This Week in the Mercury
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Puppy / News Animals: a Bunch of Pessimists, Xenophobes, Nazis and Zombies
Posted by Kevin "the Intern" Otzenberger on Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 2:13 PM
It's our opposable thumbs that separate us from the animals, not our insecurity and bigotry. This week, for whatever reason, there seemed to be a media surge of stories about animal psychology. There's also one article about a zombie dog, and another about Shaq shopping for a tiny horse.
We learned that lemurs intentionally play nice with strangers to get over their xenophobia, (unlike Bill O'Reilly), that pessimistic dogs have increased separation anxiety, and that dogs are vulnerable to indoctrination of political ideologies, as you can see below.
We also read the nightmare tale of an 11-year-old Rottweiler that was put to sleep by its owner on Saturday, then woke up from the botched euthanasia to scare the hell out of everyone. Now, the owner is too freaked out to try putting her down again. How's that for animal psychology?
In celebrity animal news, Shaquille O'Neal and Paris Hilton both expressed interest in buying the world's smallest horse, which was born in April and now stands only 20 inches tall. Now knowing how insecure and impressionable animals are, I certainly hope the owners don't sell the little guy, so he won't grow up to add "terrible rapper" or "inexplicably famous" to this list of animal personality disorders.
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