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Archive for December, 2009

Happy Festivus

Festivus for the Rest of Us:

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LOL, it  gets Kramer back on strike!

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The strange creature’s identity revealed

It was sloth bear!

This illustration comes from a book called Sport in Many Lands: Europe, Asia, Africa, and America (1890).

The author, Henry Astbury Leveson, includes many different anecdotes about hunting all sorts of different creatures throughout the world.

However, the person who created the illustration appears to be a person who had never seen a sloth bear.

Sloth bears do have manes, but this animal looks like a lion.

This is what a sloth bear looks like in the real world:

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Sloth bears eat mostly termites, with some honey, fruit, and maybe some other vegetable matter. To make it easier for the bears to lick up the termites, they have lost the incisor teeth on their top jaw.

However, they have been known to attack people. Some sloth bears have become notorious for their aggression. The sloth bear of Mysore killed a dozen people and probably injured twice that number.

These attacks come  because they likely see people as potential threats. Sloth bears are prey for leopards and tigers, and the sloth bears have developed aggression as a defense mechanism towards these predators.

Because people have hunted them, the bears have a reason to fear humans, and they deploy a similar defense mechanism against us. If an unarmed person startles a sloth bear in the forest, it is possible that the bear could respond with aggression.

So that is why a bear that eats mostly termites can be a threat to humans.

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Classic scene from a very strange (and controversial) movie:

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The pug’s tail is very different from that of the wild dog!

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Remember my rule about not having pets that can kill you?

Good example (and I’m NOT talking about the bull terrier):

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What are these hunters chasing?

Leave your answers in the comments.

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Hunting a strange creature

What do you think this animal is?

Leave your answers in the comments.

Sloth bear.

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Vaccinating dogs to save Ethiopian wolves

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I know I’ve embedded this video before, but I find everything about Ethiopian wolves very interesting!

These dogs are a kind of African livestock guardian landrace from the Ethiopian highlands.

They do look a bit like Ethiopian wolves, and I wonder if some of these dogs might have some Ethiopian wolf genes. However, it is much more likely that the two animals evolved a similar appearance from living in the same environment.

But it would be amazing if these dogs had some Ethiopian wolf ancestry.

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