Category Archives: Animals

Wild ways: how readers have been helping wildlife in their gardens

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From digging ponds to planting pollinators, Guardian readers have been bringing out the best in nature

Inspired by the story of the hedgehog highways in an English village and impressed by the contributions to our urban wildlife gallery, we asked Guardian readers to tell us what they have been doing to help wildlife in their gardens in 2020. Gardens are important habitats for small mammals, songbirds and insects and gardening in a wildlife-friendly way can make a massive difference in counteracting biodiversity loss. As always, the response was amazing, with readers from the UK, Australia, the US and Mexico sharing their innovations. Here are the best of them.

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Australia’s grumpy cat: shelter staff bent on finding ‘demonic’ Chester a home

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South Australian eight-year-old has lived in four homes already, but RSPCA says it’s about knowing how to handle him

Returned to the RSPCA by four different families in the past seven years, “demonic” Chester may be the least-loved cat in Australia, but workers at the shelter are still determined to find him a home for Christmas.

The grumpy eight-year-old moggie was described by his last owner as “anti-social” and “a real Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”. On his surrender form, the former owner wrote that while Chester was “great with chickens” and “tolerates the dogs”, he also “attacks our old cat and the neighbours”. She told the RSPCA that she had visitors who would not enter the house unless the cat was locked away.

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‘He’s the deer of the year’: Carrot on way to recovery after arrow pulled from head

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  • Whitetail deer made headlines last week for shocking injury
  • Carrot seen alive days after delicate operation to remove arrow

The last thing Carrot the deer probably wanted in 2020 was a hole in his head.

But the Canadian whitetail deer which made headlines last week for his shocking injury no longer has an arrow impaling his head.

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Global food industry on course to drive rapid habitat loss – research

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World faces huge wildlife losses by 2050 unless what and how food is produced changes

The global food system is on course to drive rapid and widespread ecological damage with almost 90% of land animals likely to lose some of their habitat by 2050, research has found.

A study published in the journal Nature Sustainability shows that unless the food industry is rapidly transformed, changing what people eat and how it is produced, the world faces widespread biodiversity loss in the coming decades.

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‘The platypuses were glowing’: the secret light of Australia’s marsupials

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The discovery that bilbies, bandicoots, Tasmanian devils and echidnas emit bio-fluorescence under UV light has sparked the burning question. Why?

Dr Kenny Travouillon turned off the lights and headed straight for the shelf holding the stuffed platypus, armed with an ultraviolet torch to test something out. Would the monotreme glow?

“All the platypuses were glowing,” says Travouillon, the mammals curator at the Western Australian Museum in Perth. “We went through with other mammals and we found they were glowing too.”

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Sea turtle filmed defending itself from tiger shark attack off WA coast – video

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A flatback sea turtle has been filmed defending itself from a tiger shark attack off the Western Australia coast. A team of researchers at Murdoch University’s Harry Butler Institute and Western Australia’s Department of Biodiversity, Conservation & Attractions captured the vision after mounting a camera on the turtle's shell during a project at Roebuck Bay. Despite the mismatch in size, the turtle uses aggressive biting lunges at the shark before making a hasty escape to safety 

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Carrot the deer found in Ontario with arrow sticking out of his head

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Wildlife photographer Lee-Anne Carver is trying to share Carrot’s plight in hopes of saving injured deer

The Canadian winter can be tough for deer, as temperatures plummet and food becomes scarce. But Carrot, a whitetail buck living in northern Ontario, faces an additional challenge: he has an arrow sticking out of his head.

“It’s been really tough to see,” said Lee-Anne Carver, a wildlife photographer in the city of Kenora, who named the young animal. “I’ve been photographing animals for years and there’s something special about Carrot. He’s unlike any deer I’ve ever met.”

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‘I lost all sense of perspective!’ The broadcaster whose dogs became superstars

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Millions of frustrated sports fans began following Andrew Cotter’s ultra-competitive labradors Olive and Mabel in the first lockdown. Has it changed the trio’s lives?

Did anyone convey the topsy-turvy world of pandemic life better than two ultra-competitive labradors? When the first lockdown was announced back in March and sports events were cancelled across the country, the Scottish commentator Andrew Cotter found himself staring at a grim year ahead. And so he decided to simply continue commentating … on his dogs.

“You can feel the tension,” he said in his soothing soft Scottish accent, over a video of his dogs, Olive and Mabel, racing to empty their bowls. “Olive focused, relentless, tasting absolutely nothing.”

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‘What’s that Skip?’ Researchers say kangaroos can communicate with people

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Study shows animals with no long history of domestication show patterns of interaction with humans similar to that of dogs or horses

The classic TV show Skippy, about a child speaking with a highly intelligent kangaroo, might not be as fictional as we once thought, according to Australian and UK researchers.

A study from the University of Sydney and the University of Roehampton in London suggests that kangaroos are capable of intentionally communicating with humans, suggesting a higher level of cognitive function than previously thought.

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Cher at 74: ‘There are 20-year-old girls who can’t do what I do’

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Her $60m annual Las Vegas residency was off the cards this year, but the singer still has lots to say about animal rights, Trump’s ‘toxic’ politics, cosmetic surgery and the men in her life

The Goddess of Pop is in town. And what an entrance she makes. Two-tone black-and-white beret, matching jacket, skinny jeans, black boots, black mask, and an elephant-shaped knuckle-duster. She looks the ultimate in revolutionary chic – Cher Guevara. She is not in London to promote a record (100m sold and counting) or a film (she won the best actress Oscar in 1988 for Moonstruck); she is here to talk about rescuing the world’s loneliest elephant from a zoo in Pakistan and flying him to a sanctuary in Cambodia. Cherilyn Sarkisian, aged 74, has never been predictable.

We meet in a London hotel, close to the BBC’s Broadcasting House, where she has been eulogising elephants. She is masked, I am masked, and we sit at opposite ends of the room. It’s such a strange world we’re living in, I say – how are you coping? And she is straight off into a turbo-charged rant. “How am I taking it? There are no words that describe it. And in my country the president doesn’t believe it has anything to do with him. He doesn’t think he has any responsibility to help us.”

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Origin story: what do we know now about where coronavirus came from?

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When Chinese scientists alerted colleagues to a new virus last December, suspicion fell on a Wuhan market. What have health officials learned since then?

Maria van Kerkhove was staying with her sister in the US for the Christmas holidays, but checking her emails. As always. Every day there are signals of potential trouble, said the World Health Organization virologist who was to become a household name and face within weeks.

“There’s always something that happens at Christmas time. There’s always some alert, or a signal of a suspected case. The last several years it’s been Mers [Middle East respiratory syndrome] – a suspect case travelling to Malaysia or Indonesia or Korea or somewhere in Asia from the Middle East. So there’s always some kind of signal. There’s always something that happens,” she said.

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‘Covid-19 has an odour, and the dogs are detecting it’: meet the canine super-squad sniffing out the virus

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They’re loyal, diligent – and have unbeatable noses. Could dogs play a key part in the fight against the pandemic?

A single-storey building in a lonely rural business park, a few miles from Milton Keynes on a grey autumn day. It looks like a location for a bleak thriller: where a kidnap victim is held, perhaps, or the scene of a final shootout. Inside, though, something kind of cool is happening.

In a brightly lit room, four inverted metal cups have been placed on the red carpet, each containing a small glass jar. One of these contains a smell: a “training odour”. Into the room bursts Billy, followed by Jess. Billy is a labrador, and Jess his human trainer. Billy bounces about the place, clearly super excited. He sniffs at everything – furniture, people, the cups – wagging ferociously. When he sniffs at the cup that contains the smell, another trainer, Jayde, indicates success with a clicking noise. Billy is rewarded with his favourite toy, a well-chewed rubber ball, and a chorus of “good boy”.

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Masked Horses: photographs by Tim Flach

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Wildlife photographer Tim Flach’s series Masked Horses speaks to the role of the horse as a companion to humankind over the ages. A disguise, or a protection the images reflect on our current pandemic. Flach’s animal photographs have often been likened to classical portraiture and his portraits of horses wearing gas masks, head protectors, equine inhalers and blindfolds are both captivating and disturbing

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Rats besiege New York Chipotle, eating avocados and attacking staff

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Rodents were so brazen that the Upper West Side location closed after the wiring systems were chewed through

As columnist Mary Schmich once said, in life, there are certain inalienable truths: prices will rise, politicians will philander, and – I’m going to add one – you can always count on New York for a good old rat story.

Today that story is of the Upper Manhattan Chipotle food chain rats, who have been feasting on avocados and burritos – and, by the sounds of it – disturbed staff.

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The Wolf Dividing Norway: the hunter v the environmentalist

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With unique access to remote communities in the snow-capped landscape of Norway, this film follows characters on either side of a fierce debate on whether to cull the wolf population. For decades the topic has split political parties, families and communities across the country, with environmentalists world-wide criticising Norway for how it handles its tiny population of critically endangered wolves. Here, a group of hunters await news from the government on whether their yearly hunt will be permitted, while the environmentalists anticipate the worst. With angry threats on both sides, the film takes a deep dive into what’s at stake for both groups, as well as the wider world

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Sexy beasts: animals with ‘charisma’ get lion’s share of EU conservation funds

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Analysis shows invertebrates are overlooked in favour of mammals and birds despite vital role in healthy ecosystems

Money made available for wildlife conservation by the EU is based on a popularity contest, with vertebrates getting nearly 500 times more funding for each species than invertebrates, according to a new report.

Brown bears, wolves, bitterns and Eurasian lynxes are the Hollywood stars of European conservation and receive almost the same amount as all invertebrates put together, according to analysis of funding under the EU’s Habitats Directive. This leaves little for less charismatic creatures such as spiders and crustaceans, many of which are crucial to ecosystem health and at greater risk of extinction, the study found.

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Trump fails to disrupt ‘panda diplomacy’ as China’s famed bears remain at US zoo

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The Smithsonian national zoo’s three giant pandas will stay in Washington for another three years, upholding a decades-long tradition

Donald Trump may have done his best to disrupt Washington’s relations with Beijing, but at least Americans will still be able to enjoy the original bonus of more open links with China: giant pandas.

Ever since Richard Nixon welcomed the gift of the animals when he “opened up” China in the early 70s, panda diplomacy has loomed large in relations between the two countries.

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Family in South Australia find live koala in their Christmas tree

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When the McCormicks came home on Wednesday, the Christmas tree in their Adelaide house had acquired a new ornament

The McCormicks went for a silver, pink and blue theme on their Christmas tree. The old plastic leaves were worn but looked beautiful with baubles on each branch and twinkling lights.

But this year the family tree included one very unexpected ornament: a wild – and somewhat confused – juvenile koala.

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Cher greets ‘world’s loneliest elephant’ in Cambodia

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US star joined campaign for Kaavan to be moved from Islamabad zoo accused of substandard care

An elephant described as the “world’s loneliest” has landed in Cambodia after a seven-hour flight from Pakistan, receiving a warm welcome from Cher, who will accompany him to a sanctuary housing potential mates.

The case of Kaavan – an overweight, 36-year-old bull elephant – prompted global uproar from animal rights groups, who petitioned for him to be moved from an Islamabad zoo accused of substandard care and conditions.

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Denmark could dig up and cremate mink killed in Covid cull

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Fears nitrogen and phosphorus could be released in large quantities into soil at grave sites

Denmark’s government is considering exhuming and cremating the remains of millions of culled mink after decaying carcasses started to emerge from a hastily dug grave.

After a mutated version of Covid-19 was found in the animals, the prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, announced a cull in early November of the estimated 15-17 million mink in Denmark, the world’s biggest exporter of mink fur.

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