A 15-year-old dog in in Chongqing’s Yuzhong district has been dubbed the ‘Chinese Hachiko’ for patiently waiting up to 12 hours a day outside a local metro station until his owner returns from work.

Xiongxiong, which translates as ‘Little Bear’, has reportedly been waiting outside the Liziba metro station, in Yuzhong district, every day for the past eight years, ever since his current owner started looking after him. The pooch is well-known by locals who often stop to pet him, but after a recent video of him patiently waiting for his master recently went viral on social media, Xionxiong has become a national celebrity, with people travelling to Chongqing from all over China, just to see him.

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An Oregon woman who allegedly left her horse outside during the winter without adequate care and shelter, causing it pain and suffering, is now being sued by the animal for more than $100,000 in damages.

It’s not every day you hear about horses taking humans to court, but in states like Oregon this sort of thing has been possible ever sing 2014, when the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that animals can be victims of crime and have legally protected rights. Justice, the horse in this particular case, is listed as a plaintiff in the legal action against its former owner, and, just like a human, has a team of lawyers fighting on its behalf.

According to Justice’s legal team at the Animal Legal Defense Fund in Portland, the 8-year-old horse has suffered a great deal of pain and suffering as a result of his former owner’s neglect and is entitled to a substantial amount of money that should go toward his current and future care and medical treatments.

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South Korean ad agency Cheil Worldwide partnered with Molly’s Pet Shop, a popular pet shop chain, to provide stray cats with comfortable shelters on cold winter and spring nights, by recycling old jacket hoods into cozy homes.

Called Hood Houses, the ingenious cat cribs were created to raise awareness about South Korea’s stray cat problem, and also promote positive interaction between people and homeless animals. Last December, Goodwill shops and Molly’s Pet Shop branches started collecting old jacket hoods and other padded clothing, which were then recycled into portable dome homes, fitted with a waterproof roof, a bed as well as bowls for food/water. Over a two-week period, over 2,000 Hood Houses were given away for free to Molly’s Pet Shop customers who bought food for stray cats.

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The world’s most faithful male is a stork. Every year, for the past 16 years, he has flown 14,000 km from his winter home in South Africa to a small village in Croatia, Europe, to be with his handicapped mate, who cannot fly due to an old gunshot wound.

The amazing love story between Klepetan and Malena has made the two storks celebrities in Croatia. Every March, the male stork flies back to the village of Brodski Varos, where Malena is waiting for him. They mate and have new babies each year, which Klepetan then teaches how to fly, before migrating with them to South Africa. The injured female stays behind, as she cannot fly, but she’s always well taken care of during the cold winter.

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Apart from the sound they make while chewing on leaves, the vast majority of caterpillars are silent creatures. However, the Nessus sphinx hawkmoth caterpillar is able to produce clicking noises that sounds a lot like static, as a self-defense mechanism, and scientists believe they discovered how.

Insects have no lungs, but some of them can be really noisy. While humans and most other vertebrates make noise by forcing air out of their bodies, insects and larvae don’t have that luxury. Some of them have adapted, rubbing, knocking or vibrating parts of their bodies to produce distinctive sounds, the kind you hear when you open a window on a quiet summer night, but the Nessus sphinx hawkmoth caterpillar doesn’t fall into that category. When threatened, it produces a strange sound that resembles a combination of cracking and spitting, by pushing air through a constriction between its two foregut chambers, even though it has no lungs.

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Police in Youngstown, Ohio, have received over a dozen reports of zombie-like raccoons coming out in the daytime, flashing their teeth and just falling on their backs for no apparent reason.

Youngstown has always had a raccoon population, but the furry mammals usually stayed out of people’s way, only coming out at night to search through their trash cans for food. However, last month, some of the raccoons started acting really strange. They would come out in broad daylight, sometimes walking up all the way to people’s front doors, flash their sharp teeth in a threatening manner and then fall on their back and enter a comatose-like state. Over the past three weeks, such raccoons came to be known as “zombie raccoons”.

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At 17-years-old and suffering from kidney failure, Stanley the cat was on the last of his nine lives. Luckily, his owner decided to gift him a tenth, by shelling out $19,000 for a kidney transplant.

Betsy Boyd earns just $46,000 a year, working as a part-time writing professor, and her husband Michael is a freelance journalist and a stay-at-home dad for their 3-year-old twin boys. They’re not exactly rolling in dough, but when presented with the chance to save their favorite cat’s life in exchange for $19,000, they didn’t hesitate. They even agreed to adopt his donor after the transplant, just so they could have Stanley a little longer.

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Cats get stuck high up in trees all the time, and there’s often no one to call for help, but if you live within an hour’s drive of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, you can rely on Randall Kolb, a 64-year-old retiree who has dedicated the last four years of his life to rescuing felines from trees.

Kolb, aka “Cat Rescue Guy”, discovered his calling in 2014, just two days after retiring from his IT job at Louisiana State University. A cat had become stuck in a tree near his house in Baton Rouge, and he spent two days trying to find someone willing to climb up and bring the feline down. When he did, he paid close attention to the rescue and decided to learn how to climb trees so he could rescue cats in the future. He has since bought or created his own tree climbing equipment and used it to save over 150 cats, for free.

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How much do you really love your pet dog? Enough to buy it the world’s first 24K gold jacket encrusted with Swarovski crystals and black diamonds? It’s “only” 137,000 and it’s armored, meaning it will protect your pooch from bites and even knife slashes.

The world’s most expensive dog jacket is the result of a collaboration between Doggy Armour and VeryFirstTo, the same company that brought us the ultimate holiday for James Bond fans and the world’s most luxurious coloring book. The lavish canine garment is made of “Golden Textile” 24K gold Nano coated fabrics, which apparently “has the authentic values of gold itself and embraces 99.99% gold that is nono-structured”. Clients also have the option to have the jacket decorated with either 20 Swarovski crystals, or 20 black diamonds.

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Yogi, a one-year-old brown Shih Tzu- poodle mix, has become a social media sensation due to his uncanny, almost human-like facial expression.

Photos of this ‘dog with a man’s face’ have been doing the rounds online, and people can’t stop talking about him. It all started when Chantal Desjardins, from Massachusetts, posted a photo of her freshly groomed pooch Yogi, on Facebook. It wasn’t long before her friends started pointing out that his face looked uncannily human-like, and some even asked her if she used editing software like Photoshop or one of those popular ‘face swap’ apps to create the eerie effect. Chantal insisted that she had not manipulated the photo at all, but after examining the photo again, she understood why people were asking her that.

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The story of a nameless mongrel that has been patiently waiting outside a hospital in Sao Paolo Brazil four months after his owner was admitted there following a stabbing has been making headlines around the world.

The dog first showed up at the Santa Casa de Novo Horizonte hospital in Sao Paolo on the same night that the ambulance brought in his owner, a 59-year-old homeless person who had been stabbed during an altercation. Ambulance staff would later tell their colleagues that the dog ran after their car all the way to the hospital, stopping at the entrance and patiently waiting for his master to return.

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Spanish YouTuber Sonia Sae, who uses her channel to share advice on how to live on a plant-based diet, has come under fire for putting her pet fennec fox on a vegan diet, after photos of the shockingly thin animal were shared online.

Animal activists and some of Sonia Sae’s own followers have accused her of animal cruelty after the youtuber admitted that she has been raising Jumanji, her pet fennec fox, on a vegan diet, ever since she rescued him from a breeder in 2014. Photos of the seemingly-malnourished fox have been circulating online, along with some of Sae’s own posts in which she admits that Jumanji suffers from “spontaneous convulsions”, “half blindness” and has exhibited weight loss. A petition demanding that the youtuber either feed Jumanji a “proper” diet or hand him over to a sanctuary that can meet its complex needs.

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El Rey Magnum, a young Arabian colt bred to have an extremely dished face, wide flared nostrils and widely spaced eyes, features that combined make the animal look cartoon-like, has sparked a heated debate about extreme selective breeding.

The first photos and videos of El Rey Magnum were released by its owner, Washington-based Orrion Farms, late last year, and had quite a polarizing effect. While many equine enthusiasts were quick to call El Rey Magnum the most beautiful horse in the world, some experts declared themselves horrified by some of the animal’s extreme features, and warned that they could negatively affect its health.

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After making a daring escape while being loaded on a truck headed for the slaughterhouse, a cow in Nysa, Poland, swam to an uninhabited island on a nearby lake and has been living there ever since.

Cows are among the most obedient of domestic animals, but when their survival instincts kick in, they can pull of some truly extraordinary things. Just last month, we wrote another cow in Poland that escaped her farm and went on to join a heard of bison at the edge of the primeval Bialowieza Forest, and earlier this month we featured Hermien, a plucky cow from the Netherlands, that escaped just as her owner was sending her to the slaughterhouse and hid in the woods for over six weeks. Now, we’re heading back to Poland, where another brave cow is making news headlines for her will to survive.

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If you passed by Chris Arsenault’s home, in Medford, New York, and saw the 300 cats living there, you’d probably consider the 58-year-old retired train conductor a crazy cat person, but that’s only because you don’t know his history with them.

In the summer of 2006, about two months after Arsenault lost his son Eric, 24, in a motorcycle accident, the train conductor found a colony of young cats by some train tracks, in Long Island. There were over two dozen kittens, and Chris knew just by looking at them that if he left them there they would die. So he took them all home, doctored them back to health, fed them and gave them a home. They in turn helped the mourning father deal with the pain of losing his son.

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