I have stared at a chicken's eyes and seen and felt this stupidity Herzog is talking about...

Werner Herzog on Chickens from Tom Streithorst on Vimeo.

Chicken stupidity is so profound it's philosophical.

I've also seen a chicken run about without its head—legs, feathers, blood spurting from where the head should be. It ran perfectly well without its head. It even ran across a narrow bridge that was in my cousin's backyard. Only a fence stopped the headless bird.

The image is here.

Please help us settle a debate!

A dog inadvertently started a fire that destroyed a house early Saturday morning in Vancouver’s Sunnyside neighborhood... [T]he renter had left the dog alone in the house for the first time, and investigators believe the dog jumped up looking for food on the stove and inadvertently turned the stove on...

Speaking of American pets...

The majority of adult dogs and cats in U.S. homes are overweight or obese, and the problem has gotten worse over the past year, according to the Association for Pet Obesity Prevention. Fifty-three percent of adult dogs and 55% of cats were classified as overweight or obese by their veterinarians.

...The Association for Pet Obesity Prevention report shows not only that more pets are overweight, but also that those with the problem "are getting fatter," said Ernie Ward, the group's founder.
The annual study, to be released next week and given in advance to CNN, found that 25% of cats and just more than 21% of dogs are obese. Both those figures are up slightly from 2010.

About 41 million dogs are overweight. About 41 million dogs and 47 million cats are overweight or obese, the study found.

You know all those heartwarming stories about the loyal family dog that saves its owners from a house fire? This isn't one of them.

A dog inadvertently started a fire that destroyed a house early Saturday morning in Vancouver’s Sunnyside neighborhood, according to the Vancouver Fire Department.

... [Vancouver Fire Department Capt. David] James said the renter had left the dog alone in the house for the first time, and investigators believe the dog jumped up looking for food on the stove and inadvertently turned the stove on, which caused items on the stove to catch fire.

It turns out, according to the American Kennel Club, that "nearly 1,000 house fires each year are accidentally started by the homeowners’ pets." Who knew? Though I'm not really sure why everybody is so convinced that these fires are "accidental."

Either way, this particular dog didn't survive the fire, so it ain't talking.

This is how the bunnies roll in Sweden.

BBC:

Non-native Burmese pythons are the likely cause of a dramatic mammal decline in Florida's Everglades.

A team studied road surveys of mammals in the Everglades National Park before and after pythons became common.

Researchers found a strong link between the spread of pythons and drops in recorded sightings of racoons, rabbits, bobcats and other species.

Earlier this month, US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that the US was poised to approve a ban on importing Burmese pythons. But some observers remarked that the move was about 30 years too late.

But thanks to the largely volunteer-run and official-protocol-free rescue shelter world, it can sometimes be a total pain in the ass/kick in the face. Slate's Emily Yoffe shares some horror stories of dealing with rescue-shelter Nazis in "No Pet for You!":

Katie wrote that she wanted to adopt a retired racing greyhound but was told she was not eligible unless she already had an adopted greyhound. Julie got a no from a cat rescue because she was over 60 years old, even though her daughter promised to take in the cat if something happened to Julie. Jen Doe said her boyfriend’s family lives on fenced farm property with sheep, but they weren’t allowed to adopt a border collie—whose raison d’être is herding sheep—because the group insisted it never be allowed off-leash. Philip was rejected because he said he allowed the dog he had to sleep wherever it liked; the right answer was to have a designated sleeping area. Molly, who has rescued Great Danes for more than 30 years, was refused by a Great Dane group because of “concern about my kitchen floor.”

Read the whole thing here. (And look for the Portlandia spoof of animal-rescue idealists any second.)

From a recent Scientific American interview with the famous Dutch American primatologist Frans de Waal:

Johnson: Newt Gingrich, now a Republican candidate for President, passed your book Chimpanzee Politics to one of his aides. He apparently saw it as a treatise on human nature.

De Waal: Yes, of course Chimpanzee Politics is not about Social Darwinism or about evolutionary processes. It is really about political processes and I can see how Gingrich got carried away by that. Here in Georgia we have two politicians who are very prominent. One is Newt Gingrich and the other is Jimmy Carter. I visited Carter once and it turned out that he had read my book Peacemaking Among Primates. I always felt afterwards that they should have swapped books. Newt Gingrich should have read Peacemaking Among Primates and Jimmy Carter should have read Chimpanzee Politics. They both would have gotten more out of it.

In Northeast Seattle this morning, staff at Eckstein Middle School had to distract two dogs to stop them from attacking a bus driver on school grounds, principal Kim Whitworth explained in voice message left with parents. Listen to her message here:

.

The driver "suffered puncture wounds to his hands," Whitworth said, and school officials called police to catch the dogs. Meanwhile, the school was placed on lockdown. "Lockdown means all students and staff remain in their classrooms," she continued. I've placed a call to the school but haven't heard back.

Slog tipper I Got Nuthin' asks, "Anyone want to take a guess at what breed of dogs these were?"

From Jared Diamond's book Why is Sex Fun:

For instance, flocks of up to ten female [Wilson's Phalaropes] may pursue a male for miles. The victorious female then stands guard over her prize to ensure that only she gets to have sex with him, and that he becomes one of the males rearing her chicks.

To me, it looks like the crow is trying to stop it...

Tip from Matt Hickey

I'm impressed...

The best part is that the kid is completely oblivious to the fact that his face would be ripped to bloody shreds if not for that window:

(Thanks, Jackson!)

Historically, now is the time when you look back over the past year, think about what you've accomplished, and realize that you will never say anything more true or "right" than what I wrote in my July 26th I Love Television™ column about "weenie dogs."

Weenie dogs are clinically insane. Are sharks insane? NO. When they take a bite out of a seal, surfer, or sex-crazed teenager, it's usually because they're starving to death. Conversely, the reason weenie dogs take a bite out of people's ankles is for one of the following reasons: (1) Weenie Dog God told them to. (2) The person's ankle reminds them of a Jew. (3) They believe their teeth are miniature diamond-encrusted robots that will teleport them to weenie dog heaven if constantly coated in human blood and cat feces. In short, WEENIE DOGS ARE BATSHIT CRAZY!!

Top that in 2012. You won't be able to. Read more of my wisest quotes of the year here.

This POLAR BEAR CUB is being raised by PEOPLE—DANISH PEOPLE—and here is why, but LOOK:

WaPo:

A chimpanzee that kicked a smoking habit and used sign language to beg for candy has died at a California animal refuge.

Martine Colette of the Wildlife WayStation says Booie (BOO’-ee) was being treated for a heart condition when he died Saturday at 44. The chimp had been living at the animal sanctuary near Los Angeles since 1995, after he retired from a research lab.

The Daily Mash:

THE scientist who discovered how large birds achieve erection has urged his colleagues not to name it after him.

Professor Tom Logan, of the Insitute for Studies, said there was no reason for the process by which ostriches and other large birds pump their genitals full of lymph fluid to become known as 'getting a Logan on'.

"It is only fair that Professor Logan should now be immortalised," [said director of institute that employs Logan.] "Myself and all other leading scientists thus decree that a large, sexually-aroused male bird will henceforth be described as 'having a Logan on'. Or as having undergone 'Loganisation' in its phallus.

In the following video that is so cute I had to double up my diabetes medication, a Yorkie puppy mauls a human baby... with LOVE!!!!

Fuck everything. I'm going to kill myself.

Because the 1 percent are politically powerful and directly own or have easy access to the means of mass communication, their values (which simply justify their possession of an obscene amount of wealth) are greatly overrepresented. This overrepresentation (transmitted across the entire social field by waves of imitation—Adam Smith brilliantly discusses this deleterious form of imitation/admiration in The Theory of Moral Sentiments) distorts actual human values, which are fundamentally more social and democratic. Social change, then, can only occur if this distortion is significantly minimized or entirely eliminated.

I'm not, of course, advocating the violent removal of the 1 percent (that's playing by their game), but the recognition of the distortion. If we recognize the problem, we can resort to culture to solve it. Social problems are best corrected by cultural solutions.

That said, let's turn to a section of Frans de Waal's Our Inner Ape to see what happened to a troop of baboons when its most powerful and greedy members were suddenly eliminated....

[O]live baboons have a fierce reputation. They’re not the sort of primates one would expect to go the flower-power route, but this is exactly what happened with one troop in the Masai Mara in Kenya. Every day, males of a troop studied by American primatologist Robert Sapolsky fought their way through the territory of another troop to get access to the garbage pit of a nearby tourist lodge. Only the biggest and meanest males would make it through.

The bounty was definitely worth fighting over until the day the lodge discarded meat infected with bovine tuberculosis. It killed off all the baboons that ate it. This meant that the troop under study lost many males, and not just any males, but the most aggressive ones. As a result, the troop suddenly became an unlikely oasis of harmony and peace in the harsh world of baboons. This by itself was hardly surprising. The number of violent incidents in the troop naturally dropped after the bullies got wiped out. It became more interesting when it was discovered that this pattern was maintained for a decade, even though by then none of the troop’s original males were around anymore.

Baboon males migrate after puberty, hence fresh young males enter troops all the time. So, despite a complete turnover of males, this particular troop upheld its pacifism, tolerance, increased grooming, and exceptionally low stress levels. How the tradition had been maintained remains unclear. Female baboons stay all their lives in the same troop, so their behavior probably holds the key. Perhaps they had become selective in their acceptance of new males or managed to perpetuate the relaxed atmosphere of the early years by grooming more with males, relaxing them.