Claire Peters, of Drusillas Park, said: “We were incredibly surprised to see Bandit return. Obviously we longed for her safe return but no one expected her to turn up. It is thought the sisters escaped after being spooked by a noise or unexpected movement, leading them to flee up the perimeter fence and through the electric deterrent. Thankfully neither appears to be injured.”

Bandit's identity was confirmed by a scan of her embedded microchip. She apparently found that the grass was not greener on the other side of the fence. Link -via Arbroath

(Image credit: Drusilla's Park)

Did you lose your cats? Redditor thingsaintjust found a pile of them sleeping on the porch.

Francisco Mingorance snapped this photo of a fennec fox walking against the wind in the Sahara Desert in Morocco, and submitted it to the 2013 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest. Link - via In Focus

A juvenile fox takes advantage of a golf ball coming his way. This hazard wasn't explained back at the club house. Still, watching him play was probably more fun than the game. -via Daily of the Day

Georgina Hirst, a veterinarian, spotted these two friends in the Black Mountains of Wales:

"The lamb was obviously hungry and it's quite amazing that it learnt to suckle from the mare. It might have just copied the foal."

The vet, from Hay on the Wye, Powys, added: "Trying to get mares to adopt foals can be very challenging so it's incredible the mare was so receptive of the lamb.

"She would even stand guard while the foal and the lamb slept cuddled together." 

Link

(Photo: BNPS)

"I didn’t know what to think," she said. "I was shocked and surprised and then of course, awww."

The dog and kitten received the same reaction when Smith took them to the animal shelter. Volunteers marveled at the way the dog, which is at least 5 years old, looks out for the 5-week-old kitten.

Jessica Cwynar, director of the shelter, says such behavior is natural for mammals.

"It would be like one of us seeing a neglected or abandoned child and taking it under our wing," she said.

Neither the dog nor the kitten has a known name, so shelter volunteers call them "Girl."

Cwynar said the 5-year-old dog likely started producing milk because of a surge of hormones when she found the kitten. The dog is obviously a pet, and the shelter is hoping the owner will come forward and take the kitten, too. Link -via Arbroath, where you can see a video.  

Zero to 60 in three seconds! The "features" of a cheetah are presented in this video in the manner of new model of sports car. Everything that makes a cheetah different from other cats is about the acceleration. One fact that floored me: one stride of a cheetah can be 25 feet long. Imagine tracking a cat like that -you'd never know which way to look for the next paw print! -via Viral Viral Videos  

Today's featured pet is Steve, sent in by Neatoramanaut Kate Nelson.

This is my cat Steve... he is not dead that is just how he sleeps.

He is named for 2 people 1-Scuba Steve (he loves water) and 2- Steve McQueen (because he is cool).

Now, I agree that Steve McQueen is cool, but I had to look up Scuba Steve. Thanks, Kate!

Send a picture of your cat, dog, or other pet in so they, too, can be a featured pet on Lifestyles of the Cute and Cuddly!

(Image credit: Flickr user Ed Schipul)

What would Porter the Wonder Dog have eaten 200 years ago, before there was Alpo or Dog Chow? Here's the history of the multi-billion-dollar dog food industry.

CHOW DOWN

* More than 2,000 years ago, Roman poet and philosopher Marcus Terentius Varro wrote the first farming manual. In it he advised giving farm dogs barley bread soaked in milk, and bones from dead sheep.

* During the Middle Ages, it was common for European royalty to have kennels for their hounds. Kennel cooks would make huge stews, mostly grains and vegetables with some meat or meat byproducts -the hearts, livers, and lungs of various livestock.

* Dogs in common households had meager diets. They were fed only what their owners could spare. A normal domesticated dog's diet consisted of crusts of bread, bare bones, potatoes, cabbage, or whatever else they could scrounge on their own.

* In the 18th century, farm dogs, which had to be fairly healthy to do their jobs, were regularly fed mixes of grains and lard. In cities, you could make a living by searching the streets for dead horses, cutting them up, and selling the meat to wealthy dog owners.

* There were exceptions: The very wealthy, throughout history, have fed their pet dogs fare that was much better than what most humans ate. In the 1800s Empress Tzu Hsi of China was known to feed her Pekingese shark fins, quail breasts, and antelope milk. European nobility fed their dogs roast duck, cakes, candies, and even liquor.

LUXURY FOOD

The in the mid-1800s, the Industrial Revolution created a growing middle class with more luxury and more leisure time, pets began to be regarded as "luxury items" by everyday folk. Result: pet food became more closely scrutinized.

More pets and more money meant a new profession: veterinary medicine. It was officially founded in the United States in 1895, but many self-styled experts were already giving advice on dog diets. Many said that dogs needed to be "civilized," and since wild dogs ate raw meat, domesticated dogs shouldn't. (That advise influenced the pet food industry for decades after.)

In the late 1850s, a young electrician from Cincinnati named James Spratt went to London to sell lightning rods. When his ship arrived, crew members threw the leftover "ship's biscuits" onto the dock, where they were devoured by hordes of waiting dogs. That gave Spratt an idea. "Ship's biscuits," or hard tack, were the standard fare for sailors for centuries. Flour, water, and salt were mixed into a stiff dough, baked, and left to harden and dry. The biscuits were easily stored and had an extremely long shelf life, which was important in the days before refrigeration. And they looked a lot like today's dog biscuits.

Spratt had the idea that he could make cheap, easy-to-serve biscuits and then sell them to the growing number of urban dog owners. His recipe: a baked mixture of wheat, beet root, and vegetables bound together with beef blood. When Spratt's Patent Meal Fibrine Dog Cakes came on the market in 1860, the pet food industry was born. Spratt's Dog Cakes were a hit in England, so in 1870 he took the business to New York …and began the American pet food industry.

A GROWING TREND

Others followed in Spratt's footsteps:

* In the 1880s, a Boston veterinarian introduced A.C. Daniel's Medicated Dog Bread.

* The F.H. Benner Biscuit Company opened in 1908, making biscuits shaped like bones. Bennet also made the first puppy food, and was the first to package different-sized kibble for different breeds.

* In 1931 the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) bought Bennet's company and renamed the biscuits Milkbones. Then they hired 3,000 salesmen with the specific goal of getting Milkbones into food stores -and the national consciousness. For the first time, dog biscuits became a part of regular grocery shopping.

* In 1922 Chappel Brothers of Rockford, Illinois, introduced Ken-L-Ration, the first canned dog food in the United States. It was horse meat. In 1930 they started sponsoring a popular radio show, The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin. Ken-L-Ration became such a success that by the mid-30s they were breeding horses just for dog food and slaughtering 50,000 of them a year.

AW, DRY UP

By 1941, canned dog food had a 90% share of the market …until the United States entered World War II and the government started rationing tin and meat. Then dry dog food became popular again.

In 1950 the Ralston Purina Company started using a cooking extruder to make their Chex cereal. Here's how it worked: ingredients were pushed through a tube, cooked under high pressure, and puffed up with air. This allowed Chex to stay crisp when milk was added.

At about the same time, manufacturers were getting complaints about the appearance, texture, and digestibility of dry dog food. Purina's pet food division borrowed an extruder from the cereal division and experimented with it in secret for three years. The result: Purina Dog Chow. Dogs loved it, it digested well, and it quickly became the number one dog food in the nation -and still is today.

NO PEOPLE FOOD FOR YOU

In the early 1950s, Ken-L-Ration made the jump from radio to TV advertising, running commercials on wholesome show like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. ("This dog food uses only USDA, government-inspected horse meat!")

In 1964 the Pet Food Institute, a lobbying group for the now-gigantic pet food industry, began a campaign to get people to stop feeding their dogs anything but packaged dog food. They funded "reports" that appeared in magazines, detailing the benefits of processed dog food, and even produced a radio spot about "the dangers of table scraps."

The dog food industry was spending an incredible $50 million a year on advertising. Commercials centered around the "beef wars," with competing companies all claiming to have the most pure beef. (Bonanza star Lorne Greene did a TV commercial for Alpo …holding a sirloin steak.)

(YouTube link)

In the 1960s and 1970s, factors such as the increased number of breeds and rising crime rates made dog ownership skyrocket. By 1975 there were more than 1,500 dog foods on the market.

Today, more than 1,600 square miles of soybeans, 2,1000 square miles of corn, and 1.7 million tons of meat and poultry products are made into pet food every year. There are more than 65 million dogs in the U.S., and pet food as an $11 billion industry …and growing.

___________________

The article above was reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Unstoppable Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

Is it ballet or morning calisthenics? This juvenile bearded dragon is said to be "waving," which some say is a dragon sign of deference to a superior, but I think this critter's style puts him into the category of "performer." -via Tastefully Offensive

When his favorite song, "Make You Feel My Love" comes on, Rev wakes up and has to sing along with Adele! This dog may not pronounce all the words correctly, but he sure has an emotive voice. -via Viral Viral Videos

Woe unto the man who comes between Korra and her ice cream cone! That man is Mike Reeves, who finally just gave up. Good move. Korra like potato chips, too. I see a weight problem in the future. -via Laughing Squid

Bees who’ve evolved with short tongues and thus can’t reach for the sweet nectar have learned to carve holes into the side of a flower in order to reach their reward. This phenomenon, first observed by Charles Darwin, gets a bee nectar without the bee pollinating the plant. More cannily, there’s evidence suggesting that bees aren’t born behaving this way—they learn how to thieve from other bees, a sad sign that bee society is being overrun by hoodlums.

Read about seven thieving species at mental_floss. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Joe Penniston)

The pygmy marmoset (Cebuella pygmaea) is the smallest monkey in the world. They are about five to six inches tall, not including the tail. This one is eating a piece of macaroni, which looks huge in its hands! -via Daily Picks and Flicks

The Portland Police Department shares a dash cam video of Traffic Officer Mark James pursuing a speeder. But that's not all that happens. -Thanks, MB!

Bridget Evans, founder of the Illini Service Dog Program, received her Masters degree from the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Saturday. She was accompanied at the graduation ceremony by her service dog Hero. Evans said,

Hero knows over forty commands to assist me! He loves to retrieve objects for my like envelopes, pens, my crutches, etc. He also turns off the lights, opens doors, and he pulls me in my wheelchair up ramps! I couldn't have gone to college without him!

Hero grabbed a lot of attention and photographs at the graduation. These were posted by two different redditors, in threads that tell more about Bridget and Hero. In both, it was mentioned that while Bridget got a Masters, Hero was awarded a "dog-torate."

Link and Link

Animals play the cups, too! The otters have it down, while the bunnies and cats just try to look their best while trying. -via Tastefully Offensive

Isabella Rossellini, who makes strange videos about what animals do, has a new series called Mammas. It is the third part of her Green Porno series. In the introductory video, a hamster mamma explains why they sometimes eat their babies. At the Sundance Channel, you can see other videos on spider, cuckoo, dunnock, and wasp mothers. Link  -via Laughing Squid

Today's featured pet is Blaze, shown here catching a little shuteye on Mt. Hawkins in the San Gabriel mountains. The Australian shepherd was hiking with Neatoramanaut Miki Davis, who sent this great picture in. Thanks, Miki!

Your pet could be the featured pet on Lifestyles of the Cute and Cuddly, too! Sent your pics to tips@neatorama.com and check out the site every day!

This bird is Nyctibius griseus, or the common Potoo. The nocturnal bird of Central and South America is a master of camouflage, but you'd never know it by looking at those crazy eyes. See more pictures of this funny-looking bird at imgur. Link -via reddit

(Image credit: Carlos Gussoni)

Today's featured pets are Lucy and Muffin, sent in by Neatoramanaut Jane Lang. They are mountain climbers in their own imaginations. -Thanks, Jane!

The rest of you, send your pet's picture to tips@neatorama.com to be the featured pet at Lifestyles of the Cute and Cuddly.

Here be dragons, but the kitten doesn't know what they are about. He learned a little lesson, though: while you are focusing on the moving animal, be aware that there may also be one that's not moving …yet. -via Arbroath

Ypres, Belgium, stages the Festival of Cats on the second Sunday of May every three years. The festival harkens back to a time in which cats were tortured and destroyed because they were believed to be witches or incarnations of the devil. However, the modern festival is instead a celebration of cats, and no live cats are involved.

The centerpiece of the festival is the Cat Parade. The first parade was held in 1938 with music, a jester, and a bunch of altar boys carrying a bunch of plastic cats. They marched from the city hall to the belfry. Amid a concert of trumpet music and the carillon of bells, the jester climbed to the top of the belfry tower to throw the toy cats into the crowd below. This was based on how live cats were once thrown from the bell tower during the Middle Ages. These days it is soft plush cats that are tossed to the crowd below, perhaps mocking the awful brutality that is now thankfully left to the past. A mock witch burning also remains as a part of the festivities.

Kattenstoet would have been this weekend, but the festival was held last year and the next one will be in 2015. See plenty of pictures and a video of the parade at PetsLady. Link -via the Presurfer

(Image credit: Flickr user Cedric Dubois)

Like it said on the tin, Guinea Pig Fashion is a website where you can buy haute couture for your cavy. We can't wait till they make a teeny runway for these cute rodents to strut their stuff! Link - via The Cut

Well, this is silly, but you might want to give it a try for laughs. Petswitch allows you to easily put your features on your pet's face. Or if you don't have a pet, there's a gallery of pet pictures you can select from. It helps to make sure the two pictures combined are facing the same direction, and pay attention to the tilt. Shown here are my eyes and mouth on my cat Marshmallow. Link -via b3ta  

As much as Disco talks, it's a good thing he knows a lot of different phrases. He jumps from one pop culture reference to another, sometimes garbling them a little, just enough to make you laugh! -via Tastefully Offensive

The old way of multiplying a dog's age in human years by 7 is just not cutting it anymore. To get at your dog's true age, follow this formula:

For first two years:

9 years per human year for the first two years for small dogs
10.5 years per human year for the first two years for medium sized dogs
12.5 years per human year for the first two years for large dogs

For years 3+:

Small: Dachshund (Miniature) 4.32, Border Terrier 4.47, Lhasa Apso 4.49, Shih Tzu 4.78, Whippet Medium 5.30, Chihuahua 4.87, West Highland White Terrier 4.96, Beagle 5.20, Miniature Schnauzer 5.46, Spaniel (Cocker) 5.55, Cavalier King Charles 5.77, Pug 5.95, French Bulldog 7.65

Medium: Spaniel 5.46, Retriever (Labrador) 5.74, Golden Retriever 5.74, Staffordshire Bull Terrier 5.33, Bulldog 13.42

Large: German Shepherd 7.84, Boxer 8.90

Read more about the reasoning behind the new formula over at this post by Ben Carter of the BBC News: Link

Ze Frank narrates the entries of a cat's diary. This is a bit like Henri, the Existential Cat, with an added dollop of Ze's craziness. Watch for the sand cat at 2:27. -via Viral Viral Videos

(Image credit: Flickr user William Wan)

Nothing says "STAY AWAY!" to a predator like a tasty-looking creature that's a little too flashy. Bright colors and crazy patterns are nature's skull and crossbones, a warning to the carnivorous to look elsewhere for meals. Toxic animals usually have uniform markings: Each member of a species looks the same. Monarch butterflies bear the same patterns; puffer fish all puff up in the same way. But there's one animal that ignores this advice completely: the poison dart frog. These deadly amphibians have developed endless combinations of shades and markings, making it a challenge for hungry birds and snakes to keep track of their patterns. If the idea of being visibly toxic is to be as obvious as possible, why would a single species of frog maintain such an extensive wardrobe? That's the question that had Mathieu Chouteau sweating in the Peruvian Amazon as fastened 1,800 clay frogs to rainforest leaves.

(Image credit: Flickr user MoleSon²)

Back in 2009, Chouteau, a biologist from the University of Montreal, became obsessed with this evolutionary puzzle. "For the longest time, I've been fascinated by the phenomenon of local adaptation," he says. But because the varieties of poison dart frog patterns are so many and, more importantly, occur so geographically close to one another, they struck Chouteau as particularly odd. He wondered whether different types of local predators were somehow responsible for the variations.

(Image credit: Flickr user Geoff Gallice)

With the help of a patient girlfriend, fellow biologist Melanie McClure, he was able to test his theory. For an entire month, Chouteau and McClure spent four to six hours a day molding and hand painting nearly 2,000 clay frogs. Before long, it looked like an invasive species had taken over the couple's home. In his experiment, Chouteau focused on two patterns. Some of his frogs were painted to look like a group from the Peruvian highlands: black and splashed with bright green blotches. The other mimicked the pattern on a group of lowland frogs living six miles away: black with yellow stripes.

(Image credit: Flickr user Geoff Gallice)

In the field, the variety is even more astonishing. Some poison dart frogs are striped with bands of black and gold, like the business end of a bumblebee. Some are spotted. Some are speckled. Some are neon yellow all over. But all of them are easy to spot, glittering like gems on leaves and branches. They're also dangerous. Each frog is packed with toxic alkaloids that wreak havoc on cell communication and lead to fibrillation, arrhythmia, cardiac failure, or death. A few varieties are so poisonous that indigenous tribesmen use them to give their blowgun darts extra stopping power.

As soon as the paint on Chouteau's models had dried, he packed up his decoy frogs and headed to the Amazon for the next painstaking task: Using toothpicks, he pinned the clay hors d'ouvres to low-hanging leaves in both highland and lowland locations, It took days.

(Image credit: Flickr user Jacob Kirkland)

When Chouteau returned to check on his frogs, he found that some of the models had been marred by beaks, talons, and fangs. He continued to check in for the next three days. In that time, some frogs had been ripped clean in half or disappeared altogether.  But many remained intact. It all depended on which frogs were in which locations. In each zone, the predators -mostly birds, snakes, and spiders- had gone after the foreign-looking frogs almost four times more than the ones that sported familiar patterns. The trend became clear: Local predators steered clear of local frogs, but they were willing to taste the ones they didn't recognize. Chouteau's work showed that the frog's color variety wasn't some great evolutionary plan. The frogs that local predators learned to avoid -the ones that ended up populating and flourishing in a particular area- weren't smarter, faster, or better-looking. They were just lucky enough to be wearing the right spots in the right spot.

_______________________

The article above, written by Matt Soniak, is reprinted with permission from the March-April 2013 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

Be sure to visit mental_floss' website and blog for more fun stuff!

What's fat cat Maru doing these days? Here he is in the bathtub, but there's no water. He's discovered that the tub plug goes round and round, but it doesn't come out. -via HuffPo Green