Talented Animals

I’ve already covered animals who paint. But today I want to talk about other extremely talented animals. And its all in honour of a border collie called Gin.

Any non-UK readers (and to be honest probably quite a few British readers) won’t have the faintest idea who Gin is.

Well, Gin (and owner Kate) are finalists in tomorrow’s Britain’s Got Talent. And if there is any justice in the world they will win the £10 000 prize money and the chance to perform at the Royal Variety Performance*. So get voting!

But, my all time favourite talented animal was a horse named Clever Hans.

When talking and writing about Clever Hans the first thing animal behaviourists and historians will say is: “Oh, Clever Hans! He turned out not to be so clever after all”.

Read his story and decide if you think Clever Hans was clever or not.

Clever Hans was a popular attraction in Germany, where he appeared to be able to solve maths problems, read and generally demonstrate himself to be smarter than the average horse.

The psychologist Oskar Pfungst was unconvinced, and in his role as a 1900s James Randi he undertook a scientific investigation into Hans and his alleged intelligence.

He found no fraud. But Pfungst concluded that, far from performing these intellectual tasks himself, Hans was in fact responding to subconscious clues from the people around him.

This is the point where people say Hans wasn’t so clever. But I have to say I think he was robbed! He may not have been actually doing maths problems, but he was picking up on subtle clues. Similarly, Gin (much as I love him) is not actually dancing in time to the music – he’s picking up on clues from his owner (who seems a pretty good dancer herself).

Anyway, Pfungst’s research remains important today. Especially, in discussions of Facilitated Communication, a controversial technique sometimes used to communicate with severely disabled children.

*Although, personally, I also have a soft spot Bollywood-Michael Jackson Fusion Dance act Signature.

Cryptozoology vs YouTube: Join the debate

Over at Cryptomundo Loren Coleman is asking what we’ve all been wondering: “Bigfoot and YouTube: Worthless Combo?”

There have been a spate of shaky hand-held hominid films lately.

Join the debate at Cryptomundo.com

Personally I want more monster videos like this*:

*And fewer half-hearted hoaxes

Imagine Bigfoot

Enigma Street’s first commentator has a great new blog, recounting his experiences with a mystery

hominid in Ontario.

Visit Imagine Bigfoot and check it out!

New ABC sighting (thats an A-lien B-ig C-at to the uninitiated)

Mystery big cat spotted in wolds! – Horncastle News

For several years witnesses have been reporting big cats in Lincolnshire.

The latest sighting took place on the 21st May. A woman saw a large black “cat-like” animal

A genuine out of place feline cryptid? Or just a case of mistaken identity?

You can vote online at the Horncastle News site.

(Via There’s Something in the Woods)

Dinosaur footprints

I’m always disappointed when I read a headline like this from the always fascinating Unexplained Mysteries site: “New dinosaur tracks discovered“.

I regress to a dinosaur mad 5 year old (actually my dinosaur mania lasted well into my teens) with an addiction to cryptozoology and find myself hoping, desperately that this time they will have found actual footprints from a relict dinosaur.

In this case, it’s yet again some fossilized prints. But it’s still an amazing find of great value to paleontology.

But, what I really want is tracks from something like the Mokele Mbembe.

That would be ace.

Here’s what German Captain Freiherr Von Stein had to say about the beast in 1913 (quoted in Bernard Heuvelmans’ On The Track of Unknown Animals:

“The animal is said to be of a brownish-grey colour with a smooth skin, its size approximating that of an elephant; at very least that of a hippopotamus. It is said to have a long and very flexible neck and only one tooth but a very long one; some say it is a horn. A few spoke of a long muscular tail like that of an alligator. Canoes coming near it are said to be doomed: the animal is said to attack the vessels at once and to kill the crews but without eating the bodies. The animal is said to live in the caves that have been washed out by the river in the clay of its shores at sharp bends. It is said to climb the shore even at daytime in search of food; its diet is said to be entirely vegetable. This feature seems to disagree with a possible explanation as a myth.”

British Bigfoot Film

Over at MAN-BEAST UK, Nick Redfern draws our attention to a video recently posted on YouTube.

Is it film of a British hominid? Well, as Nick points out, if you joke about yetis and then film one no one’s ever going to take you seriously? Talk about football, films or your grandparents (unless they’re yetis): anything but yetis.

Enjoy….

Can movies make you a killer?

Mental Floss has given us a list of 6 Flicks That Drove Crazies to Kill

A fascinating read especially in the wake of the UK’s Byron Review.

Although as post author, Ransom Riggs points out, the perpetrators in every case were already mentally ill. These specific films just provided a grim “inspiration”.

One surprising entry: The Ten Commandments. Apparently, in 1959 a West German serial killer claimed his murderous sprees were inspired by the classic. What would the staff at the FBI’s BAU make of that?*

On a serious note, people suffering from mental illness are far more likely to kill themselves than anyone else. Show your support and learn from SANE, MIND and The Samaritans.

*I suspect that Shemar Moore from CBS’ Criminal Minds would look troubled yet attractive.

Agatha Christie Meets the Doctor (NO SPOILERS)

Well, its Saturday here in the UK and that means Doctor Who is on!

In tonight’s episode the Doctor meets detective writer Agatha Christie.  The Unicorn and the Wasp suggests a sci-fi explanation for what happened when the great lady went missing in 1926.

In December of 1926 Ms Christie’s disappeared from her home in Berkshire, her car was subsequently found abandoned in a Surrey chalk pit.

After being missing for ten days, she was found alive and well (physically at least) at a hotel in Harrogate (it looks lovely I quite fancy a few nights there myself).

Oddly, the alias she used was that of a woman with whom her husband was said to be having an affair.

Ms Christie claimed that she had suffered some form of nervous breakdown and entered into a fugue state (brought about by the stress of her husband’s affair and the death of her mother). But some people were unconvinced, accusing the writer of staging an elaborate publicity stunt (that ultimately cost the authorities a great deal of money).

Staged disappearance or sudden mental illness? I think I’m going with whatever the Doctor Who writers go for – it seems to involve a giant alien wasp.

True Conspiracies

True Conspiracies? That’s a contradiction in terms, right? Like True Urban Legends?

Well, thanks to Cracked you can learn all about 7 conspiracies that actually, really happened.

Some, like the infamous Tuskegee experiments, are truly tragic and make me weep for the human race.

Elephants Can Paint! As can some other animals…

Elephants are wonderful, intelligent and sadly often exploited animals.

And there is a host of wonderful trivia about pachyderms.

Did you know, for example, that the Asian Elephant is actually more closely related to the woolly mammoth than it is to the African Elephant?

But anyway, now it seems they can paint as well. Is this cruel? I really don’t know…

(Thanks to BUST blog)

But elephants aren’t the only animals who show (admittedly sometimes debatable) artistic talents.

Take, Beenie the Asian Otter, she typically works in water colours.

Then there was Congo the Chimpanzee. Picasso owned one of his paintings.

(One last word, with regard elephants, check out this wonderful sanctuary for former performing elephants in Tennesse.)