HOME |
RSS | 
This video was produced by the comedy duo Rhett & Link, but there are two professional dancers inside the costume. Keep your eye out for the special guest cameo. -via Laughing Squid
This little guy is the offspring of a female zebra and a male donkey, born in Haicang Zoo in China. His unusual genetic make-up has graced him with a donkey-shaped body and zebra-like head, with just a smattering of black and white stripes in his mostly brown hide. There were difficulties during birth, but zoo officials say the donkra is thriving and already weighs in at over 30kg. To watch a video of the cutest little crossbreed in China, check out the report on BBC News. Link
Sammi Jo Stohler had a problem: her zebra Zach kept jumping out of his field, so much that she had an eight-foot fence built. So she turned his habit into an asset by training Zach to show off his jumps! Stohler took Zach in after his former owner had trouble with him.
“As I was training horses, I kept hearing, ‘You can’t train zebras, they’re untrainable.’ I said, ‘Why?’ To say something is untrainable implies that it can’t learn, and we all know that if they couldn’t learn, they’d all be extinct. They have to be able to learn and adapt. Obviously, the burden lies on the trainer to be able to train them,” Stohler said.
She got her first zebra about 10 years ago. “He was a dream to work with, and I’ve been hooked ever since. They’re very intelligent. When you teach them something, you don’t have to do a lot of review,” she said. “You train them something, put them away for a few months, then bring them back out, and it’s exactly as if you didn’t stop. A lot of horses need review over and over again before they’re consistent.”
Stohler has two zebras, Zack and Charlie, on her farm in Willis, Texas, as well as a zorse (a zebra-horse cross) and a zonkey (a zebra-donkey cross). She rides Zack frequently, especially on trail rides, and drives Charlie. Her exotic animal rehabilitation skills have led her to work with birds of prey, antelope, deer, elk, camels and badgers.
Stohler intends for Zach to jump in demonstrations, but not in competition. Link -via Arbroath
(Image credit: Kimberly Hahn-Orlaska)
When is a zebra not a zebra? When it’s a zebra crossing, but that’s only part of the story. A public safety advertising campaign in Russia hopes to draw motorists’ attention to pedestrians crossing the road by using zebras.
Only, police in the Russian capital could not get any zebras – so they painted black stripes on white horses instead.
They paraded the horses over crossings, forcing motorists to slow down and read road safety messages.
Thousands of pedestrians die in road accidents in Russia every year.
Perhaps they got the idea from a zoo in Gaza. Link to story. Link to video. -via Arbroath
Previously: The Only Zebra in Gaza
Thanks to Guy and Rodd, I can now cross that pesky "get made into a cartoon" off my bucket list! This Brevity comic panel ran yesterday on April 6, 2010. Woohoo! Thanks, guys! (How did they know I love tic-tac-toe?)
Check out the gallery for Brevity over at Comics.com (past 8 days): Link | Official Website
The photo above was taken by a visitor to the Zurich zoo, who observed a zebra placing its head in the mouth of a hippopotamus.
But the hippo had no intention of having the zebra for lunch – it was having its teeth cleaned… the teeth-cleaning session lasted 15 minutes and the zebra came to no harm.
Link. Photo: Jill Sonsteby/Solent News.
After two years of economic blockade, the zoos in Gaza are suffering. Only one has a zebra, but there’s something about this zebra that seems, um, un-zebralike.
“It’s really a painted donkey,” admitted Mahmud Berghat, the director of Marah, when asked about the creature. Making a fake zebra isn’t easy—henna didn’t work and wood paint was deemed inhumane, so they finally settled on human hair dye. “We cut its hair short and then painted the stripes,” Berghat explained behind the closed door of his office.
It did the trick—if not for zoologists, then at least for legions of Gaza schoolchildren who have never seen a real zebra. When I asked him whether anyone had ever caught the ruse, the director admitted that two sharp university students had IDed the counterfeit creature. “But don’t tell anyone,” he said. “The children love him.”
Most zoo animals have to be smuggled in through tunnels, but a zebra was too expensive for the Marah zoo. Link -via Arbroath
(image credit: Sharon Weinberger)
If there’s ever been two animals you wouldn’t have expected to see together it’s these two.
(Photo by Mike Owyang/AP)
Beauregard, an 8-month-old male Grants zebra is greeted by Brandy, an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin while out on a daily walk around the park at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo, Calif., Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2007. Beauregard was hand-reared at the park and takes daily strolls around the 135-acre park.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Jake.
