HOME |
RSS | 
Just like humans, when an animal loses a leg or other important body part, a prosthetic can mean the difference between living a normal life and struggling on a day to day basis. Here are ten stories of animals that suffered loss and then learned to live with a new adaptation to their body.
While some people criticize the efforts put into these prosthetics, particularly in species that are not under threat of extinction, it is important to realize that these developments could help save a critical breeding member of an endangered species one day. Additionally, many of these techniques are brand new and by testing them on animals, researchers are developing useful insights to see if they may one day work on humans. If you end up losing a body part and get a bionic replacement twenty years from now, you might just have a cat or dog to thank for your top-of-the-line prosthetic.
Oscar lost his two rear legs in an accident with a combine harvester. After losing so much blood, his owners were told to expect the worst, but even after he survived the ordeal, their vet warned that cats rarely live happy lives with only two legs. Fortunately, he referred Oscars owners, Kate Allen and Mike Nolan to a veterinary surgeon who specializes in state-of-the-art animal medicine.
After looking at Oscar’s situation, Dr. Noel Fitzpatrick agreed to take on the new patient, surgically fitting him with implants that can eventually be attached to prosthetic paws. The surgery makes Oscar a notable kitty as he is the first cat to ever have prosthetic paws.
While the process was a success, Oscar’s paws haven’t yet been perfected for outdoor use. He has been made to be a house cat for the rest of his life, but really…that’s not all that bad now is it, especially when you consider how he was injured in the first place.
The first animal to receive such treatment though was Storm, a Belgian Sheperd, who lost his paw after it became infected with a tumor. The same vet that would later provide Oscar with his bionic paws, Noel Fitzpatrick, was the first to offer this service to any animal and Storm was the perfect candidate. Fitzpatrick says that he hopes his developments can eventually be used to help soldiers returning from Iraq and victims of the July 7th bombings in London.
Earlier this year, Naki’o became the first dog in the world to be fitted with a full set of bionic paws from Orthopets, a leader in the pet prosthetics industry. Far from just helping him walk easier, the paws are so well attached that he can now run and swim just as he did before the accident. Naki’o lost his paws due to severe frostbite after his previous owners abandoned him to fend for himself throughout the freezing winter in Nebraska. Despite the fact that the poor pup had to crawl on his stomach to move, he still found a loving adoptive family who worked tirelessly to raise the money to get Naki’o the prosthetics he desperately needed. Their efforts paid off as Naki’o is now thrilled to have his bionic paws and is eager to run, jump and fetch with his new family.
I don’t know about you, but I’m a sucker for touching animal stories and this National Geographic article about the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust an elephant orphanage in Nairobi. The stories in the article are a must-read for any animal lover.
The nursery takes in orphan elephants from all over Kenya, many victims of poaching or human-wildlife conflict, and raises them until they are no longer milk dependent. Once healed and stabilized at the nursery, they are moved more than a hundred miles southeast to two holding centers in Tsavo National Park. There, at their own pace, which can be up to eight to ten years, they gradually make the transition back into the wild. The program is a cutting-edge experiment in cross-species empathy that only the worst extremes of human insensitivity could have necessitated.
Be sure to read the whole thing to learn all kinds of fascinating information about the group, the elephants and the amazing people working to improve the lives of these majestic creatures.
Every day, scientists are striving to make our lives better and to better understand our lives through a range of experiments on just about every subject. Unfortunately, not all of these projects work out so well. These five experiments have all gone wrong, whether due to the errors of the scientists, the unexpected behavior of the subjects or because the public reaction destroyed what may have actually been an advantageous advance in the field.
Image via http2007 [Flickr]
While many test animals are killed in the name of research, many of them are at least being used to investigate potentially life-saving drugs. Perhaps the saddest and most spectacular failure of any animal-based experiment occurred in 1962, when Tusko the elephant (not the one pictured) was given LSD simply for the sake of seeing how the magnificent beast would react to such a substance.
Unfortunately, the researchers, Louis Jolyon West and Chester M. Pierce, had no idea how much LSD it would take to dose an elephant. Rather than erroring on the side of safety, the doctors decided that they didn’t want to have to do the experiment again just because they underdosed the elephant the first time. They ended up deciding to give Tusko 297 milligrams, which is about 3000 times the dosage a human takes, despite the fact that an elephant weighs about 90 times more than the average human.
After being dosed, Tusko immediately started running around in his pen and soon lost control of his movements, eventually collapsing to the ground and going into seizures. To counteract the LSD, the doctors gave the elephant 2,800 milligrams of an antipsychotic. The drug reduced his seizures slightly, but didn’t stop them. After another hours, the doctors decided to give Tusko a barbiturate to calm him down, but it didn’t help. He died a few minutes later.
Two other elephants were later dosed with the drug and suffered no ill effects. Ultimately, the doctors that dosed Tusko summed up their experiment in Science by saying, simply, “It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD.” Even so, it is still unclear whether or not Tusko died from the acid or a combination of the three drugs given to him that day.
The effects of positive vs. negative reinforcement have fascinated scientists and parents for hundreds of years. Unfortunately, testing on a group of unsuspecting orphans isn’t the best way to find out. In 1939, Doctor Wendell Johnson of the University of Iowa and his assistant, Mary Tudor, selected 22 children from an orphanage in Iowa. Ten of the children had stutters and the rest spoke just fine.
The stutterers were put in two groups, group IA that was to use positive reinforcement and other, group IB, that was to receive negative reinforcement. The non-stutterers were also broken into two groups, group IIB, that was told they spoke fine, and group IIA, who were told they were starting to stutter and needed to avoid making mistakes at any cost. The goal was to get those in group IA to stop stuttering and those in group IIA to start stuttering.
The impact on group IIA was exactly what the doctor had hoped for. The entire group started falling behind on their school work. The children started to second-guess their speech abilities and many stopped talking at all. One girl ran away shortly after the experiment ended. While Mary Tudor visited the orphanage three times after the experiment was over, attempting to convince the children that they didn’t have any speech problems, the damage was already done. Although none of the kids became stutterers, many of the children retained speech problems their entire life and most were reluctant to speak. In 2007, six of these children were awarded $925,000 in a lawsuit against the state for the university’s role in the experiment.
The study has since been dubbed “The Monster Study” by the public and scientists alike who were disgusted with the doctor’s methods.
more …
You’ve gotta love how happy these little babes are in their kiddie pool.
Video link.
Adorable baby elephant is adorable. This scene was shot in Phuket, Thailand.
via Geekosystem | Previously: A Celebration of Elephants
Jed Stoneham of Urlesque gathered pictures from Google Street View that look like they were taken in wilderness areas. Pictured above is a scene from a road inside Addo Elephant National Park in South Africa.
Link | Addo Elephant National Park
Every September 22nd, we celebrate Elephant Appreciation Day! To show our appreciation, here’s a look at some of the amazing things elephants do.
1. Play Soccer and Darts
(Image credit: Reuters/Sukree Sukplang)
An annual festival in Surin Province, Thailand celebrates elephants and all that they do. Highlights of the event include a soccer match, battles recreations, and an elephant dart competition!
2. Wash Cars
Elephants at Wildlife Safari in Winston, Oregon will wash your car for just $20, but be warned that the guarantee states they will not get it clean! However, the elephants have fun spraying water everywhere, and the money goes to support the zoo. See a video of the elephants in action.
3. Play Harmonica
This baby elephant at Phuket Island in Thailand enchants tourists with her dancing skills and harmonica music! She’s not the only harmonica-playing pachyderm. An elephant named Five at West Midlands Safari Park in England plays the harmonica every chance she gets, and an African elephant named Bubbles plays harmonica at Myrtle Beach Safari in South Carolina.
The elephant is the national symbol of Thailand. But lately, citizens have been going crazy for pandas. Zookeepers feel that the elephants aren’t getting enough attention, and made their point by painting the elephants to look like pandas!
Slathering them in white watercolour paint, the keepers at the Ayutthaya Elephant Kraal then paraded the five elephants before schoolchildren in an effort to remind Thailand that its elephants have needs, too.
The furore was sparked after the nation became fascinated with the birth of a female panda cub to pandas Lin Hui and Xuang Xuang at Chiang Mai zoo.
The Bangkok Post also reported that a 20 million baht (£355,800) snow house was being built for the panda family at the zoo.
Link -via Unique Daily
Have you every read about some new science experiment or research study that just seems… well, stupid? If you’ve ever gotten to the point where you’ve wondered what other bogus things they’ll pay people to learn about, you’re in luck. Here’s 7 of the most ridiculous studies ever:
If this first group of studies show us anything, it’s that scientists are as drugged up and crazy as the junkies up the street from me.
Elephants on Acid:
If you were going to see the effects of LSD on an elephant, wouldn’t you start with smaller doses and progressively increase the dosage until there was a noticeable change in their behavior? I sure would. But the researchers on this one aren’t like you and me.
Instead the researchers working on this one started off by injecting the poor beast with 3000 times the dosage needed for an average human, despite the fact that elephants weigh around 50 times what the average human weighs. Within two hours, the animal died. The scientists defended their actions by saying they had used LSD plenty of times and were sure it was safe. They then concluded, “elephants are highly sensitive to LSD.”
Apparently another scientist found their results to be suspicious, so he gave elephants LSD in their water. In his study, the elephants acted a little funny, but were totally fine.
Turkey Arousal:
We’ve all heard stories detailing how stupid turkeys are -like the one that says they’ll drown if you leave them in the rain. Well, some of those turkey stories may be bogus, but two Penn State researchers discovered that turkeys are so stupid they can be trained to be aroused by little more than sticks.
Their experiment consisted of creating a model female turkey that could be progressively deconstructed. The scientists would then gauge the turkey’s interest in the “female” and then remove some parts of her body and try again. They were expecting the birds would lose interest after is was stripped down enough. Surprisingly, the turkeys were aroused even when the model became little more than a stick with a head. I guess this not only shows how stupid turkeys are, but how perverse they are too.
Source | Photo Via Vicki’s Nature [Flickr]
Semen As an Anti-depressant?
I always thought scientists were supposed to be unbiased. I mean, if you’re hoping for certain results, might that affect your research? Obviously these researchers bypassed that concept, by attempting to prove that semen works as an antidepressant. They decided to study this theory by interviewing college women who were sexually active. Their conclusions proved that women who had sex without condoms were less depressed than women who used them.
Of course, their research was extremely preliminary and they didn’t even bother to take into account additional factors, like the fact that women not using condoms are more likely to be in serious
relationships. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure out that this might play into someone’s relative level of happiness. But like I said, this study was about as unbiased as all those tobacco company ones that couldn’t connect smoking with cancer.
Source | Photo Via Zen [Flickr]
The rest of these studies are amazing -in that someone actually bothered to research things so obvious:
Head Banging is Bad For You:
Who would have ever thought that aggressively and repeatedly throwing your head up and down would be bad for you? Gee, I never would have imagined that spinal damage and brain trauma could have resulted from head banging. Obviously, I’m being sarcastic. After years of dating a metal head, I can assure you that head banging can certainly make you retarded…or at least, it doesn’t help your intelligence at all.
The only good thing researchers found was that head banging is unlikely to leave you unconscious. What is really funny is the researcher’s suggestions for the metal genre. They suggest metal bands play more
mellow tunes and less “beat oriented” music. They also urged label to place anti-head banging warnings on their cds. Oh, and listeners were advised to start listening to “adult-oriented rock” instead of heavy metal. Yeah, that’s gonna happen real soon.
Source | Photo Via Cayusa [Flickr]
Male science nerds likely to be virgins:
Hmmm, who is most likely to be a virgin, a party-girl, a jock, or a nerd? Think about it. No surprise here; male science nerds between 16 and 25 are the most likely to not have had sex.
At least the study provided some legitimate reasons for this statistic, rather than the typical “nerds are pimply and boring” theories of popular media. The study reasoned that these nerds were the population segment least likely to be in situations where they would meet potential lovers. Apparently, doing homework and going to the library doesn’t help you meet chicks. Hey, at least they’re being productive. Interestingly, female art students were the most sexually active.
Source | Photo Via Miss604 [Flickr]
Bullies Like Seeing Pain:
If bullies were compassionate they would sit around crying whenever they picked on people. The fact that they don’t do so might just indicate that they are mean. Why did anyone need to set up a study to confirm that bullies enjoy seeing other people in pain?
An interesting thing about this study is that it was the first time anyone used fMRI to evaluate how respondents reacted to different emotions. Instead of being empathetic like the brain of a normal person, bullies mind’s activate their reward centers when they see videos of other people being picked on.
Source | Photo Via ZZClef [Flickr]
Television Viewers Are Unhappy:
It’s common knowledge that television and other forms of entertainment are a way for people to escape their problems. If you run home to watch tv instead rather than hanging out with friends, you might be unhappy. Did we really need a scientist to tell us that people who socialize are generally more happy than people who sit at home watching tv all day? What’s more crazy is that they needed over 30 years of data to back up their claims. The only unique thing the study discovered was that many viewers are actually addicted. (Marx was right about television, is this evidence that the scientists are commies?):
“Addictive activities produce momentary pleasure and long-term misery and regret,” said Steven Martin, co-author of the study. “People most vulnerable to addiction tend to be socially or personally disadvantaged. For this kind of person, TV can become a kind of opiate in a way. It’s habitual, and tuning in can be an easy way of tuning out.”
Funny, I’ve was using the audio/visual equivalent of heroin the whole time I was researching this. I swear I could quit any time.
Now that I’ve written this, I think I’ve got a couple of ideas I could get funded. For example, are people happier when they’re warm at home or cold in the middle of nowhere? Or maybe I could find out if donkeys really die when they take a bunch of cocaine and other drugs at a bachelor party. Do you guys have any ideas for awesome studies?
