Getting a house cat to exercise can be quite a challenge, but a Korean company claims that it’s smart exercise machine can keep felines in tip-top shape even when their owners are away. There’s just one catch – it costs $1,800. Korean startup Pet Ding unveiled its smart treadmill for cats earlier this month, at CES Las Vegas. The Little Cat relies on LED lights to motivate cats to exercise, allows owners to check on the cat’s activity when they’re away and record encouragement voice messages for their pet, and a companion app lets users set fitness goals for their purring felines. The smart exercise machine features an auto mode that promises to “provide the ideal workout program for your cat, and manage workout patterns,” but also lets users who want to get more involved in their cat’s workout control the speed of the treadmill. Read More »

Scamp, an English springer spaniel sniffer dog, is so good at his job that criminal organizations have put a sizable reward on his head. During his five-year career as a sniffer dog for BWY Canine, in Pembrokeshire, UK, Scamp managed to detect around £6m ($7.8 million) worth of illegal tobacco, causing significant headaches for criminal organizations specialized in tobacco smuggling. But while Scamp’s powerful sense of smell has earned him praises from both his handler and police, it also made him a target for the nasty people whose plans he keeps foiling. According to Stuart Philips, who runs the BWY specialist detection dog service, Scamp has a bounty on his head. Read More »

Betsy, a 3-year-old cow that escaped six months ago, during the annual rodeo in Anchorage, Alaska, has been roaming the outskirts of the city ever since, despite her owner’s best efforts to capture her. Betsy the cow slipped out of her pen amid the bustle of the annual Anchorage rodeo last year, and headed right for Far North Bicentennial Park, a 4,000-acre forest on the outskirts of the Alaskan city. Cowboys saddled their horses and went after Betsy as soon as they noticed she was gone, but it was too late. She made it to the forest and she’s been enjoying her freedom for the last six months, despite her owner’s attempts to catch her. Read More »

AJ Nirvana Battle, a three-year-old Afghan hound from China is the canine version of a fashion model. He’s got a slender physique, loves posing for pictures and he has the most incredible hair. Looking at AJ Nirvana Battle and his luxurious locks, it’s easy to see why he turns heads wherever his owner takes him. But his impeccable looks aren’t all natural. Kevin Chan, a Beijing-based marketing director, spends six to eight hours bathing and grooming him every seven to ten days, and doesn’t mind spending big money on the best grooming equipment and hair products. He claims to have spent around 100,000 yuan ($15,000) on grooming tools for his three-year-old pooch, and spends another 1,000 yuan ($150) on bathing products every week. That’s a lot of money, but Chan says it’s worth it, as he considers Battle a member of the family. Read More »

Cats from the Selkirk Rex breed are known to be friendly, playful and even cuddly, but you really couldn’t tell by looking at Pompous Albert. His constantly frowned face makes him look like the angriest, most unfriendly cat in the world, but it’s also the source of his incredible online popularity. Pompous Albert became an Instagram sensation shortly after his owners set up his own account, in 2014. Just a year later, he already had over 40,000 fans who couldn’t get enough of his permanent “resting bitch face”, and today, his fan count on the popular social network stands at an impressive 228,000. He’s been featured on hundreds of major internet platforms like BuzzFeed and People Magazine, landed commercial deals with Honda, and is richer and more famous than most humans. It’s actually hard to believe Pompous Albert started out as a rejected show cat… Read More »

30-year-old Melody Hames has been clipping horses for over two decades, and it shows. Today she is credited for turning horse clipping into an art form. Hames started clipping horses when she was 9-years-old, and really got into it by clipping her pet Connermara pony who suffered from cushings disease, a condition that caused it to have a thick woolly coat that didn’t change in the warmer season. She did traditional clipping for a long time, but having always had a passion for the arts, and getting requests for custom artistic clipping from clients, Melody Hames started unleashing her creativity on the horses coats and soon became known as “The Horse Barber”. Read More »

The Lion House is a unique rentable property in South Africa that allows tourists to spend their vacation in the middle of a nature reserve, surrounded by 77 adult lions. Imagine going to sleep to the sound of lion roars, knowing that the only thing standing between you and dozens of predators is an electrified fence. If that sounds like the kind of thing you’ve always dreamed of, you’d better start saving for a stay at the Lion House, a special three-bedroom house located in the middle of a wildlife sanctuary in Harrismith, South Africa. It doesn’t feature many of the amenities you’d expect to find in a place that costs over $100 a night to rent, like TV or air-conditioning, but it does offer something very few, if any, other places around the world have – lions, 77 of them to be exact. Read More »

S Legend, a red and white Koi Carp bred in Japan became the most expensive live fish ever sold, after fetching a mind-blowing price of 203 million yen ($1.8 million), more than $1.3 million more than the previous record. The 101cm-long Koi Carp from the highly-regarded Kohaku variety was bought by a collector from Japan after a fierce bidding war  at the Saki Fish farm in the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The female carp won first prize at the prestigious All Japan Koi Show last year, and is expected to bag her second title this year, which greatly increased collectors’ interest. Fans and collectors of Koi carp are now expected to travel from all over the world to catch a glimpse of the most expensive fish ever sold. Read More »

They’ve been called the “world’s most beautiful cats”, and they’ve been mesmerizing social media users with their heterochromatic eyes for the past couple of years. They are Iriss and Abyss, the feline twins taking Instagram by storm. Iriss and Abyss have nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram who love nothing more than to watch the two gorgeous white cats show off their differently colored eyes. Many of their fans are convinced that the two are pure-bred Angora or Turkish Van specimens, but they are in fact cross-bred from a white domestic cat and a black and white cat, and owe their social-media fame to winning the genetic lottery. Their Russian owner says that the fact that the two felines were born with white coats and heterochromatic eyes – yellow and the other one blue – is nothing short of a natural miracle. Read More »

Kanathip Nathip, a 53-year-old man from Phitsanulok, Thailand,  never has to worry about locking the door of his home whenever he goes out, as anyone foolish enough to try and rob it would get the surprise of a lifetime. The Thai man shares his house with a full grown crocodile that’s free to move around as he pleases and doesn’t take kindly to uninvited guests. Nathip got the crocodile 20 years ago, as a pet for his two children. He had taken them to a crocodile farm in Nakorn Sawan and they loved the reptiles so much that he ended up buying not one but two of them. At first both Thong (Gold) and Ngern (Silver) lived in the family home, but as time went by, it became clear that Ngern wasn’t meant to be a house pet, so they built a small pond in the yard and moved him there. Thong, on the other hand, seemed much more comfortable in the house, so he’s been living there for the past two decades. Even though Nathip’s two sons have grown up and moved out of the house, the 53-year-old still has Thong, who he considers his third son. Read More »

Storm, an eight-year-old Haflinger mare from the Netherlands, has become a star on social media networks like Instagram thanks to her long, wavy locks. 24-year-old student and entrepreneur Naomi Beckers bought Storm from her previous owner two years ago after falling in love with her incredible hair, which interestingly, closely resembles her own blonde, curly locks. The gorgeous mare hand’t had her hair cut since she was only two-years-old, and she already had a decent number of social media fans when Naomi got her. So she decided to set up a new Instagram account where Storm’s human admirers could follow her progress, but never imagined it would become so popular. Storm’s Instagram now has nearly 35,000 followers, making her one of the most popular horses on the photo-sharing social network. Read More »

When it comes to the art of camouflage, few creatures can match Uropyia meticulodina, a small moth capable of mimicking a dead, curled up leaf almost to perfection. From a mantis that mimics a harmless orchid to attract prey, to a caterpillar that looks like a snake to fend off predators and birds camouflaged as toxic caterpillars, we’ve featured some truly impressive natural mimics in the past, but the Uropyia meticulodina moth may just be the best one yet. Its resemblance to a dead leaf curled round in on itself complete with tiny leaf-like veins is just uncanny. If not for video evidence that this moth is real, I could have sworn it was just the work of a skilled image editing artist. Read More »

The Amazon rainforest is home to many frightening creatures, like giant Anacondas, flesh-eating piranhas, just to name a couple, and now you can add a new one to the list, a species of wasp that lays its eggs on the abdomen of spiders and then hijacks their brain, essentially turning them into zombies. The previously unknown wasp of the Zatypota genus was discovered by researchers with the University of British Columbia (UBC) working in the Ecuadorian Amazon basin. They documented its symbiotic relationship with a species of so called “social spiders” and recently published some truly terrifying findings in the Ecological Entomology scientific journal. This newly discovered wasp is apparently able to hijack the nervous system of its host, forcing it to leave its colony, which it otherwise rarely does, protect the wasps larva and ultimately get eaten alive. It essentially turns the social spider into a zombie-like drone that then does the wasp’s bidding. Read More »

Dozens of families in and around the city of Cairns, in Australia, have been forced to temporarily abandon their homes after flying foxes started dropping dead on their properties due to the unbearable heat. Cairns residents started reporting massive numbers of spectacled flying foxes dropping out of trees on Monday, when temperatures in Australia’s Queensland region rose to above 40 degrees Celsius. According to animal experts, the nocturnal mammals cannot sustain an internal temperature of over 40 degrees, and with no way to cool off, their organs start to shut down and they eventually die. Wildlife rescuers have been working around the clock, using using spray bottles and drippers too cool off and hydrate the helpless creatures, but there’s only so much they can do. The flying fox colonies in the Cairns area have already sustained heavy losses and the number of fatalities is expected to rise for as long as the heatwave continues. But apart from the environmental issues, the massive number of dead bats rotting away so close to people’s houses has now become a become a serious public health issue as well. Read More »

Photos of a giant black and white bovine towering over other cows have been doing the rounds online for the last couple of days, making people do a double take. The animal looks so huge that you really couldn’t blame the many people claiming that the photos are photoshopped, but they’re wrong. He’s just Knickers the giant bull that’s too big for slaughter. Knickers, a 194cm-tall, 1,400kg-heavy Holstein Friesian steer, became the talk of the internet these last couple of days after photos of him towering over a heard of Wagyu cows on a farm in Myalup, Australia went viral. He looked so big compared to the other cattle that a lot of people started questioning if he was  real, or just the result of photo editing. But then videos showing this bovine giant in all his glory started showing up online, and there was no more room for doubt. Yes, Knickers is just that big, in fact, he is believed to be the biggest steer in Australia, a country home to millions of cattle. Read More »