On the hoof
AUTHORITIES in the US are giving free helicopter rides to hundreds of feral mountain goats, after the animals developed an insatiable thirst for human urine.
Olympic National Park in Washington state is home to about 650 of the goats, which have started to view hikers as wandering salt licks. When not approaching park visitors to lick their perspiration, the goats dig up soil that ramblers have, er, seasoned, damaging the trails in the process.
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With few natural predators in the park, and no approved contraceptive medications, there is little to control the goat population. Now rangers plan to trap as many of the animals as possible, transporting them by helicopter to nearby forests that offer a more suitable, .
A lot of bottle
THIEVES in Germany have made off with an entire vineyard鈥檚 worth of grapes, estimated to be worth 鈧�8000. Police believe the criminals ran a professional harvesting machine over the entire vineyard, according to the newspaper Die Rheinpfalz.
鈥淎 man complaining of a headache discovered he had a 48mm nail embedded in his skull. The cement plant supervisor from Chongyang, China, told doctors he had 鈥�
It鈥檚 not the first large-scale grape heist in the Rhineland-Palatinate region, famous for its Riesling, but the 1600-kilogram haul exceeds the 600 to 800 kilos of grapes stolen last year. Local vintners suspect that rivals are responsible, because of the specialised equipment required. 鈥淭he motive is jealousy,鈥� one winemaker told Die Welt newspaper. Might the culprits be suffering from sour grapes?
Who鈥檚 a clever boy?
PSYCHOLOGISTS have dropped a truth bomb on dog owners: your pooch isn鈥檛 that smart. A team (cat people, reckons Feedback) reviewed more than 300 papers on animal intelligence to compare dogs with other carnivores, social hunters and domestic animals, including cats, dolphins and pigeons.
In many cases, they concluded that experimenters had set out to prove how clever dogs are, and seen what they wanted to see. And for each ability that was claimed to be exceptional, they found at least one other animal that equalled dog performance.
鈥淭aking all three groups into account, dog cognition does not look exceptional,鈥� said Britta Osthaus of Canterbury Christ Church University in the UK. But surely this makes them Jack Russells of all trades, if master of none? Smart though dolphins may be, Feedback has yet to see one fetch the newspaper.
Make me whole again
MANY will call it 2018鈥檚 most adorable trend: 3D-printed prosthetics for injured animals. In Canada, a dachshund with cancer got a new titanium skull after a brain tumour the size of an orange grew through her original one.
And south of the border, Mr Stubbs the alligator had his tail bitten off by other alligators at an illegal facility before he was rescued. The good medics of the Phoenix Herpetological Society in Arizona fitted him with a 3D-printed tail made from a material known as 鈥渄ragon skin鈥�. Meanwhile, students at Armorel High School in Arkansas created a 3D-printed foot for Peg the duck, whose foot had been chewed off by a peckish turtle.
Feedback could not substantiate reports that a pig in the UK was given a finely crafted wooden leg after pulling the farmer鈥檚 infant son from a pond, saving him from drowning. After such heroics, the Devon farmer reportedly said, 鈥渨e couldn鈥檛 possibly eat him all at once鈥�.
Life in the slow lane
PREVIOUSLY, Feedback reported on a Japanese rail company giving staff a harrowing lesson in safety by forcing them to sit in a trench by the track as a train sped past (8 September). Peter Jacobsen writes that in Cariacica, Brazil, 鈥渁 bus company sought to sensitise its drivers to the experience of cyclists by having their drivers ride stationary bikes in the road while buses passed them鈥�.
London bus drivers, Feedback thinks, will be only too familiar with the experience of being stuck stationary in the road.
Ignoble metal
A FARMER in Michigan has discovered that a rock he was using as a doorstop is a meteorite worth up to $100,000. When he bought another farm in 1988, the previous owner told him his father had seen the stone come down from the sky in the 1930s.
After keeping it for 30 years, he brought the 10-kilogram rock to Mona Sirbescu, a geologist at Central Michigan University. She determined that it was 88 per cent iron and 12 per cent nickel 鈥� an unusually high nickel content. 鈥淲hat I was holding is a piece of the early solar system that literally fell into our hands,鈥� Sirbescu said.
The farmer, we presume, is investigating how many doorstops $100,000 could buy.
Cold caller
听
A SPATE of nuisance phone calls emanating from the Ke Kai Ola seal hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, were the work of an unlikely culprit.
Hospital director Claire Simeone was one of many who received silent calls from the centre, which she eventually traced to a gecko perched on a touchscreen telephone. Every time it moved, this four-footed telemarketer dialled numbers stored in the recent calls log.
鈥淚 had to send out a note to all of our staff and volunteers, who may have received telemarketing calls,鈥� Simeone wrote on Twitter. 鈥淚 immediately hired [the] gecko.鈥�
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