Ever since he retired 15 years ago, Eugene Bostick has spent a huge chunk of his time caring for animals. Among the many awesome things he does perhaps the most interesting is playing train conductor for a bunch of rescued stray dogs. He actually built a custom train for the canines, consisting of a tractor pulling a row of plastic barrels with the tops cut off.

The 80-year-old from Fort Worth, Texas, says he never planned on spending so much time with dogs, but it sort of just happened. “We live down on a dead-end street, where me and my brother have a horse barn,” he told online magazine The Dodo. “People sometimes come by and dump dogs out here, leaving them to starve. So we started feeding them, letting them in, taking them to the vet, to get them spayed and neutered. We made a place for them to live.”

But Bostick has done more than just give the strays a place to live. He’s actually made their lives fun, by constructing a unique train to take them on little trips. “I started out with my tractor,” he explained. “I had a little trailer and I put four or five dogs in there and took them riding. Then more dogs started to show up and I thought ‘Uh-oh! That’s not enough room.’”

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It’s not clear what freelance journalist Shona Sibary hoped to achieve by making an online confession about her puppy-abandoning habits, but her article in the Daily Mail has sparked outrage among internet users who are condemning her for her actions.

In the article, Sibary admitted to having abandoned four dogs in the last four years, just because they weren’t cute puppies anymore. “Over the past four years, I have fallen in love with four puppies and, on each occasion, driven miles with hundreds of pounds of cash in my pocket to buy them,” she wrote. “Then, months later, I have turned my back on them and given them away.”

Sibary said she finds this habit “strange” because according to her, “no one is more welcoming and loving to a doe-eyed little puppy than me.” She claims that all four puppies had perfect lives – with comfy baskets, colorful collars, vaccinations, and microchipping. But in her own words, “the minute they become too much trouble – which they always do – I fall out of love and start advertising them in the classifieds section of our local newspaper.”

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Loki is the internet’s newest feline sensation – her pictures have gone viral and people can’t stop gushing over her evil vampire face. With over 50,000 followers on Instagram already, her distinctive appearance is only making her more popular by the minute.

Loki’s owner Kaetlyn Koch, from Portland, Maine, says that in real life, Loki is just as adorable as any other cat. She loves to to hide under bath towels and lay on her back for a rub. Her murderous stare only seems to emerge when she’s confronted with a camera lens. She looks downright scary with her fangs jutting out, even when she’s peeking out from under towels or lazing in Kaet’s lap. Loki’s eyes never seem to close, which is a bit of a mystery.

Kaetlyn didn’t know about the vampire look when she adopted the Siamese-mix cat from a shelter two years ago. “They didn’t give me many details about her looks,” she said. “They said it was healthy but she wasn’t able to close it (her eyelids). She’s been to the vet three times in the last year, and no one has made mention of her teeth or why she looks the way she does. Still a mystery.”

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Situated in Salangsdalen, Norway’s Troms county, Polar Park has a diverse population of wild animals, including foxes, reindeer, wolverines, wolves, lynx, elk, musk, and bears. But the most popular attraction is the Wolf Camp, a facility set up with the goal of ensuring a better life for wolves in captivity. It also provides visitors with the unique opportunity up-close and personal with the beautiful creatures.

So how is it that these ferocious wolves are able to accept human company with such ease? Well, it turns out that in the wild, wolves are actually afraid of humans – so they lash out under stress. But the animals at Polar Park were raised to enjoy the company of humans, so they feel calm around visitors. Known as the ‘Salangen wolf pack’, these are the first wolves in Norway that is socialized with humans. That means they actually enjoy our presence as part of their environment and will even come up to visitors to cuddle with them a or lick their faces.

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Thomas Thwaites, a conceptual designer from England, is passionate about how humans could use technology to fulfill desires. So in September 2014, he spent six days at a farm in the Swiss Alps, using technology to realise his dream of living like a goat!

Thwaites designed special prosthetic limbs that allowed him to move on all fours, and even had a fake stomach fitted so he could graze on the open meadows. “My goal was to take a holiday from the pain and worry of being a self-conscious being, able to regret the past and worry about the future,” he said. He wanted to experience being a “nonhuman animal,” which he believed would be a lot “calmer and simpler” without the “existential terror” of everyday life.

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A new adaptation of the Shakespeare classic King Lear features a bizarre cast – one human and nine sheep! 24-year-old Alasdair Saksena plays the human, a director who tries to persuade his cast of sheep to perform the tragedy. ‘King Lear with Sheep’ is, needless to say, every bit as absurd and hilarious as it sounds.

The play is the brainchild of actor Saksena, writer Missouri Williams, and producer Lucie Elven – all in their early 20s. The idea came about after Missouri, having worked on a tour of King Lear with a human cast, got sick of them. “There’s little references to sheep within the text that I think planted the idea in Missouri’s head,” Saksena said. “And so she decided to do King Lear with sheep and me. And I thought, you can’t really say no to that, can you?”

According to Saksena, the reason why this adaptation works is the thin line between tragedy and comedy. “Lear is so tragic and sheep are so untragic that it just sort of works – it comes together and is either desperately sad or desperately funny depending on what mood is catching at that particular point of time,” he explained. Read More »

In spite of being homeless himself, a California man named Steve has made it his mission to take care of stray dogs. He has adopted 50 canines in the past 14 years, tended to their daily needs and sometimes even finding new homes for them. Steve has never abandoned any of the dogs in his care, not even when he had to move to another state.

This year, Steve decided that he’d had enough of California. He believed that a change of scene might help him get back on his feet, so he started to think of moving to Indiana to meet an old friend who had offered him help. He had a distance of 2,000 miles to cover, with nothing but a bike, but he couldn’t think of leaving his beloved dogs behind. So he put the 11 dogs currently in his care in a shopping cart and attached it to the back of his bike. He only had $6 in his pocket at the time.

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Slugs are not what you’d normally call “cute” creatures, but the Jorunna Parva species is an exception. These marine slugs bear a striking resemblance to small rabbits, which has recently earned them the nickname ‘sea bunnies’.

Jorunna parva slugs were discovered by Japanese malacologist Kikutaro Baba in 1938, but the rest of the world has only become aware of their irresistible cuteness last year, when footage from a Japanese diving school was released online. The clip, featuring parva off the coast of Japan, has gone viral on the internet and people all over the world are going ga-ga over the adorable underwater creatures.

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Constantly having to look at your cat’s butt comes with the territory when you’e a pet owner. Luckily, however, now you don’t have to, thanks to a little accessory called Twinkle Tush.

Some people are apparently put off by the sight of a cat’s bare derriere, but now you can just cover that sucker up with some fake bling. Introducing the Twinkle Tush, a plastic jewel that hangs around the base of the feline’s tail and covers its butt. It was introduced to the world on July 8th, when the makers of Cat Crib, a cat hammock that attaches to chair legs, released a video of felines wearing the Twinkle Tush.Cats are usually don’t like it when you mess with their tales and will do anything to remove whatever you attach to them, but they seemed oddly comfortable wearing this concealing piece of plastic.

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The Epinard Nasu Hotel, in Japan’s Tochigi Prefecture, offers a highly unconventional wedding service – newlyweds can rent a cute, fluffy alpaca from a nearby zoo to act as a witness to their wedding.

No one really knows when the hotel started using alpacas to attract customers, or how they came up with the unique idea, but judging from the number of photos happy newlyweds have been posting on Japanese social media lately, it’s definitely becoming popular. It’s not that alpacas are good luck charms, nor are they part of some obscure Japanese ritual, they’re just cute and a sure way to make a wedding memorable.

The alpacas are escorted down the aisle by a professional trainer who makes sure they are on their best behavior during the wedding ceremony. Still, somethings not even the most experienced trainers can prevent, so if you smell something funny during the proceedings, just ignore it. Usually they just stand there as the newlyweds exchange vows and declare their love for each other, kind of like human witnesses do.

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Meet Shabani, a handsome male gorilla that has managed to steal the hearts of young women all over Japan. He is fondly known as ‘ikimen’, a Japanese term for ‘good-looking man’, and some have even hailed him as the animal-world equivalent of George Clooney or Hugh Jackman!

Shabani, who grew up in an Australian zoo, has been living at Higashiyama Zoo and Botanical Gardens in Nagoya, Japan, since 2007. The western lowland gorilla is blessed with a shiny black coat and a macho brooding expression that make him very photogenic. In fact, his photos have gone viral on Twitter, where fans have shared them thousands of times over with comments like: “he’s too handsome!”

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A 65-year-old dog lover from China, has gone to great lengths to save as many dogs as she possibly could from being eaten during this year’s Yulin Dog Meat Festival. She managed to pay around $1,000 for the release of 100 otherwise doomed canines. It may not sound like much, but the media attention her actions got in international media also helped raise awareness about the cruel festival, thus increasing the chances of it being banned in the near future.

Yang Xiaoyun, a retired school teacher from Tianjin, China, traveled 1,500 miles from her home to the city of Yulin, to save scores of dogs from being slaughtered and eaten during the Dog Meat Festival. Photos shared on Chinese internet portal Netease show the 65-year-old woman walking through a market where dogs were kept in cages and paying for various sums of money for their release. Reports say she ended up paying 7,000 yuan ($1,000) to save 100 dogs.

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You might find its freakishly butch legs rather repulsive, but believe it or not, the Dong Tao chicken is incredibly popular in Vietnam. Once reserved for royalty and ritual offerings, the rare breed is now prized by chicken breeders and its meat is served in exclusive restaurants that cater to the wealthy.

An adult Dong Tao chicken can grow up to weigh three to six kilograms, with legs as thick as a human’s wrist. The hens are generally white, while the cocks have colorful feathers. Dong Tao meat is considered far more delicious than regular chickens, explaining its high demand and incredibly steep price tag.

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Matilda the cat is well on her way to becoming an internet sensation, thanks to her large, glassy, ‘alien’ eyes. Her mysterious appearance has earned her over 33,000 followers on Instagram and that number is about to skyrocket now that her photos have gone viral.

Sadly, Matilda’s story isn’t as amusing as it seems. The two-year-old tabby suffers from a rare condition that’s only getting worse as she grows older. Matilda’s anonymous owners, who refer to themselves as her ‘servants’, have revealed that she used to be pretty normal as a kitten, with the exception of having a ‘squinty eye’ from time to time.

“Matilda lives with her loving servants who include The Bearded Man, The Lady and Dog,” the servants write on Matilda’s official site. “She was born on Valentine’s Day in 2013 in a hoarder house in a small town, and was quickly picked up by a rescue society. When she found her forever home she was only 12 weeks old and the cutest, teensiest thing that anyone had ever seen.”

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Meet the Dynastor darius darius, a harmless caterpillar with astounding survival skills. In order to avoid being attacked by predators during its pupal stage (when the larvae transform into butterflies or moths), the helpless creature takes on the form of a rather menacing snake!

Native to Trinidad, the shape-shifting D. darius often mimics the head of a Gaboon pit viper, successfully fooling even the toughest of its predators. After it sheds its final layer of skin, the caterpillar enters its pupal stage, and its chrysalis takes the shape of a viper’s head. The transformation lasts 13 days, during which time this mimicry is its only line of defense. To make the appearance even more believable, the scary-looking chrysalis hangs on the underside of forest leaves at a carefully selected angle.

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