“This is a nice sounding story, but I’d like to remind the peeps that in WW I Britain alone lost over 484,o00 horses. After the war, thousands and thousands of horses were sold as work horses or just abandoned. In WWII soldiers lowered mice and canaries behind enemy lines to see if they died from bad air. In Vietnam dogs searched for traps and weapons caches. They died of the heat or their injuries. Those that lived were abandoned when the war ended. It is estimated that during the ’90s some 75,000 animals died in Afghanistan, mainly due to land mines.We are the hidden victims of war. You can read about animals during war HERE.”
Medical researchers, and their allies in the armed forces, awarded military-style medals to animals in laboratories to emphasize the martial significance of animal experimentation. Here, Army Surgeon GeneralMajor General Norman T. Kirk, on behalf of the Friends of Medical Research, bestows medals upon research dogs Trixie and Josie “for outstanding services to humanity.” Photo and text courtesy of Wikipedia…Gypsy photo courtesy of KarenFayeth, all rights reserved. Video uploaded to YouTube by sgtreckless2010
“This cat would like to have fun too …Where’s the snow?”
Birds just do like to have fun. We had a home once on a scant four acres in rural California. The property was roughly triangular with a creek running along two sides. One day during a rather dramatic downpour we stepped onto the deck outside our bedroom to find a duck riding the rapids. She would go so far and then fly back to the place where the creek curved and ride again. She was clearly have a good time. It was just as clear that she was intelligent and inventive.
While ducks are underestimated and often the butt of jokes, crows are known for their intelligence and for the use of tools:
As a group, crows show remarkable examples of intelligence. Crows and ravens often score very highly on intelligence tests. Certain species top the avian IQ scale.Wild hooded crows in Israel have learned to use bread crumbs for bait-fishing.Crows will engage in a kind of mid-air jousting, or air-”chicken” to establish pecking order. Crows have been found to engage in feats such as sports, tool use, the ability to hide and store food across seasons, episodic-like memory, and the ability to use individual experience in predicting the behavior of environmental conspecifics.
One species, the New Caledonian Crow, has also been intensively studied recently because of its ability to manufacture and use its own tools in the day-to-day search for food. These tools include ‘knives’ cut from stiff leaves and stiff stalks of grass.Another skill involves dropping tough nuts into a trafficked street and waiting for a car to crush them open.
On October 5, 2007, researchers from the University of Oxford, England presented data acquired by mounting tiny video cameras on the tails of New Caledonian Crows. It turned out that they use a larger variety of tools than previously known, plucking, smoothing, and bending twigs and grass stems to procure a variety of foodstuffs.
Crows in Queensland, Australia have learned how to eat the toxic cane toad by flipping the cane toad on its back and violently stabbing the throat where the skin is thinner, allowing the crow to access the non-toxic innards; their long beaks ensure that all of the innards can be removed.
Recent research suggests that crows have the ability to recognize one individual human from another by facial feature. MORE [Wikipedia]
INDIAN CROW
Crow trivia:
Eating crow is a U.S. colloquial idiom meaning humiliation by admitting wrongness or having been proved wrong after taking a strong position.Eating crow is presumably foul-tasting in the same way that being proved wrong might be emotionally hard to swallow.The exact origin of the idiom is unknown, but it probably began with an American story published around 1850 about a slow-witted New York farmer.Eating crow is of a family of idioms having to do with eating and being proved incorrect, such as to “eat dirt”, to “eat your words”, and to “eat your hat” (or shoe). MORE [Wikipedia] … and, of course, we know the part about the New Yorker is untrue. There’s no such thing as a slow-witted New Yorker.
“This is a nice sounding story, but I’d like to remind the peeps that in WW I Britain alone lost over 484,o00 horses. After the war, thousands and thousands of horses were sold as work horses or just abandoned. In WWII soldiers lowered mice and canaries behind enemy lines to see if they died from bad air. In Vietnam dogs searched for traps and weapons caches. They died of the heat or their injuries. Those that lived were abandoned when the war ended. It is estimated that during the ’90s some 75,000 animals died in Afghanistan, mainly due to land mines.We are the hidden victims of war. You can read about animals during war HERE.”
