, sprint after prey, even though the big cats only make the catch one time in four. Likewise, whales use massive amounts of energy to dive deep into cold water, and migratory birds burn heaps of energy flying thousands of miles.

All of these behaviors could be viewed as incredible energy sinks, but we know they are not because the animals gain something significant in return that makes the energy expenditure worth it, Cowen explained.

"It would be reasonable for sauropods to browse occasionally with heads high, as long as the payoff was also high," Cowen said.

Mom in the news again...

Gorillas Are No Dummies, Zoo Study Shows (National Geographic News)

While researchers have rigorously tested chimpanzee intelligence for years, they have paid far less attention to gorillas.
That's because gorillas rarely use tools, and scientists had assumed the great apes are not as mentally astute.
But ongoing research at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago suggests otherwise.
Four years ago, scientists there attached a touch-screen computer terminal to the side of the enclosure of a female gorilla named Rollie.
As the gorilla approached, it saw the numeral one displayed on the screen. When Rollie touched the symbol, a chime sounded and the machine dispensed a frozen blueberry.
It did not take long for the gorilla to work out that pressing the number had benefits.
After a while, the computer screen presented Rollie with two symbols, the numerals one and two. Through trial and error, Rollie learned to press them in the right order to receive a blueberry.
Chimps Lagged
Last year zoo primatologist Steve Ross reported that Rollie could sequence up to seven numbers at a time, and that chimpanzees at the facility were taking twice as long to learn the sequence.
"Gorillas rarely use tools and have rarely been cognitively studied as a result. So we did not expect them to perform very well at this," Ross said.
Despite Rollie's success, Ross and his colleagues wondered whether the gorilla was just one very sharp ape, or if such intellect could be found in other gorillas.
The scientists started testing other gorillas at their facility. The youngest of the group, a five-year-old named Azizi, is also proving to be a quick study.
So far the male gorilla has only learned to sequence five numbers at a time, but has progressed as rapidly as Rollie.
In Japan similar studies are being conducted with chimpanzees, mandrills, and gibbons. None have made it past the number five.
"This is the first study demonstrating gorilla intelligence like this," said Tetsuro Matsuzawa, director of the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University.
"I am eager to see how further research with these gorillas progresses."
Social Intolerance
The discovery raises questions about why gorillas do not use tools more often.
"We are starting to think that gorilla social intolerance blocks innovative behaviors like tool use from spreading widely through a group," said primatologist Elizabeth Lonsdorf, also at Lincoln Park Zoo.
If gorillas gathered together and studied one another—as chimpanzees do—tool use might be a lot more common, Lonsdorf noted.
Another factor could be feeding behavior. Gorillas depend heavily on easily obtained grass and herbs that require no tools for collection, while chimpanzees commonly feed on fruits and nuts which are often hard to access without tools.
"The challenge of obtaining food may be a second reason why chimpanzees invent tools and gorillas do not," Kyoto University's Matsuzawa said.

Its all a MOO Point!!! :-)

Cow loses cool after calf goes missing

17 Apr 2009, 0224 hrs IST, Sandhya Nair & Joshua A P, TNN

MIRA ROAD/NAVI MUMBAI: The Thane Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (TSPCA) and the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation (NMMC) are
trying to unite a cow with its calf separated after the latter's birth on Tuesday. The day-old male calf would wail for its mother who seemed to have gone berserk looking for the calf at Ghansoli in Navi Mumbai.

The cow delivered the male calf on the streets of Ghansoli on Tuesday night and soon left in search of food, leaving the calf in the middle of the road. The wailing calf attracted the attention of labourers who informed the Thane SPCA office on Ghodbunder Road. "We found the calf abandoned on the streets and so brought him to the SPCA hospital around 3 am on Wednesday,'' Thane SPCA president Shakuntala Majumdar said.

But, minutes after the calf was taken away, locals were stunned to see the cow return to the spot where it had delivered. So while the calf refused to be bottle-fed, the cow turned violent and started to attack anyone who approached it. Majumdar, who contacted the cattle-pound office of the NMMC, said it was natural for a cow who had just delivered to feel hungry and go in search of food. It returned to the street around 7 pm and continued to search for the calf till 9 pm.

Attempts to catch the cow have failed. "The only way to unite mother and child is to somehow catch the cow and bring her to the TSPCA hospital. We dread releasing the calf as it is a male and may head straight to the slaughterhouse,'' Majumdar, who spent several hours on Wednesday night trying to feed the calf, said.

"The calf got used to me feeding him and refused to be fed by other staffers. So, even after I left for home, I had to make mooing sounds over the phone so that the calf would have milk,'' Majumdar laughed. A woman staffer even wore the hospital clothes worn by Majumdar to feed the calf.

An NMMC animal officer said another team would be sent later to get hold of the cow.

Will put up further updates on the calf's current status...

Cheers!

Twinky