A Colorado girl named Sierra Jane Downing is out of the hospital after overcoming a bout of squirrel-borne bubonic plague—the first case in the state in six years. Upon being released, Sierra headed straight to the zoo (where, presumably, she stayed away from the pestilent rodent exhibit).
Did you know that otters can talk? They mostly speak nonsense, which might have something to do with the fact that they're raging drunks. Oh yeah, otters love the booze. That's why they're always lolling around on their backs and struggling to eat raw shellfish.
The only reservation I have about sharing this (delightful) video of a cheetah cub romping around a playroom at the Cincinnati Zoo is that cheetah cubs invariable meet horrible ends in Nat Geo documentaries, yet they're also easily the cutest animals. Ever. They have fuzz — fuzz — that literally makes them more…
This otter enjoys stacking cups. Really, it enjoys treats, which its handlers cleverly hide in the bottom of three stackable cups. Once the otter uses its comically short arms to align and stack the cups, congratulations are in order, but otters are pretty sharp and this one seems to be waiting for something cooler…
A polar bear lounges with little regard for the bustling world at the Tierpark Hagenbeck (the zoo in Hamburg, Germany) on August 19, 2012. Foto: Philipp Guelland/dapd
It's time to learn a lot of very interesting facts about baby sloths, first and foremost among which is the technical term for a baby sloth is baby sloth, or baby Megalonychidae/Bradypodidae. Excellent! Moving right along, baby sloths really like to hug, nuzzle, and generally do all of the adorable things we demand of…
Being a zookeeper is a job not without risks, but you have to imagine that the zookeeper at the Kolmården zoo in Sweden who walked into the wolf enclosure on Sunday morning did not expect that she'd end up dead. She apparently entered the enclosure around 11am, and witnesses say the wolves quickly surrounded her and…
After spending a mind-numbing 115 years in captivity together, two giant turtles at an Austrian zoo have abruptly split up, distressing zookeepers and proving that it's never too late to grow tired as fuck with a romantic partner's incessant mouth-breathing.
If you've ever been to the dismal peep show of incarcerated animals we as a culture innocuously call the "zoo," then you've probably locked eyes with a majestic wild creature and detected a yearning for the open plains or sweltering jungles of that creature's origin, and realized that, because humans devastate the…
Earlier this week a zookeeper at Wuhan Zoo in China named Zhang Bangsheng put his tongue to work in a most unpleasant way to help a small monkey in need. The monkey, a Francois' langur, is just three months old and is a very rare specimen. Thus, he's worth going the extra mile for. (Not that all monkeys aren't worth…
Sometimes it becomes really clear that all mammals (except those shiftless marsupials) are pretty much on the same wavelength when it comes to playtime, the most adorable time in the animal kingdom. I'm not saying that mollusks, however, aren't also fond of some wholesome recreational activity — after all, some of…
Three months or so ago, reports began to surface that a sheep and a deer were carrying on a love affair at a Chinese zoo. Well, yesterday, they "decided" to make it official, and got married in a Valentine's Day wedding ceremony at the zoo. The male sheep, who's called Long Hair, and the female deer, Pure Child,…
Sure, people wear those animal slippers as a goof, but did you ever think that one of the actual animals would be able to recognize the slippers as the dismembered feet of one of their friends? Be honest: you did not. And yet, here is a tiger trying admirably to steal a girl's tiger slippers. Oooh, what if the giant…
In a nice turn of events (for once!), last night an adorable squirrel monkey who'd been stolen from the San Francisco Zoo was returned to his owners unharmed after missing for two days. The monkey, whose name is Banana Sam (which might be the perfect monkey name) was "hungry, trembling and thirsty" when he was…
Today, in a special North Pole edition of the internet's most adorable animals, we have an astonishingly sweet polar bear cub. His name is Siku, and he is being hand-raised at a zoo in Denmark because his mother couldn't produce milk for him. He's only a month old and, thus, needs 24-hour care. Luckily, he has a…
Say it isn't so! Pedro and Buddy, The Toronto Zoo's male African penguins whose companionship gave us something both happy and animal-related to fixated on, have broken up. Cue Adele.
Here's a penguin tale that will never make it into a Disney move for a variety of reasons: Buddy and Pedro, a pair of male African penguins have found love at the Toronto Zoo, but the zoo plans to separate them. Zookeepers say the birds, "do courtship and mating behaviors that females and males would do,'' and "seem…
Kandula the elephant is being called a "giant genius." And he does seem pretty clever! He lives in an enclosure at the Smithsonian National Zoo, where jerky researchers put bamboo and fruit just out of his reach. Kandula was smart enough to push a cube over and use it as a step. And when they took away the cube, he…
A deadly Egyptian cobra has escaped from its cage (god, did I ever want to type "lair" right there. Snake houses should be called "lairs," right? It seems almost disrespectful to apply the term "cage," which is where a hamster or a rabbit lives, to where a deadly Egyptian cobra lives. But I digress) at the Bronx Zoo,…
[China, February 20: Zoo-keepers dressed up as giant pandas attempt to put Cao Gen the panda cub into a basket. The panda was released into the wild on Sunday as part of a program to work towards the training of pandas to live independently in the wild. Image via Getty.]
