But it was certainly an ‘incredible journey’ for Mason, the plucky pup who crawled home on two broken legs after a tornado tossed him up and left him for dead.
The scrappy dog had been hiding in a garage in North Smithfield, Alabama, when the storm hit on April 27.
It whipped through the community, destroying houses and uprooting trees, but when it had passed Mason was nowhere to be seen.
His family had all but given up hope when two weeks later they returned home to sift through belongings only to find the dog on their doorstep.
All animals have all the instincts/emotions like us.
We , in our arrogance, think that we alone have these,
Who knows, they may in all probability, have a mind of their own, if not better than ours.
Story:
If your dog destroys the furniture when you are away, it could be a pessimist, researchers have concluded.
A study has found that some dogs are natural gloom-mongers while others have sunnier dispositions.
“We know that people’s emotional states affect their judgments and that happy people are more likely to judge an ambiguous situation positively,” said professor Mike Mendl, an author of the study and head of animal welfare and behavior at Bristol University.
“What our study has shown is that this applies similarly to dogs.”
To measure canine psychology, researchers trained dogs to recognize that bowls on one side of a room contained food, while bowls on the other side were empty. They then placed the bowls in “neutral” locations between the two sides.
Just as happy people tend to see the positive in any situation, so optimistic dogs sprinted toward the bowl, expecting to find food, while pessimistic dogs hesitated or ran more slowly.
The study, published in Current Biology, which looked at 24 dogs at two UK animal centers, found that dogs’ temperaments correlated with their behavior when separated from their owners.
Dogs that saw the bowl as half-full were calmer when left alone, sure their owners would return, while pessimistic dogs were more likely to worry, bark and misbehave.
About half of the 10 million dogs in the United Kingdom show “separation-related behavior” at some point, Mendl said.
Instead of getting rid of anxious dogs or ignoring them, owners should recognize that their dogs may have emotional issues and seek treatment for them, he said.
(Reporting by Anna Yukhananov; Editing by Steve Addison)
Nintendo launched the DSi XL with the purpose of attracting elderly consumers with bad vision, gamers who sought a portable reading device, and people who wanted to play with the handheld in social settings. But there’s a new market segment that also seems interested – gorillas.
So this little boy was just walking around the San Francisco zoo, doing what every boy who is dragged to the zoo tends to do – play video games – when he accidentally dropped his DSi XL into the gorilla habitat. And wouldn’t you know it, a professional photographer happened to be right there.
Still photos and video capture a large gorilla that found the DSi, picked it up and started trying to figure out how the darn thing worked. At one point a smaller gorilla came up to take a look, just like the jealous kids on the elementary school playground.
After reportedly being unable to figure out the confusing friend code system, the gorilla knocked it around and eventually lost interest.
The boy got his system back when a trainer lured the gorilla with an apple and was able to snatch the device out of the gorilla’s hands. It then grabbed a princess and jumped up a tower of ladders and construction beams before throwing down barrels of oil.
Although the DSi was pretty beaten up, the rigorous inspection didn’t stop it from working. It turned right back on and the boy was able to continue his game, which unfortunately was most likely not this one. So congratulations, DSi XL, you have officially passed the American Tourister test. It seems Nintendo hasn’t gone astray from its history of extreme durability.
There’s more to an innocent game of tag than meets the eye. When gorillas play the playground favourite, it teaches them a valuable life lesson about unfairness, social boundaries and retaliation. That, at least, is the conclusion of the first study to observe the primates’ reactions to inequity outside a controlled laboratory setting.
Young gorillas often engage in play fights that resemble what children do in a game of tag: one youngster will run up to another and hit it, then run away. The other gorilla then gives chase and hits the first one back (see video, above).
A man who survived a terrifying crocodile attack when he jumped into its enclosure in Broome on Monday night believed he might die when it closed its jaws over his leg.
Michael Newman, 36, of Perth, denied he was drunk when he scaled the fence at Malcolm Douglas’ crocodile park in Cable Beach and climbed into a pen, hoping to pat and sit on one of the beasts.
He said as the crocodile, “Fatso”, took hold of his leg, he grabbed hold of the fence with both hands.
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