Animal Intelligence

Gorillas and humans use similar body language to communicate, reports the U.K. Daily Mail. Researchers at the University of Sussex studied a family of gorillas in a British animal park.

Psychologist Dr Gillian Sebestyen said: “We shared 23 million years of evolution with great apes and then diverged approximately six million years ago. Gorillas have highly complex forms of non-verbal communication. I think we are looking back at what sort of communications skills we may have once had.”

[...]

She told Science Daily: “Apes, like humans, use a range of non-verbal communicative social skills such as facial expression, eye gaze and manual gestures, and tactile signals, such as grooming and huddling, which are used for social cohesion.”

The Daily Mail article is rather vague. I’d like to know more information about the types of body language that are similar. I’ll have to do more digging online…

I never understand those crazy Japanese television shows. But here’s a clip from one in which a chimpanzee learns to ride a Segway:

I especially like how, after crashing into the bushes a couple times, the chimp learns to steer. Neat.

When I was a boy, we had a Saint Bernard. Like all Saint Bernards, Charlie was a big, slobbery dork of a dog. Charlie was a good dog. We also had several cats, one of which was named Batman. (We named all of our cats after comic book characters.)

Charlie and Batman were best friends. Everywhere Charlie went, Batman went too. At night — especially on cold winter nights — Batman would climb onto Charlie’s side and curl up in his thick fur. They’d sleep contentedly for hours, best buds.

Here’s a YouTube video featuring other cat and dog friendships:

I know that cat-dog friendships are common, but just how common? And why do they occur? What are the dogs thinking? What are the cats thinking? What about friendships between other species?

Lynn sent me an item that’s been making the rounds as an e-mail forward. Though I’m reluctant to post something that I cannot properly credit, I’m going to do so. I like it that much.

Terry Burns from Middleburg, Pennsylvania shared this photograph and caption with an unknown magazine:

The text reads:

Cashew, my 14-year-old yellow Lab, is blind and deaf. Her best friend is Libby, 7, her seeing-eye cat. Libby steers Cashew away from obstacles and leads her to her food. Every night she sleeps next to her. The only time they’re apart is when we take Cashew out for a walk. Without this cat, we know Cashew would be lost and very, very lonely indeed. It’s amazing but true: This is one animal who knows what needs to be done and does it day in and day out for her friend.

If you know where this originated, please let me know so that I can offer proper credit!

This summer, my wife and I have made friends with the blue jays that live in our yard. We have been shocked by how brave they are, and by how much personality they possess.

I grew up with birds in the house, but they were parrots and macaws and parakeets. I know that these birds are intelligent, and have just as much personality as any other animal (or person). But I’ve always clumped wild birds into a nebulous “dumb bird” category in my head. (Except for crows, that is. I know crows are smart.)

Turns out blue jays aren’t dumb birds. And they have plenty of individual personality.

Our “main” bird is called Sammy, and he’s the boldest and most aggressive of the group. We lure the jays with peanuts, and Sammy is willing to come down within arm’s reach to get his treats. (My goal is to get him to eat out of my hand. He’s considered it before, but never acted upon it.)

If we go outside, Sammy will sometimes fly down to where we are — the rose garden, the blueberries, wherever — and squawk at us. “Give me peanuts,” he says. If we are in the process of feeding him and another jay comes nearby, Sammy will scold the interloper and try to scare it away. (This often fails, though. He can’t keep away three or four jays at a time.)

Last month, I was going a project at the picnic table. I set a pile of peanuts on a nearby bench. Despite the fact I was moving around the table (and often within just feet of the bench), Sammy continued to fly down, grab a peanut, and then fly away with the treasure.

Sammy used to fly far away to hide his peanuts and then return for more. Now he realizes that’s too much work. When we give him a peanut, he simply hides it wherever he found it in the lawn, even if that’s just a few feet from us. He tap tap taps the nut into the ground, eyes it to be sure it’s hidden, then covers it with a leaf or two. Then he turns around for more peanuts.

He’s even losing his fear of our four cats (and they are losing interest in him). If a cat is at the picnic table, Sammy will still fly down to pick a peanut off the other end.

We’ve been trying to decide what has made this bird so bold. We believe that Sammy is a youngster, one of last year’s juvenile jays. We believe he’s never had reason to fear us. One of this year’s juveniles is almost as bold, too (maybe bolder), and we expect it to join Sammy’s antics next year.

My favorite time with Sammy, though, is in the midst of “the grove”, a small clearing in the middle of a flower bed. It’s an enclosed space maybe twelve feet in diameter. Sammy feels perfectly safe there, and he comes even closer than he does on the lawn. He and I like to sit in the grove and chat, sharing peanuts.

Can you jump over 100 feet in the air? Neither can I. But trap-jaw ants can perform the equivalent feat. With their mouths. This video (complete with protractor!) demonstrates these amazing insects in action, using their jaws to propel themselves great distances.

From the YouTube post:

This has to be one of the oddest (and strangely mesmerizing) things on the net: ants flying through the air in extreme slow motion propelled by the rapid closing of their jaws. All set to a very peculiar sound track. The ant at the top of the image above is cart-wheeling its way over the other two.

What are the other ants thinking while they watch this? Does this hurt the ant? I’m convinced that many animals have cognition. But insects? Is this all reflex? What’s going on here?

(Read more about trap-jaw ants in this article.)

Last fall I shared a two-minute video of the cat who was raised by a crow. Diane recently left a comment pointing to a longer video with a more complete story on this unlikely friendship:

There is nothing I like more than stories of interspecies friendship. I love the idea that different kinds of animals can communicate and empathize with one another. Great stuff.

It has been a long time since I posted here. It’s not for lack of material. Animal Intelligence doesn’t have a lot of readers, but you few brave souls continue to send me good stories.

For example, here’s a story about Yosuke the Japanese parrort. When Yosuke escaped from his cage, he was able to return home because he knew his address. From the CNN story:

“I’m Mr. Yosuke Nakamura,” the bird told the veterinarian, according to Uemura. The parrot also provided his full home address, down to the street number, and even entertained the hospital staff by singing songs.

“We checked the address, and what do you know, a Nakamura family really lived there. So we told them we’ve found Yosuke,” Uemura said.

The Nakamura family told police they had been teaching the bird its name and address for about two years.

This instance may or may not be indicative of animal intelligence, but it’s still a fun story. I grew up around birds, and I know they’re smart. Once our yellow-naped Amazon flew from one end of the house to the other and crashed into the piture window at full speed, falling to the ground stunned. I rushed over to see him stand up, shake his feathers, and announce, “That was fun.” To this day I have no idea if he had any idea what he was saying. (I had also taught him to say “I’m Superman” but that phrase wasn’t appropriate to the situation.)

[CNN: Lost parrot gives vet his name and address]

When I was a kid, we used to try to fool our dog, Hairy. We’d make a stuffed dog “growl” and “bark” at him. Hairy was always game, responding to the play with growls and barks of his own, but I’ve always wondered just what his thought process was. Did he understand it was play? (And it’s obvious that animals enjoy play.) Did he on some level believe the stuffed dog was a real dog?

Modern technology makes such questions even trickier. Here, via Boing Boing, is a video of a real dog reacting to a $15 battery-operated toy.

I find it unlikely that the real dog — Isabel — would believe she were encountering another animal. For one thing, the toy isn’t going to possess the scent of a living creature. For another, its “bark” sounds artificial. But what does Isabel think? She’s fascinated by the interloper, but what is her perception of it?

On a similar note, my wife gave me a fake crow for Christmas last year. (Yes, I’m serious.) It’s not a real crow, and it doesn’t even have real feathers, but it certainly looks real. Its wings are spread wide, and if I swoop it around the room, the cats get tense. “Why is there a crow in the house?” they seem to say. One of the cats runs like hell. The others wonder if they might not be able to catch the crow.

When its not tormenting my animals, the fake crow lives on one of our windows. One of our cats — Max — periodically attempts to examine the crow. He’s very curious about it, but since it’s out of his reach, he feels thwarted.

How does this fake crow affect my cats’ views of the real crows outside?

I wish there were a way to get deeper inside animal minds.

By far my favorite aspect of animal intelligence are the stories of interspecies friendships. A goat that hangs out with tiger cubs? A pig that befriends a bear? A moose and a tern who are inseparable? These sorts of things make my day. I want to believe that on some level, all animals are capable of empathy with other animals. (I realize that I may be stretching things there, but that’s okay. I’m aware of my weakness in this area.)

Therefor, I love this video:

Here we have a dog. And a cat. And a rat. The three of them live in what seems to be perfect harmony. “The dog raised the cat,” says Greg, the animals’ owner. “That’s her puppy.”

I love how these animals seem to want to be around each other. They huddle together (probably out of fear, it’s true — they’re in a downtown area), they groom each other.

It’d be great to find more videos like this…

Here’s one a couple months old. The 20 January 2008 edition of the Toronto Star reported on two new stuides about the brains of squirrels.

First, from the journal Animal Behaviour (which sounds like something I need to be reading!), biologist Michael Steele at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania has been examining how squirrels cache nuts. Apparently, they’re concerned enough about theft to “fake it” sometimes:

While the furry-tailed creatures made a show of digging a hole in the ground and covering it with dirt and leaves when watched, one time out of five they were faking and nothing was buried. The proportion of phony caching increased after the squirrels saw their morsels being filched by undergrads who had kept a keen watch on where the nuts were really buried. Steele speculates that the squirrel brains have an inkling about the intention to steal, by either two- or four-legged thieves.

The second study is interesting, too. Some squirrels in the southwestern part of the United States are bitter enemies with the rattlesnake. Their bodies provide some defense (they can tolerate snake venom), but they’ve also developed special behaviors to avoid being attacked in the first place:

Animal-behaviour researcher Barbara Clucas, at the University of California, Davis, investigated how squirrels employ false scent to reduce detection in the first place.Scientists had already discovered that squirrels will chew on discarded rattlesnake skins and then vigorously lick their fur, effectively applying an olfactory camouflage.

This might have been a way to repel fleas or drive away other squirrels. In the current issue of the Royal Society’s Proceedings B, Clucas and colleagues ruled out these two possibilities. By recording the rate of tongue flicking, they showed that rattlesnakes were more attracted to squirrel scent on its own than to squirrel scent combined with their own snaky scent.

“Snaky scent” — ha!

[Toronto Star: A week's worth of science news — Squirrel Smarts]

A recent Discovery News article indicates that some primates may have a richer vocabulary than previously believed — but that their language may just take an unfamiliar form. Author Jennifer Viegas writes:

While such syntax-like behavior has been described in other species, such as whales and dolphins, the new findings are the first to clearly demonstrate the skill in a non-human primate.

“What our research shows is that individual calls do not carry any specific meanings, but different call sequences do,” co-author Klaus Zuberbuhler told Discovery News.

“So, for example, a series of hacks almost certainly indicates the presence of a crowned eagle, whereas a series of hacks preceded by 1 to 2 pyows reliably indicates that the caller is about to start traveling away,” added Zuberbuhler, who is a researcher in the School of Psychology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

The article describes the study’s method, which consisted of researches playing recorded calls and observing the results. I’m fascinated how our own preconceptions about language play into studies like this. It’s easy for humans to observe other animals and conclude that no language-based communication is occurring — it doesn’t resemble our language after all! But our lack of comprehension does not necessarily imply a lack of language.

[Discovery News: Monkey vocab richer than thought]

In an older post about elephants in love, Lynne shared the following story. With her permission, I’m posting it as an entry.

I volunteered at a zoo back in the 1970’s doing animal behavior observations with elephants and others.  I spent one hour each week observing and recording what I saw.

One week I watched the herd bull and a young cow who had never been pregnant. It was hoped that would soon change, so the two were cooped up in the viewing rooms of the barn to get acquainted and do the deed.  The youngster was utterly disinterested.  The bull was gentle, interested, and persistent, using his trunk to stroke her and sniff her.  Repeatedly, she simply moved off to the other side of the room.  Nothing more happened in that hour. 

The next week, I observed the same two animals plus another female. My supervisor told me the new animal was an experienced female who understood sex, and who might be able to teach the reluctant youngster a thing or two.  This ‘older woman’ flirted w/ the bull unashamedly.  The bull immediately responded. The two stood face to face, trunks stroking, exploring, and sniffing each other’s bodies.  The reluctant youngster simply watched from across the room. She seemed to be glaring, but I think it was her constant slight agitation that made me think that.

She stood beside an enormous metal chain with a ring on the end, which hung from the roof.  This chain could be pulled by the elephants at any time to activate a carwash that had been installed in their doorway.  The elephants could then give themselves a shower whenever they wanted.  The reluctant youngster never left the immediate area of the chain.  She stood watching intently as the happy couple petted and rumbled and attempted to copulate.  As soon as the couple neared the doorway, the youngster pulled the chain dousing them both with cold water, and the five foot erection would disappear.  

She did this 3 times during my hour of observation.  I couldn’t believe my eyes. The zoo patrons were pretty amazed too.  It was interesting to see the women going up close to watch, giggling and talking to one another.  The few men who came in abruptly left without a word. 

On the following week, the experienced ‘older woman’ was gone.  Little Miss Reluctance and the bull were happily groping each other and ignoring the crowd of interested visitors.

Elaine sent me more evidence of fish intelligence. Researchers have discovered that certain fish can count. But only up to four. According to the London Telegraph:

Previously it was known that fish could tell big shoals from small ones, but researchers have now found that they have a limited ability to count how many other fish are nearby. This means that they have similar counting abilities to those observed in apes, monkeys and dolphins and humans with very limited mathematical ability.

Christian Agrillo, an experimental psychologist at the university of Padua in Italy said: “We have provided the first evidence that fish exhibit rudimentary mathematical abilities.”

Last year, he and his colleagues showed that if a female mosquito fish is harassed by a male, she will try to avoid his attentions by seeking solace in the largest nearby shoal; demonstrating that the fish can tell bigger shoals from smaller ones. The team first conducted a series of experiments to see whether a lone mosquito fish would prefer to join a shoal of between two and four others.

This article is fascinating because it describes the notion of numbers, not just among animals, but among non-mathematical humans.

[London Telegraph: Fish can count to four — but no higher]

“You’re home blogging full-time now,” a friend wrote me recently. “Does that mean there’s a chance you’ll revive Animal Intelligence? Again?” Why sure!

A couple of people sent me this BBC News story about a New Zealand dolphin that helped to rescue a pair of beached whales. Due to copyright issues, I’ve been trying not to quote entire articles, but this one is so good that I’m going to make an exception:

A dolphin has come to the rescue of two whales which had become stranded on a beach in New Zealand. Conservation officer Malcolm Smith told the BBC that he and a group of other people had tried in vain for an hour and a half to get the whales to sea.

The pygmy sperm whales had repeatedly beached, and both they and the humans were tired and set to give up, he said. But then the dolphin appeared, communicated with the whales, and led them to safety.

The bottlenose dolphin, called Moko by local residents, is well known for playing with swimmers off Mahia beach on the east coast of the North Island. Mr Smith said that just when his team was flagging, the dolphin showed up and made straight for them.

“I don’t speak whale and I don’t speak dolphin,” Mr Smith told the BBC, “but there was obviously something that went on because the two whales changed their attitude from being quite distressed to following the dolphin quite willingly and directly along the beach and straight out to sea.”

He added: “The dolphin did what we had failed to do. It was all over in a matter of minutes.”

Mr Smith said he felt fortunate to have witnessed the extraordinary event, and was delighted for the whales, as in the past he has had to put down animals which have become beached.

He said that the whales have not been seen since, but that the dolphin had returned to its usual practice of playing with swimmers in the bay.

“I shouldn’t do this I know, we are meant to remain scientific,” Mr Smith said, “but I actually went into the water with the dolphin and gave it a pat afterwards because she really did save the day.”

This is one of my favorite animal intelligence stories ever. I love the interaction between the whales and humans, between dolphin and whales, and between humans and dolphin. I love that the locals know this dolphin. I love that the story involves one of the great animal mysteries: why do whales beach themselves? And, too, I love that Mr. Smith obviously has great respect and affection for Moko.

Animal Intelligence is back up and running. Again. Send me your stories!

[BBC: NZ dolphin rescues beached whales]

I am in awe over this newstory about a Siberian woman who shares her apartment with 136 cats. 136 cats!

I have four cats, and even they are too much to control. Every one of them is an individual being with a strong personality. How in the world could anyone cope with 136 of the critters.

This woman intends to help these animals, but is she really? I can’t decide. I, too, would want to keep them from being euthanized, but perhaps euthenization is better than some fates.

And where are the litter boxes? Please tell me there are litter boxes. Like 40 of them…

People keep sending me animal intelligence links, but I haven’t found the time to post them. Instead, here I am on a Saturday morning posting a video of a cat in a bathtub.

Have you ever seen such behavior? Most of my cats hate water. I have one, Max, who will drink from the faucet, and who likes to walk around the edge of the tub while I’m bathing, but he’d never do anything like this. Strange little kitten.

In August, the Guardian Unlimited reported on an elephant love story. It’s a short piece, so I’ll quote it in its entirety:

It’s a very traditional love story — just on a bigger scale than usual. A tame female elephant has fled an Indian circus after eloping with a wild bull elephant that broke open a gate and led her off into the jungle, her distraught handler said today.

“I brought up Savitri since she joined the circus two decades ago,” Kalimudddin Sheikh, who unsuccessfully tried to lure his charge away from her new beau, added.

The wild male, who wildlife officials believe was probably in musth — the periodic condition in which bull elephants seek to mate — turned up at the travelling circus when it stopped in the village of Kumar Bazar, in West Bengal state, yesterday. It broke into an enclosure and led Savitri into the jungle, with the pair being followed by three other female elephants in the same pen. Their trumpeting alerted circus workers, who led them back.

Savitri’s mind, however, seemed made up. According to one forestry official, she was last seen bathing with the bull in a jungle pond. When handlers called for Savitri to come to them, she looped her trunk around the bull’s leg and “he protectively shielded her like in a Bollywood blockbuster,” the official said.

The forestry department said it would continue to monitor the pair to ensure they did not cause any damage.

Anyone who has spent a lot o time around animals knows that they show individual preferences for one person (or animal) over another. On a basic level, our cats and dogs prefer one family member to other family members. But as my past entries on interspecies friendships have shown, there’s more to it than that. Is it emotion? Is it instinctual? Is it an actual conscious preference?

[Guardian Unlimited: Jumbo romance]

Newsweek has an awesome slideshow profiling the Rhesus monkey infestation in northern India. There are ten photographs with brief captions describing the ways in which these creatures interact with the humans around them. Here’s the full text of the introduction by Rajesh Kumar Singh:

The Oct. 20 death of Delhi Deputy Mayor S. Bajwa, who died from a fall he took while trying to scare a troop of rhesus macaques off the balcony of his home, brought to the world’s attention a growing problem in India’s cities: how to make sure the country’s various primate species live in harmony with the dominant one — Homo sapiens.

Recently, Delhi’s rhesus macaques have been getting into all sorts of, well, monkey business, tossing around top-secret documents at the defense ministry, pursuing commuters right on to the cars of the city’s new subway system, even invading hospitals and yanking IVs out of patients’ arms so they can suck up the glucose.

photo by Channi Anaqnd, Associated Press

But dealing with the problem is tricky: the simians are sacred to Hindus; the cute but deceptively dangerous critters are representations of the monkey god Haruman.

As India’s metropolises expand, the monkeys’ natural habitat has been squeezed, resulting in even more confrontations between man and monkey. But animal-rights advocates have been critical of efforts to combat the problem — leading some local bigwigs, who live in the primates’ path, to bring in bigger monkeys in hopes of scaring off the smaller fry.

According to this week’s issue of Newsweek, this slideshow was the most-viewed story on newsweek.com last week. I love it.

[Newsweek: Monkeys in the middle]

Digging through the archives at Ask Metafilter, I stumbled upon an awesome discussion from last month. User showbiz_liz writes:

What are the arguments for and against the idea that animals have self-awareness?

I’m in an anthropology class called Moral Consciousness that discusses human conceptions of selfhood. It’s a very interesting class, but I have one problem with it- the professor has stated several times, in an off-hand, of-course-this-is-true sort of way, that ONLY humans have selfhood. He seems to have a basic assumption that animals don’t, and that humans have overcome their instincts in a way that animals can’t.

I’ve always been very interested in the idea that humans and animals are far less different than we usually assume, and I’m not sure if I can just accept my professor’s assumption without some evidence. I’m reminded of statements like “animals don’t use tools” and “animals don’t have emotions” that were accepted for years and later disproven. So, when he says that only humans are capable of thinking of themselves as “I”, or of rejecting food when they are starving, or of sacrificing themselves, or of thinking abstractly, it bothers me that he isn’t presenting any evidence. I’m not sure if there actually IS evidence for these things, or if they’re just baseless assumptions.

So- where can I find some decent evidence for and/or against my professor’s statements? Are there actually papers and studies on the question of animal self-awareness?

Last year, I wrote that researchers have concluded that elephants are self-aware. One commenter notes that primates and dolphins have also passed tests of self-awareness.

From the discussion at Ask Metafilter:

• It seems obvious that animals have emotions. My own experience backs this up. Every animal I have ever known has moods, and most seem to have emotions of some sort. I’m not always able to decipher their exact emotions — is my cat sad, angry, or just bored? — but it seems clear that they’re feeling something.
• It also seems obvious that different individual animals within a species have different levels of intelligence, just as different humans have different levels of intelligence. Again, I’ve known some very smart cats. But I’ve also known some cats who were as dumb as posts. There’s some sort of statistical distribution at play.

Anyhow, this thread isn’t too long — it can be read in ten or fifteen minutes — and it’s filled with fascinating discussion on the subject. Well worth your time if you find this subject interesting at all.

[Ask Metafilter: Dogs: People too?]

After yesterday’s story about drunken elephants, an Animal Intelligence reader pointed me to this video clip from the 1974 documentary Animals Are Beautiful People. In this scene, a variety of animals get a little tipsy from consuming fermented marula fruit.

According to the Wikipedia entry on this film, some critics believe this scene was staged. It’s possible, I suppose, but I believe it’s equally likely that these creatures like their marula fruit!

(By the way, I thought the film’s style looked familiar. Sure enough: writer/director Jamie Uys also created The Gods Must Be Crazy, a film of which I have fond memories.)

I’ve read many reports of animals who love alcohol just as much as humans do. But until now, I never knew that their wild parties could lead to drunken brawls. The West Australian has a story about a herd of elephants that had a little too much beer and then went on a rampage. Here’s an excerpt:

Six Asiatic wild elephants were electrocuted as they went berserk after drinking rice beer in India’s remote northeast, a wildlife official said today [23 Oct 2007].

The 40-strong herd uprooted an electric pole while looking desperately for food on Friday in Chandan Nukat, a village nearly 240km west of Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya state, said Sunil Kumar, a state wildlife official. “There would have been more casualties had the villagers not chased them away,” said Dipu Mark, a local conservationist.

The elephants are known to have a taste for rice beer brewed by tribal communities in India’s northeast. Four wild elephants had died similarly in the region three years ago.

There’s another story of elephants raiding the liquor cabinet at the end of this piece.

[The West Australian: Drunk elephant rampage ends in death]

My friend Joel loves pigs. That’s probably putting it a little strong. Joel respects pigs and believes they’re too intelligent to eat. He refuses to eat pork products. A life without bacon isn’t something I’m ready to pursue, but I’ll grant that our porcine cousins do have a reputation for braininess.

While browsing the web recently, I stumbled upon the story of Tom and DJ:

The story of Tom and DJ is a story about animal intelligence.  It’s a story of animals making up games among themselves and having fun, even between different species.  And most importantly, they do it on their own without human direction or prodding.

Peggy Couey of Dragonwood Farm, a pig sanctuary, wrote, “Today I was able to catch a shot of my little kitten Tom (aka Tom Mix) and his brother Jerry as Tom saddled up and rode out into the sunset on DJ, one of the little piglets here.   This is an every day event here, and they both love it.  Once DJ sets off Tom sits down lower and holds on.  I didn’t get the award winning picture but I did get one before they were both full grown!”

The Dragonwood Farm link led me to Shepherd’s Green Sanctuary, a non-profit that “exists to provide rescue, lifetime care and other aid and assistance to abandoned, abused, neglected, homeless and otherwise endangered pigs.” A shelter for pigs? I never knew such a thing existed.

There’s a lot of stuff here. As you’d expect, there are pig gifts (which are not gifts for pigs, but gifts of pig-related items such as calendars). But there are also pig stories! “Read them to your children, your parents, your friends. They will make you laugh, they will make you cry and they will make you think twice about these little beings we call pigs.”

There’s a huge list of pigs, many of which have mini-biographies.

This site is like some sort of strange obsession, but I love it.

While it would be keen of me to actually post some more animal intelligence news — I have ten browser tabs open, each with a different AI story — I’ve taken the liberty of sprucing things up around here instead. The original blog template was a makeshift thing, thrown together on the spur of the moment. This new template is still rather rushed, but I think it looks sharper. Plus it has pictures of animals!

Look for actual animal stories coming soon to a blog near you…

Patrick sent me the story of Peanut the parrot, who saved the life of his family by imitating a smoke detector. Here’s the story from the Associated Press (it’s short, so I’m quoting the entire thing):

MUNCIE, Ind. - A noisy parrot that likes to imitate sounds helped save a man and his son from a house fire by mocking a smoke alarm, the bird’s owner says.

Shannon Conwell, 33, said he and his 9-year-old son fell asleep on the couch while watching a movie. They awoke about 3 a.m. Friday to find their home on fire after hearing the family’s Amazon parrot, Peanut, imitating a fire alarm.
“He was really screaming his head off,” Conwell said.

The smoke alarm had activated, but it was the bird’s call that caught Conwell’s attention.”I grabbed my son and my bird and got out of the house,” he said. The fire destroyed the home’s dining room, kitchen and bedroom, Muncie fire officials said. It remains under investigation.

Aside from Peanut, Conwell said the fact that he and his son fell asleep on the couch helped save them. They may not have heard the alarm or the bird if they were asleep in their bedrooms. Conwell said he runs an air conditioner and a breathing machine in his bedroom and they drown out a lot of noise around the house.

[MSNBC: Parrot imitates fire alarm, saves family]