Festivus for the Rest of Us:
LOL, it gets Kramer back on strike!
Posted in Absolute Piffle on December 17, 2009 |
Posted in Identify the species, wildlife, tagged bears, sloth bear on December 17, 2009 | 3 Comments »
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:
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.
Posted in Absolute Piffle, dog domestication, wild dogs, wildlife on December 17, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Classic scene from a very strange (and controversial) movie:
The pug’s tail is very different from that of the wild dog!
Posted in wildlife, tagged hippopotamus, Jessica the Hippo, pet hippo on December 16, 2009 | 9 Comments »
Good example (and I’m NOT talking about the bull terrier):
Posted in Uncategorized on December 15, 2009 | 4 Comments »
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Posted in Identify the species, wildlife on December 15, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Posted in wild dogs, wildlife, wolves, working dogs, tagged African dogs, Ethiopian wolves, wolves on December 14, 2009 | 1 Comment »
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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