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Crendro, Lord Shardik! Some of the Kodiak bears that live at the Olympic Game Farm in Sequim, Washington are known for waving at visitors. You can view two more videos of them at the link.
No word on where this super bear happens to have originated from, but one thing’s for sure: criminals better not mess with him.
Which caliber for a flying eye laser beam-shooting grizzly bear? Bag limit of two per season.
I haven’t been able to track down the artist responsible, but some people think that this is an illustration for a 90s era RPG called The World of Synnibarr.
-via The Uniblog
In gratitude for the attention that redditors had given to his work, the artist Zac Max let them decide what should be the subject of his next sculpture. Appropriately, they chose a bear with chainsaws for arms.
There’s a lot of money being spent on research for prosthetic arms. Perhaps an easier solution would be to give people chainsaw arms. Oh, on some occasions chainsaw arms would not be practical. But at other times, they would be essential.
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What would you do if a bear picked up your dog as an afternoon snack? I think most of us would just run away and kiss Fido goodbye, but Brooke Collins isn’t like most people. Instead, she punched the bear in the face, making it drop her pup and run away.
“It was all so fast. All I could think about was my dog was going to die,” said Collins.
“It was a stupid thing but I couldn’t help it,” she said. “I know you’re not supposed to do that but I didn’t want my dog to be killed.”
Now that’s one dedicated puppy owner.
Link Via The Mary Sue
Don’t worry, it’s not the real R2-D2! It’s just a model. The staff at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado stuffed a cardboard R2 unit with treats and let Emmett, a grizzly bear, have his way with it. Because….
Well, they don’t actually say why. -via Nerd Bastards
Shark Week is cool, but I’ve always thought that having a yearly shark week seemed a little silly -after all, how much more are you really going to learn from one year to the next? College Humor has 10 reasons why having Bear Week would be much better than Shark Week.
I can’t help but agree that it would be nice to see another predator get the attention, but what do you guys think?
Relax, no bears were harmed in the making of this video. This is a video about National Geographic photographer Michael Melford on an expedition to take pictures of bears. But that doesn’t mean there’s no excitement! And we’ll see a bit of humor, too. -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!
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Video link
I’m sure many of you are familiar with the German superstar bear, Knut. He rose to stardom when his mother abandoned him at birth. A keeper at the Berlin Zoo stepped in and raised the cub from childhood, feeding him from a bottle, cuddling him, playing with him and otherwise rearing the little one. The issue really came into the public attention when PETA and other animal rights groups argued that the cub should have been left to die, as it was nature’s course and these activists believed animals shouldn’t be kept in zoos anyway.
Knut passed away on March 19 and while activists are still crying foul, blaming the zoo for Knut’s death, his fans will remember the adorable little bear that passed away far too soon -at only four years old. The zoo will be performing an autopsy, but results have not yet been released. In the meanwhile, we can console ourselves by remembering Knut kindly through this great memorial over at Cute Overload.
On a more positive note, the circle of life always continues and as the star of Berlin’s zoo passes on, Rotterdam recently introduced their newest addition to the public for the first time. Little Vicks (seen above) was born on December 6 and is every bit as cute as little Knut once was.
What is it about interspecies animal friendships that make humans so infatuated? Is it the unlikelihood of the partnerships or the simple cuteness of two different species reflecting so well upon one another? Whatever it is, these adorable animal pairings are simply precious no matter how you look at it.
Perhaps one of the most famous strange animal friendships involves Greg Pike’s three companions, Booger, Kitty and Mousie, who constantly ride on top of one another. His animals were named by a group of school children who Greg gave the opportunity to name.
Pike is a busker who receives monetary compensation from passersby who wish to photograph his bizarre animal trio. He currently resides in San Francisco, but he and his pets previously lived in a small border town in Colorado, Arizona, in Santa Fe, New Mexico and in Santa Barbara, so if you think you may have seen him in person and you happened to be in one of those places, then you almost certainly saw the real act, not an impersonator.
Greg likes to think of them as a symbol of peace, if these three national enemies can get along, why can’t we humans. If you like the act, you can always make a donation via his website.
When Stuart and Caroline Ward bought an owl named Boobah right before her German shepherd, Hazel, gave birth to puppies, they worried the dog would be overprotective of the litter and act aggressive towards the owl. Fortunately, the exact opposite was true. Hazel immediately started to look after her owl friend who took to riding on the dog’s back for rides. The pair soon became inseparable and Boobah even tried to suckle milk from Hazel like the young puppies did.
Many people have seen this image without ever seeing the equally sweet story. The 12 week-old macaque was brought to an animal sanctuary after he was discovered close to death after being abandoned by his mother. After his rescue, his health improved, but he remained listless until he struck up a friendship with an unlikely suspect –a white pigeon. The two were so close keepers almost never found them more than a few feet from one another’s side. The friendship managed to bring the monkey back from the brink and he displayed a whole new attitude.
While some consider cats and dogs to be mortal enemies, it is still fairly common to see the two animals become close friends after living together. As common as cat and dog friendships are, it takes a special bond to capture the interest of a nation, but Cashew and Libby were that close.
Cashew was an older yellow lab that had gone blind and deaf in her old age, but his feline friend, Libby, didn’t let that stand in the way of their friendship. Libby served as a seeing-eye cat for her elderly friend, leading him to his food and watching over him while the pair slept next to each other. The cat would even follow her friend on walks to make sure he got back safely.
After Cashew passed, Libby has shown no interest in other dogs and has been known to hang around at her friend’s favorite nap spots. The cat’s utter loyalty to her friend earner her the Cat of the Year from the ASPCA, a high honor with so many great kitties in the country.
While the header for this one has the makings of a great animal sitcom, it’s actually a true story that warms your heart. It al started when a stray goat and dog were picked up by animal control outside of a wedding chapel in Dallas. They were brought to the East Lake Pet Orphanage, where volunteers soon saw the pair was inseparable. Unfortunately, Texas law requires that abandoned pets must be kept with animals of the same species, so a sheriff’s deputy took away the goat, named Minnelli. If the goat stayed unclaimed, she would have been sold at a livestock auction.
Fortunately, the story already hit the papers and the Dallas County Commissioner assured the public Minnelli would not end up on someone’s dinner table. A few days later, the animal’s owner came forward. The family also owned a three-legged yellow lab and could no longer afford to take care of their animals, so they signed over the rights to all three pets to the East Lake Pet Orphanage.
The shelter received hundreds of adoption requests for the unlikely trio, which they then narrowed down to the five best applicants. Representatives from the shelter visited each home to ensure the pets were given to the best possible candidates. Eventually, they were adopted by Norman and Sandra Williams who owned three acres of land and plenty of other critters to keep their new family members company.
This video, allegedly taken last September near Newfolden, Minnesota, shows a hunter in a tree stand. A black bear wanders by and decides to climb up the ladder of the stand to where the hunter sits.
via reddit
Previously: Bow Hunters Wed in Tree Stand, Clad in Camo
A bear attacked a dog in Frenchtown, Montana. The dog’s owner fended off the bear using a zucchini:
When the woman, whom police did not name, tried to separate the animals, the bear bit her in the leg.
Maricelli says the woman reached for the nearest object at hand on the porch’s railing — a large zucchini that she had harvested from her garden.
The woman flung the vegetable at the bear, striking it and forcing it to flee.
Link via Say Uncle | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user Jagger used under Creative Commons license
Police raided a farm in Christina Lake, British Columbia to find that black bears had been enlisted to scare intruders away from the premises. Two people were arrested for running a marijuana plantation. The ten or so bears did not pose a threat to police.
“They were tame, they just sat around watching. At one point one of the bears climbed onto the hood of a police car, sat there for a bit and then jumped off,” said Royal Canadian Mounted Police sergeant Fred Mansveld.
In Canada, feeding bears is illegal as it leads to bears associating food with humans and increases the likelihood of bears coming into towns and cities to look for food.
One has to wonder whether the bears were guarding the marijuana or helping themselves to it. Link -via Arbroath
A baby bear got caught in a fisherman’s dip net. Human residents at the homestead tried to safely remove the bear, but mama bear stepped in to solve the problem. The action starts at 0:50.
via Urlesque
Zoos, or at least animal menageries, have been around since at least Roman times when exotic animals were collected for the purpose of being used in battles in the coliseum. During medieval times, the greatest zoo around was actually contained in the Tower of London. It was opened to the public for the first time during the reign of Elizabeth I. During the 18th century, guests could visit the zoo for only three half-pence, or they could come for free if they brought a dog or cat to feed to the lions. This animal collection was eventually moved into the world’s first official “zoo,” the London Zoological Gardens.
Over the years, zoos have moved from being collections of caged animals designed to please the public to expansive parks dedicated to maintaining ecological diversity and conservation. While modern day zoos are mostly safe places where the public can go to see wild, exotic animals, this isn’t always the case. Here are some weird stories relating to modern zoos in honor of Visit The Zoo Day on December 27.
Image Via www.theedinburghblog.com [Flickr]
When the only two zebras in the Mara Land Zoo in Gaza Strip starved to death during the Israel-Hamas war, zoo officials knew they needed the popular creatures in order to entertain the crowds. Unfortunately, replacing the expensive attractions through the secret underground tunnels in the area was not an option for the financially strapped zoo. So keepers did what any good zoologists would do and just faked their zebra collection by painting donkeys to look like their stripped cousins. To give them the dye jobs, zoo keepers used masking tape and black hair dye to create “authentic” stripping patterns on the creatures. While it may sound like a bad solution, many of the zoo’s young guests had never seen a real zebra and were equally impressed by the frauds. I guess it is still better to see a mock wild animal than no wild animals.
Source Image Via Associated Press
What’s exotic to one culture may just be a standard farm animal to another, as evidenced by Khanzir, the only known pig in all of Afghanistan. Because pork products are illegal in the country, the pig is a true rarity in the country, who received Khanzir as a gift from China. As if the poor pig wasn’t lonely enough grazing beside goats and deer, when fear of the swine flu hit the country, he was forced to spend his time in quarantine all by himself.
The zoo director, Mr Saqib explained the zoo’s decision to isolate the animal, despite the knowledge that it would not actually be able to infect the general public, “The only reason we moved him was because Afghan people don’t have a lot of knowledge about swine flu, and so when they see a pig they get worried and think they will get ill.”
Mr. Saqib does have hopes to alleviate the pig’s loneliness though, he says after the swine flu concerns die down, he would like to get Khanzir a female companion. Perhaps then, poor little Khanzir could at least be a member of the only pig family in the country.
If you’ve ever wondered how keepers prepare for the possibility of an animal escaping the zoo, you’re not alone. Fortunately, thanks to the miracle of the internet, a Japanese training session to get keepers prepared for a potential rhino escape has been caught on tape and made its way into your home. The “rhino” in this case is pretty darn terrifying, what with its eight legs and all. While the team’s efforts seem effective, you have to wonder if they would work nearly as well when the beast is actually 1 ton and angry as all heck.
Perhaps those zoo keepers should have worked on their plans for escaped primates rather than escaped rhinos. A video seen on Animal Planet (sorry its not embedded, but they don’t offer that service) demonstrates the terrifying things that happened when a four-hundred pound angry orangutan broke out of its cage and chased tourists and charged security guards. During his escapade in the outside world, Blacky also smashed some scooters and took control of a camera tripod hoping to use it as weapon against the guards who shot him with a tranquilizer dart.
In the shot, you see just how long it takes for a huge animal to fall after getting shot with a tranquilizer dart –meaning the rhino training exercise certainly was optimistic about that part of the procedure.
In nature, it is not uncommon for a mother to abandon her cub. Some environmentalists claim that the best thing to do in these situations is to let nature take its course and let the cub die off. But when the animal is already affected by human intervention because it lives in a zoo, it seems more than a little cold-hearted to just abandon the cub. Zookeeper Thomas Dörflein agreed, which is why he saved a two newborn polar bears that were abandoned by their mother.
One of the bears died of an infection within four days, but the other, Knut, was hand raised by Dörflein, who provided the cub with around-the-clock care. Only a few months into little Knut’s life, a German tabloid carried an article about Knut that featured a quote by animal rights activist Frank Albrecht, who said the bear should have been left to die rather than be subjected to a life as “a domestic pet.” The director of another local zoo agreed with Albrect and said that keepers should have “had the courage to let the bear die.” To be fair, both of the people quoted said they were taken out of context and Dörflein has said that he was making a point about a German court’s decision saying that it was OK for another zoo to have euthanized an abandoned cub in a similar situation.
Naturally, animal lovers everywhere rallied in support of the little bear and the Berlin Zoo vowed to keep him alive and care for him. As a result of the controversy, Knut became a worldwide celebrity and videos of the little cub with his zookeeper were loaded onto YouTube for everyone to marvel at. His fame brought so many visitors to the zoo that it soon experienced its most profitable year out of its entire 163 year history.
As Knut grew older, he continued to be a popular attraction for visitors and he is still living at the zoo. Unfortunately, Dörflein died of a heart attack in 2008, although he remains a hero to many residents of Berlin.
Source Image Via Jean-Luc [Wikipedia Commons]
A long time ago (actually as recent as 1958 in Brussels), it wasn’t uncommon for humans of other races to be displayed in zoos alongside exotic animals. While racism in that time is not unusual, having people live in a zoo these days certainly is. But in 2007, the Adelaide Zoo in Australia ran a zoo exhibit where humans were housed in a former ape enclosure (they did get to go home at night). Inhabitants took part in a number of exercises and the amused onlookers were then asked for donations towards a new enclosure for a new exhibit for the chimpanzees.
I was actually going to post an informative piece about how bears hibernate during the winter, but a quick Wiki reveals that bears aren’t true hibernators.
In true hibernators, body temperatures drop to near ambient and heart rate slows drastically, but the animals periodically rouse themselves to urinate or defecate and to eat from stored food. The body temperature of bears, on the other hand, drops only a few degrees from normal and heart rate slows only slightly. They normally do not wake during this “hibernation”, and therefore do not eat, drink, urinate or defecate the entire period. Higher body heat and being easily roused may be adaptations, because females give birth to their cubs during this winter sleep.
Of all mammals, North American bears continue to fascinate my adult mind, as much of what I remember being taught about them as a child isn’t nearly what they’re capable of.
This immediately reminds me of the Animal Planet piece this year chronicling Charlie Vandergaw’s story of feeding black and grizzly bears on his property (Stranger Among Bears). This show was made possible mostly due to the work of photographer/filmmaker Richard Terry. Check out this audio commentary by Richard while browsing amazing photos of his time with the beautiful animals, and realize he had already seen Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man.
Always let them know where you are, what you are doing.
Photo: Juliet Mills
Wiki (Top photo: Ursus americanus, Wikimedia)
A bear could easily catch a dead salmon in this pool, but most bears don’t like to get their ears wet. An underwater camera reveals a clever ursine trick.
– via bangocibumbumpuluj
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.
Zookeepers in Cairo are charging visitors to actually go inside the animal cages. Hugging bears, feeding crocodiles, pestering seals and provoking lions can all be achieved for under ten bucks!
I don’t know what’s worse, the exploitation of these poor animals or the stupidity of the patrons for getting inside an enclosure with a live bear.
Photo: Nasser Nuri/Reuters
An Egyptian family asked to play with the lions. Two dollars, said the zookeeper. The mother nodded and the zoo employee motioned to them to come to a side door away from the row of cages and mesmerized onlookers.
The zookeeper looked nervous, peering up and down the sidewalk. Seeing none of the authorities, he swung the door open and beckoned the family of four inside. By the time the family had entered, the zookeeper had grabbed a lion cub and hoisted it into the arms of the startled teenage son. Another lion cub looked on from a few feet away.
The family posed for photos. The cub snarled with displeasure.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by bethtucker.
