Here is something you don’t see every day – a woman casually waiting for the subway train in Moscow with a full-grown pet fox perched on her shoulder.

A video of the unnamed blonde woman and her unusual pet has been doing the rounds on Russian social media for a week. Its origin is currently unknown, but it went viral after it was uploaded on Instagram by Russian fitness trainer @valerasupertrener. Footage shows a young blonde woman holding the leash of an adult fox perched precariously on her shoulder, as they both wait for the train in a Moscow subway station. The animal doesn’t seem particularly concerned about either the other subway riders staring at it, or the train as it storms into the station, which suggests that this is not its first train ride. As the doors open, the woman steps inside while trying to keep her back straight as not to affect the fox’s balance.

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Two cute felines who have been trying to enter an art museum in Hiroshima, Japan, a few times a week for the past two years recently went viral online. The cats have yet to get past the guards at the museum’s front door, but their persistence has earned them the adoration of millions of people.

This adorable cat-and-guard game started back in 2016, when the Onomichi City Museum of Art in Hiroshima hosted a cat photography exhibition called ‘Cats – Mitsuaki Iwago Photography Exhibition’. Among the many human visitors who came to admire this collection of photos of street cats in various poses, there was also a black cat who, just like everyone else, tried to access the museum through the front door. However the vigilant guard on duty spotted it and shooed it away. The cute scene was captured by Twitter user @mikusuke, who later posted photos of it online. They got thousands of likes and comments, but there’s really nothing unusual about cat pics going viral. What no one anticipated however, was the black cat’s persistence. For some reason it has been coming back to the museum and trying to get inside every week for the past two years, and at one point it even brought a friend.

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Devesh Adivasi, a 7-year-old boy from rural Madhya Pradesh, in central India, has some very unusual best friends. For the past four years, he has been going into the jungle near his village and coming back with all kinds of snakes, some of them poisonous, that he plays, bathes and eats with. So far, he hasn’t been bitten once.

The boy’s family says that his fascination with snakes started when he was 3 years old, after dreaming about the slithering reptiles one night. Next morning, he told his parents about it, but they didn’t think much of it until they saw him running into the jungle near their village and later coming out with two snakes in hand. The reptiles slithered all over his body, but they didn’t bite him. Since that day, Devesh has been going into the jungle almost every day and bringing back new friends to play with. He keeps them for a few days, bathes and sleeps with them, massages them with oil and then releases them back into the jungle.

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Looking at these incredible photos, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they’ve been edited to make the body of a spider look like a black dog’s head, but this is what the tiny Bunny Harvestman actually looks like.

Independent scientist Andreas Kay took these incredible photographs of a Bunny Harvestman in the Amazonian forests of Ecuador back in 2017, but they only recently went viral online, and for good reason. They show the bizarrely-shaped body of the tiny arachnid in such great detail that it’s hard to believe that this is a real creature and not the work of Photoshop.

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A Russian man has become so attached to a wolf that he adopted as a small pup that when he had to leave his old home and move into an apartment in the big city of Volgograd, he took the wolf with him.

Ivan L. and his daughter have been sharing their home with Gray, a full grown wild wolf, for several years now. It was easier when they lived in Astrakhan, but things got considerably more complicated when they had to move into a one-room apartment on the first floor of a nine-story building in Volgograd. Still, despite facing many challenges, they managed to make it work, and Ivan says he couldn’t imagine his life without his beloved pet.

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A pet husky recently got his owner in trouble after escaping its enclosure, going into a neighboring farm and spending an entire night killing chickens.

Chinese media reports that the owner of a chicken farm in Ningguo, China’s Anhui province, burst into tears on the morning of October 29, after going to check on the birds and finding the coop littered with lifeless bodies. The first thoughts that went through his mind were that someone had killed most of his chickens out of spite, or that some wild animal had made its way inside and decimated the birds. But after checking around his farm for clues, the man actually found the perpetrator – his neighbor’s husky dog with a dead chicken in its mouth.

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Edgardo “Perros” Zuniga has been travelling all around Mexico on a tricycle, looking for abandoned and injured dogs to rescue and put up for adoption. He has rescued over 400 dogs in the last 5 years.

When he left his home in Jalisco in 2013, 48-year-old Edgardo set a very clear goal for himself – to help as many stray dogs as he possible could. Over the last five years, he has travelled through 14 Mexican states and rescued over 400 abandoned dogs, by nursing them back to health and later placing them in the hands of staff at various adoption centers. He also helped dogs that weren’t eligible for adoption, by treating their illnesses, feeding them and doing everything in his power to improve their lives before continuing his journey. He travels with a pack of loyal dogs that make up his ‘rescue team’ and that he claims make his job a lot easier by showing the strays he encounters that they can trust him.

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If you’ve been looking for a way to prevent your pet cat from scratching you whenever you try to bathe or groom it, maybe try these bizarre anti-scratching boots. Don’t expect your beloved pet to thank you, though.

The first time I saw these adjustable anti-scratching boots for cats on Chinese online marketplace Aliexpress, I thought they were a prank, but it turns that they are a real product designed to help pet owners seal off their cats’ paws and prevent scratching completely. They are supposed to be used for certain situations like bathing, nail clipping or visits to the vet, but I know a few people crazy enough to leave these plastic contraptions on for long periods of time just to make sure their cat doesn’t ruin the living room sofa.

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If you’re familiar with horse reigning, you probably know about the sliding stop, a signature move where the galloping horse lowers its hindquarters as it comes to halt. It’s definitely impressive to watch, but it’s nothing compared to the Mexican version, the Cala de Caballo.

Cala de Caballo is one of several “charras” performed by charros (the Mexican equivalent of the cowboy) in charrerias, popular competitive events similar to the American rodeo. It involves a series of maneuvers, like turning the horse on its own axis both ways a minimum of six times, and walking backwards in a straight line, but the most impressive one has to be the sliding stop, where the charro makes his horse run at full speed and then stop abruptly by sliding on its rear legs, in a marked 20-meter-long rectangle. The competitor who leaves the longest slide marks in the marked area without going over the limit gets the most points.

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A New York man has been dubbed the “Pied Piper of Raccons” after a video of him drawing almost two dozen furry critters from the woods with a Native American flute tune went viral online.

The popular video shows Eddy Lawrence playing his flute on the side of the road in Brasher State Forest, St Lawrence County, as dozens of raccoons emerge from the woods and form an audience around him. The otherwise shy creatures appeared mesmerized by the song, and according to the person who shot the video, around 20 of them had gathered around Lawrence by the time he finished playing. As the song ended, the spell it put on the raccoons seemed to break as well, as they scurried back into the forest.

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International media outlets have been reporting the shocking case of a dolphin, dozens of penguins and other wildlife that have been abandoned in a derelict Japanese aquarium that closed down months ago.

The operator of the Inubosaki Marine Park Aquarium in Choshi, a city in Japan’s Chiba Prefecture, closed down in January 2018, citing a steady decline in visitors following the strong earthquake and nuclear crisis of 2011. However, the marine life that used to entertain guests – including a bottlenose dolphin and dozens of humboldt penguins – has been locked inside the abandoned facility ever since and are living in improper conditions. Although someone has reportedly been feeding them regularly, animal activists claim that Honey the dolphin is showing signs of stress due to loneliness and suffered serious sunburns this summer, while the penguins are living in crumbling pens, among debris. Park representatives could not be contacted about the situation and local authorities claim that their hands are tied.

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The Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard is mostly known as one of the few places on Earth where people are forbidden from dying, but few know that this place also has a ban on cats, with one exception, a purring feline that’s technically a fox.

Cats weren’t always banned on Svalbard. It was only during the 1990s that Norwegian authorities enforced the ban, after it was decided that they were susceptible to rabies and echinococcosis (a type of tape worm) infections from foxes and rats, which in turn posed a big risk to the human population. Interestingly, rats are not indigenous to the northern archipelago, only arriving here relatively recently on board cargo ships, but being the resourceful creatures they are, they quickly adapted to the harsh conditions. Photos taken prior to the ban on cats show that felines were once popular on Spitsbergen and the other islands that make up Svalbard, but since then, only one ginger cat has been photographed on the archipelago. Her name is Kesha and she has a rather interesting story.

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They say no good deed goes unpunished, and this kindhearted North-Carolina woman who took in dozens of abandoned pets as Hurricane Florence ravaged the US state is a prime example of that. She was arrested and is now facing several misdemeanor charges for practicing veterinary medicine without a license.

As Hurricane Florence was getting ready to make landfall in North Caroline, Tammie Hedges decided to turn a warehouse she had been remodeling into a shelter for pets. Pets came from the streets, where they were picked up by volunteers, but also from their owners, who had to evacuate but couldn’t take their animals with them. All in all, she sheltered 27 pets – 17 cats and 10 dogs – during the storm, and also administered some medical treatments to ensure their well-being. But whereas most people considered her actions an act of kindness to animals, local authorities saw them as a violation of the law and charged her with several misdemeanors.

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A South Korean man and the 21 ducklings he has been raising as his children ever since they hatched have been breaking the internet with their incredible bond. A video that recently went viral in the western world shows the cute birds following their “mother” on a mountain hike and listening to his every command.

The middle-aged man, whose name is not revealed in the video, has been taking care of his 21 ducklings ever since they were fertilized eggs, making sure the incubation period went smoothly, and even helping the tiny birds break through their shell when it came time to hatch. He was the first thing they laid eyes on in this world, and he has remained the most important figure in their lives since.

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Austria often gets mistaken for Australia, and tourist shops even have souvenir t-shirts that say “no kangaroos in Austria”, but now that one has been spotted hopping around in the European country, they may need a better line than that.

Police in the small town of Kirchschlag, northern Austria, confirmed multiple sightings of what looked to be a kangaroo hopping through the meadows and forests around the town, over the weekend, and are now actively searching for it. They have also contacted zoos and breeders in the area, but so far no one has claimed responsibility for the mysterious animal.

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