A Malaysian woman ended up with a pet duck after buying a fertilized egg from a restaurant and using a makeshift incubator to hatch it instead of eating it.

39-year-old Erica Lim, a creative professional from Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia, recently sat down with online magazine Star2 to talk about life with a pet duck in a high-rise apartment building. She spoke about Daisy’s love of water, her friendly and adventurous nature, and how she adapted to life in the big city, but Erica’s most interesting revelation was the story of how the duck came into this world. Apparently, she was meant to be eaten as “balut”, a controversial Asian snack that consists of a cooked partially-developed duck embryo.

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A Thai marathon runner recently made international news headlines after it was reported that she ran 30km carrying a small puppy she found on the side of the road during the 42km race.

Khemjira Klongsanun was 12km into the Chombueng marathon in western Thailand, on Jan 20, when she saw a puppy dog by the side of the road. Some of the other runners ignored the adorable ball of fur, while others actually avoided it, but Khemjira stopped to check on it, thinking it had been abandoned. With no houses around that the pup might have escaped from, the marathon runner decided that this was an unsafe area for such a young, helpless animal, so she decided to pick it up and carry it all the way to the finish line. Running 30km with a puppy in your arms is harder than it sounds, the animal lover said, but it was definitely worth the effort!

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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.

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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.

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Unscooped dog poo is a problem in most urban communities around the world, but one company is offering an advanced scientific solution to crack down on offenders – testing the poo for DNA and comparing it against a database of registered community pets to track down their owners.

Lazy dog owners who don’t clean up after their pets are a bane on any community, but catching them in the act or finding proof that a certain person is to blame can be very difficult. Or at least it used to be until BioVet Laboratories launched their PooPrints service, which allows housing complexes to test unscooped poo and compare the results against a database of genetic material from dogs who live in that community. Offending owners are then tracked down and fined up to $250. BioVet Laboratories are currently working with over 3,000 housing complexes in the US, Canada and the UK.

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A young Alabama vet student was recently arrested for allegedly pulling off one of the sickest scams imaginable. She took older horses from their owners, promising that they would live out the rest of their lives in a sanctuary, but later sold them to be slaughtered.

24-year-old Fallon Blackwood used her educational background as a veterinary student to gain the trust of horse owners who could no longer take care of their older animals. She told several of her victims that she owned an 18-acre farm in Boaz, Alabama, where she could look after the elderly horses, but only if they willingly placed them in her care, as she didn’t have the money to buy them. After taking the horses off their owners’ hands, Blackwood allegedly sold them to kill-buyers to be shipped to Mexican slaughterhouses. The third-year vet student is believed to be responsible for the disappearance of nearly 50 horses.

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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.

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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.

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A Silicon Valley family was in the news recently for renting a $1,500-a-month living space for their two cats, because they didn’t get along with the dog they shared their previous home with.

David Callisch couldn’t be happier with the tenants living in the 425-square-foot studio apartment behind his house, in San Jose, California. They don’t drink, they don’t smoke and they never turn on the music too loud. That’s because Tina and Louise are two cats who live alone in the $1,500-a-month living space. Callisch planned to use it as an Airbnb, but when his friend Troy Good asked him if he could rent it from him for his daughter’s cats, he agreed. He was shocked by the request at first, but then decided he couldn’t ask for better tenants.

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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…

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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”.

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Horse races are usually all about speed, but in Ban’ei, a form of horse racing unique to the Japanese island of Hokkaidō, it’s strength and stamina that matter most.

Ban’ei race horses, also known as ‘banba’, are very different from the fast thoroughbreds we associate with horse racing. They can weigh up to 1,200 kilograms and are more than twice the size of the small dosanko horses native to Hokkaidō. These horses are crossbred descendants of workhorses imported from France and Belgium at the end of the 19th century to help farmers work their land, and are now considered a Japanese breed in their own right. Depending on their size, these strong animals can pull up to a ton of weight, and that’s exactly the kind of strength required to win the world’s slowest horse race.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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