Animal Intelligence

An Animal Intelligence reader sent this amazing story of interspecies friendship. Meet Cassie the kitten and Moses the crow:

This clip is from 1999. I wonder if there’s more information available about the pair. I haven’t been able to find any, though I did find this year-old thread at Monkeyfilter.

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Here’s an old article about a feral human from TV New Zealand.

“Chicken boy” learning to be human
A 32-year-old Fijian known as the “chicken boy” is getting help to learn how to live like a human being.
Sunjit Kumar was tied to a bed in a rest home for 20 years after being found in the middle [...]

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Someone at AskMetafilter wonders:
I’m looking for books about how people relate to animals, about people trying to make friends with animals or cross over into the world of some other species. Or for books that try to give you a view into the particular world of some other animal. The better the writing, the better. [...]

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Waiting to die: last days of the cross-bred lions too weak to eat
This is a sad, sad story.
(tags: zoos)

Shark That Walks on Fins Is Discovered - washingtonpost.com
(tags: nature science)

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Here’s some footage of clever crows in a Japanese city.

Crows are exceptionally intelligent.

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I love interspecies interaction, especially interspecies friendship. But even I am amazed by this clip.

In the end, the impala did not survive, but the hippo did its best.

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A panda at a zoo in China is inconsolable afer accidentally killing her baby.

BEIJING - Staff at a zoo in southwest China are in mourning after a sleep-deprived panda dropped her two-day-old baby and crushed it to death, local media reported on Friday.
“It was very sudden, but also unavoidable,” Guo Wei, panda department chief at [...]

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BBC News has two stories about the growing fox problem in the U.K.

From 2001, Urban fox hunt [warning: photos may be disturbing] describes how “foxes — once mostly confined to the countryside — are becoming almost as common in cities as stray cats.” Their increasing numbers are causing clashes between those who believe they’re harmless [...]

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It’s always startling to discover which celebrity deaths affect me. Ronald Reagan? “He was so old, man.” River Phoenix? Meh. But Steve Irwin, the crocodile hunter? My heart aches.
But why? I never watched anything the guy ever did. I always thought he was kind of goofy. But somewhere deep inside, I admired Irwin’s spirit, his [...]

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