A Riverside County animal control officer was hospitalized Monday after suffering punctures and lacerations to his leg following an attack by two pit bulls, officials said.

Officer Michael Cox responded to a call in the 2500 block of Mount Vernon Avenue in Riverside around 11:20 a.m., regarding a complaint from a property owner claiming four dogs were on his vacant, fenced property, Riverside County Animal Services said in a news release.

The dogs appeared to be friendly at first but then one of them bit Cox’s right leg, according to the agency. A second dog then joined in the attack.

Both dogs involved were described as adult pit bulls.

The officer retreated while using his retractable containment baton and pepper spray, the agency said. Once he reached safety, he contacted an Animal Services dispatcher who informed the Riverside Fire Department.

Firefighters bandaged Cox’s leg and transported him to a local

While the prevailing belief is that wildlife should stay in the wild, at least one respected biologist thinks that allowing us to keep Australian animals as pets could help their chances of survival.

A paleontologist at the University of New South Wales, Mike Archer, told Geoff Hutchison of ABC Radio Perth that not allowing the public to keep native animals as pets was “potentially a passport to extinction”.

Only South Australia and Victoria permit the keeping of native animals as house pets, and Professor Archer said that if it were more common there would be greater interest in saving them.

“You wouldn’t be interfering with what’s happening to them in

That honeybee study raised eyebrows, not just because it showed that an animal with fewer than one million neurons in its brain (compared with the human brain’s 86 billion) could treat zero as a quantity, but because bees and mammals diverged in evolution 600 million years ago. Their last common ancestor “was [barely] able to perceive anything,” Avarguès-Weber said, much less count. According to Nieder, who was not involved with the insect work, this implied that the ability to grasp the empty set and other numerosities evolved independently in the two lineages.

“A whole different neural substrate … produced such high-level cognitive capacity,” said HaDi MaBouDi, a cognitive scientist at the University of Sheffield in England. Unfortunately, researchers have so far been unable to study the neural activity of honeybees as they perform numerical tasks, making it difficult to compare their representations of zero with those of monkeys. To

Ministers have opened the door to expanding the use of animal testing to ingredients used in cosmetic products for the first time in 23 years, an animal welfare charity has said.

Cruelty Free International (CFI) said animal testing on ingredients exclusively used in cosmetics – which was banned in the UK in 1998 – could be required, after being told by the Home Office that the government had “reconsidered its policy.”

In a letter, the government said it was aligning itself with a decision made last year by the appeals board of the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), which said that some ingredients used only in cosmetics needed to be tested on animals to ensure they were safe.

The Home Office insisted that UK law on animal testing had not changed, but campaigners warned that accepting the ECHA’s ruling could lead to a much wider use of animal testing.

The ECHA

Encounters with coyotes in cities across Canada appear to be more frequent these days. Starling incidents with the animals have made headlines around the world, such as the case of Macy the Yorkie, who ended up in ICU after trying to protect her 10-year-old owner from an attack in a Toronto neighbourhood. When a Global News crew came to interview the young girl, the same coyote appeared on camera chasing another neighbour.

Meanwhile, Vancouver’s Stanley Park has been the scene of a number of attacks in recent months, including one involving a two-year-old girl, which resulted in a trip to hospital, a female jogger, and a woman who was attacked from behind by the animal. The incidents led to a cull of four coyotes in the park, using soft-foot hold traps.

Are coyote attacks really on the rise in Canada?

Simon Gadbois, an ethologist at Dalhousie University who’s studied wild

Some tiny birds take bold risks to gather a beakful of hair for their nests. Titmice have been spotted dive-bombing cats, alighting on dozing predators’ backs and plucking strands of hair from people’s heads. Now, there’s a term for the unusual behavior: kleptotrichy.

Derived from the Greek words for “to steal” and “hair,” kleptotrichy has rarely been described by scientists, but dozens of YouTube videos capture the behavior, researchers report online July 27 in Ecology. Titmice — and one chickadee — have been caught on video tugging hair from dogs, cats, humans, raccoons and even a porcupine.

“Citizen scientists, bird watchers and people with dogs knew this behavior much more than the scientists themselves,” says animal behaviorist Mark Hauber of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Popular observations precede science rather than the other way around, which is a valid way to do science.”

CNN
—  

Poppy, a young golden retriever, was found wandering the streets north of Shanghai before she was rescued and brought to the US.

Claire Mracek and her family were mourning the loss of their child before Poppy came into their lives and provided joy and comfort. But now, a recent ban by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the import of dogs from more than 100 countries where rabies is a problem, means dogs like Poppy can no longer be brought in from China.

“Our rescuer was able to pick Poppy up before she was shot,” said Stephanie Kenney, director of intake with Adopt A Golden Atlanta. Poppy was then thoroughly checked

Animal rescuer and cinematographer Douglas Thron’s passion for animals began when he was a little kid. “I started rescuing orphaned baby animals,” Thron tells Yahoo Life. “And I wanted to be a wildlife cinematographer.”

When Thron grew up, he did just that, working as a cinematographer for shows like Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week,” filming the Great White sharks off the coast of Santa Cruz, Calif., along with doing aerial cinematography for NatGeo. But Thron says it was the Paradise fire in California in 2018 that “pushed” him to do animal rescue activism work, putting his aerial cinematography skills to good use.

At the time, Thron was working as a cinematographer filming a man who was rescuing cats after the fire using an infrared handheld camera. The camera uses heat to detect the animals at night. Thron and the man talked about how incredible it would be to put one

At the peak of the whaling industry, in the late 1800s, North Atlantic right whales were slaughtered in their thousands. With each carcass hauled on to the deck, whalers were taking more than just bones and flesh out of the ocean. The slaughtered whales had unique memories of feeding grounds, hunting techniques and communication styles; knowledge acquired over centuries, passed down through the generations, and shared between peers. The critically endangered whale clings on, but much of the species’ cultural knowledge is now extinct.

Whales are among the many animals known to be highly cultural, says Prof Hal Whitehead, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University. “Culture is what individuals learn from each other, so that a bunch of individuals behave in a similar way,” he says.