Look at this homemade cardboard cat castle! Just look at it! It's got rooms, stairs, a ramp, a balcony, plenty of holes and doors (some even slide), drawers, a basement to crawl under, and a turret that's shaped like a dragon's head, teeth and all!
Dinni the cat loves his new digs! Sam and Natalia, together called prefabcat, have closeup photos and more details about the Cat Ark at their website. Previous towers Sam built for Dinni are impressive, too. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Kennedy Sorensen's dog Chanel recently had puppies and rather than let the memories slip past, Kennedy thought it might be fun to capture the beauty of her preggo pooch before the puppies were delivered.
Like many expecting mothers, Chanel looks a little embarrassed by her full-figured frame, but she's still beautiful no matter how she feels. And just look at that healthy glow.
As was only fitting, the maternity shoot was then followed up by a photoshoot for the eleven beautiful, bouncing puppies.
You can see more pictures from the maternity shoot and the puppy photos on Kennedy Sorensen's Facebook
Via Today
Everyone gets so into the Christmas shopping rush this time of year -even critters. This cute little furball was discovered browsing the Christmas aisles of a Dollar General in Maryland on Monday. Unfortunately, he didn't seem to find anything he was looking for, so instead he just messed up some of the shelf displays and left. I guess they just don't sell quality wood at Dollar General.
He was eventually caught by Animal Control and released back to a wildlife rehabilitation center -though I have to wonder if they would have let him keep shopping at local strip malls if he actually bought some items like a civilized creature.
See more pictures of the busy beaver over at the Daily Mail
People take their allergies very seriously these days, and if you try to feed them something they can't eat the militantly allergic will attack, and trust me- you don't want that.
It's even worse when your cat or dog is trying to tell you the food you bought ain't agreeing with them, because they can't express themselves with words- only violence.
Better to heed the warning set forth by this Cheekylicious comic and consult your cats and dogs about any special diets they may have before you feed them!
-Via Geeks Are Sexy
Cats are even smarter than we realized. Of all the things they could take from a purse, a drawer, or a backpack, they go for the currency. And sometimes coins.
They know they better make a quick getaway with their filthy lucre, too! -via Tastefully Offensive
Everyone has seen nicely decorated birdhouses before, but have you ever seen one that looks good on the inside? Artist Jada Fitch takes plain cardboard boxes, decorates them on the inside, fills them with bird seed and then tapes them to her windows.
The result is a charming set of images featuring all types of birds in quite cozy cottages complete with furniture and birdie portraits. You can keep up with her newest works on her Facebook.
Nobody likes their home to be full of rats, even if they enjoy an indoor-outdoor lifestyle, so watching a gibbon struggle to get rid of a rat that has invaded his enclosure is something we can relate to.
Of course, if I were a gibbon I'd simply use my monkey kung fu skills to dispatch the rat and toss it to the nearest predator as an offering.
But the timid little gibbon in this video appears to have given up on his kung fu training- so he has to ask his mom for help.
This video was shot at the Birmingham Wildlife Conservation Park in the English West Midlands, which may explain why the gibbon is so timid- he's not used to roughing it among the rats!
-Via Laughing Squid
Most dogs' natural instincts kick in when they hit the water, even if they're wearing a life jacket, but this husky is just too chill for that. He may be failing his swim class, but he's winning at life. I mean, why waste energy swimming when you can just float on?
Humans have always had an uneasy relationship with ravens, and for every civilization that thought of them as pure evil there was one who saw the raven as a powerful deity or nature spirit.
But despite what some bird haters will have you believe ravens don't want to watch the human world burn- they want to be a part of it.
Ravens are one of the smartest animals on Earth, they can imitate human speech much like parrots, and scientists believe they communicate by using nonvocal signals and may even feel empathy for their fellow ravens.
Ravens also roam around in gangs during adolescence, love to trick other animals out of their food and roll around on ant hills, so perhaps their bad reputation isn't pure superstition after all.
Cows are more intelligent and graceful than most people think, but they're also simple creatures who don't mind spending their days standing around in fields munching grass with the rest of their herd.
But just like in human society the herd isn't enough for some cows, and these lone wolves of bovine society are always looking for a chance to slip away from the herd and have a bit of fun on their own.
And while bales of hay look like hard work to most humans the cow in this video shared by Redditor ibru sees it as the perfect cure for bovine boredom.
But as it turns out playing with hay bales isn't just a sport for loners, and sometimes whole herds like to kick up their hooves and get silly with a bale of hay, as shown in this video posted by Jennifer Muzzall of 3 Sisters Beef in Coupeville, Washington.
Who knew frolicking cows would be such a great cure for the blues?
-Via Boing Boing
When a curious cat gets his head stuck in something, his first instinct is to walk backwards away from it. That doesn't help a bit, as the thing just goes with the cat. Lucky for these cats, there's someone right there with a camera to help out -after they get a bit of footage first.
What's even funnier is when a cat finally gets unstuck and the first thing they do is go right back to that object again to satisfy their curiosity! -via Tastefully Offensive
(Image credit: Byron Eggenschwiler)
How one whippet changed canine athletics (and got his owner arrested in the process).
IT WAS THE TOP OF THE EIGHTH. The Los Angeles Dodgers were pla}dng the Cincinnati Reds in a game being nationally broadcast by NBC on August 5, 1974. Alex Stein, a scruffy 19-year-old clad in shorts and a T-shirt, walked from the parking lot into the ballpark with a dog following a few feet behind him. Dogs were not allowed on the premises. The security guard eyed Stein. “That your dog?” he asked. “Never seen him before in my life,” Stein answered.
As the guard took the trespasser by his collar and shooed him into the lot, Stein found his seat in the top row near the exit. A few moments later, with the guard’s attention drifting elsewhere, the dog joined Stein and settled in under his seat. In fact, he did belong to Stein, and he had followed his owner’s scent into the bleachers. Everything was going according to plan.
Stein watched the changeover as the Dodgers came up to bat. Then, just as the game was about to resume, he ran down 26 steps to the retaining wall that separated the seats from the field, stopped, and tossed a Frisbee 40 yards. The dog, named Ashley Whippet, bounded over the 3-foot wall and sunk his teeth into the Frisbee before it could touch the ground. The animal seemed to linger in the air like Jordan off the rim, his muscled hind legs propelling him skyward. The crowd roared, and as cameras trained their lenses on the spectacle, the outfielders sat down on the grass and watched.
With 50,000 people cheering in the stands and millions watching at home, Stein and his dog effectively invented the phenomenon known as dog Frisbee.
Leanne Lauricella runs the rescue group Goats of Anarchy. One of her recent rescues is a blind, underweight goat named Polly, who has other medical issues and severe anxiety. She goes into a panic when Lauricella is out of sight. They tried several things with Polly, including a Thundershirt, a swaddling coat that calms dogs. Nothing worked, until Lauricella brought home a child's Halloween costume made up to resemble a duck. When she put the costume on Polly, she immediately calmed down.
It must be the texture. Lauricella bought other costumes, and they also have a calming effect on Polly, although she loves the duck costume the best. There is more to the story, which you can read at The Dodo. -via Metafilter
Just look at this lovely cat! Neatoramanaut Ally from Melbourne, Australia, shares her beautiful Furrdy with us. His story is not your everyday pet adoption tale.
After weeks of him hanging about our property at night meowing, we caught him in a council cat trap, intending to give him to our local authorities to dispose of. We opened the cage that night expecting to find a mangy stray and instead stepped back in surprise and said, "Oh! Our apologies dear sir, we didn't realize you were a gentleman. Please be our guest."
After checking with our local council, who searched for his owner to no avail, we were able to welcome him home where he typically resides on our velvet footstool. His name is Hector Furrdinand Van Humboldt the First, known as 'Furrdy'. He enjoys fine salmon, fresh cream and, when slumming it with the lads, hot dogs. He also has a quirky penchant for eating balloons and sleeping underneath blankets on the bed.
Except for the part about eating balloons, that lifestyle would appeal to any of us. Since Furrdy was a stray, his lineage is not a sure thing. However, Allie thinks he may be at least part Maine Coon, since he has several of the breed's distinguishing traits: 'snow shoe' tufty paws, enormous size, a waterproof fur coat, unusually tiny meow, and a desire to play with water. -Thanks, Allie!
Pigeons hang around our cities eating stuff off the sidewalks, pooping on statues and cars and people and generally just being an urban bird that has adapted to life in the concrete jungle.
But for some reason city folk find the mere presence of pigeons offensive, calling them "rats with wings" and cursing their existence when they spot them strutting around town.
Ask these people why they hate pigeons so much and they probably won't have much to say because, as NY Times writer Jon Mooallem said, "The full scope of our disdain and distrust for the birds is impossible to quantify, It’s hard even to explain.”
Sociologist Colin Jerolmack got pooped on by a pigeon in Greenwich Village back in 2005, and that crappy encounter inspired him to investigate how people came to hate city pigeons so much.
Colin studied how animals and humans interact in NYC in an effort to discern whether the enmity originated from something the pigeons did directly to us humans or not.
His conclusion- humans feel pigeons are out of place in the city, a feeling they interpret as hate:
The pigeon-as-pest, he thinks, is a symptom of people’s idea that the environments we build are separate from natural ones. In what sociologists call our “imaginative geography” of cities, there’s a border that separates clean, orderly civilization and wild, uncontrolled nature. “That doesn’t mean there’s no nature, but ideally, the city is the place where we invite nature in in ways that we control,” Jerolmack says. “We cut out little squares in the concrete, and that’s where the trees belong. We don’t like it when grass and weeds begin to grow through cracks in the sidewalks, because that’s nature breaking out of those boundaries that we want to keep it in.”
