Some weird medical condition is affecting the spectacled bears at a zoo in Leipzig. Check out the photos.
The bears are named Lolita, Bianca, and Dolores, and normally spectacled bears look more like this:
Spectacled bears are the last surviving member of a subfamily of bears called the Tremarctines. The most famous Tremarctine bear of all was the giant short-faced bear (Arctodus simus). That particular bear was the largest bear that ever existed, weighing as much as 2,500 pounds and standing over 5 feet at the shoulder. It had a broad range in North America from Alaska to Mexico.
Now, these poor bald bears in Germany are nowhere near as impressive as that animal.
But it is a mystery why these bears have gone bald. All are female, so their sex may have something to do with it.
It may also be a genetic condition. It could be their diet. But whatever it is, the bears are going to suffer in this winter.
Spectacled bears are vulnerable in their native range in South America, which is roughly the entire northern and central Andes. This is the only species of Tremarctine bear to survive into the modern era, and it is the only surviving South American bear.
But if one were seen in the wild, I wonder what some cryptozoologists would say.
I can only imagine.
Aaron Hall, "Lion Hunter of the Juniata" and founder of the legendary strain of Pennsylvania panther dogs.
I came across an account of an unusual breed of hunting dog that was developed in Centre County, Pennsylvania. This account comes from Extinct Animals of Pennsylvania by Henry Wharton Shoemaker. The text was originally published in 1907, but the actual account comes from period between 1845 and 1869 in which a legendary cougar hunter named Aaron Hall was said to have killed fifty “panthers.”
Hall’s legendary status had left him with the sobriquet “Lion Hunter of the Juniata.” He had styled himself as the central Pennsylvania version of Davy Crockett.
And like any great hunter of those days, he had a pack of hunting dogs that helped him pursue his quarry.
Unlike any other hunter of that day, though, he had bred a rather unusual strain of cougar hound.
His massive dogs were run in pairs that then pursued the cougar until they could catch it by the ears– one dog on each ear, very similar to how hog catch dogs are used. It is also very similar to the way that the borzoi caught wolves. The borzoi would grab the wolf by the sides of the neck, usually two dogs on either side.
The dogs were said to be the result of breeding old-type bulldogs, mastiffs, Newfoundlands, and bloodhounds together to produce a superior cougar hound. They dogs were said to have been so large that a former Pennsylvania game commissioner was able to ride one of them.
I have some issues with the veracity of these claims, but it is known that the mastiff-type dogs can be used to hunt large cats. Fila Brasileiros were used to hunt jaguars and South American cougars, and the Dogos Argentinos were also used to hunt cougars in their native country. Newfoundland dogs were very common in America at the time and were considered an appropriate dog to use for hunting various species of game, although waterfowling was their most common purpose. Bulldogs were probably chosen for their tenacity and ability to grip recalcitrant and powerful quarry, and bloodhounds have legendary noses. The mixture makes sense.
However, the story about the dogs grabbing the cats by the ears is a bit too far fetched for me to accept. A cougar is a very strong and agile animal. If cornered by dogs, it is going to fight very hard. Because its ears aren’t that large, my guess is that the dogs would have a very hard time holding the cats by the ears. They would simply be clawed to pieces, even if they did manage to get them by the ears.
Keep in mind that a cougar can kill a lone wolf, and it wouldn’t have very much trouble killing a domestic dog of any size. (There is a very good account of a cougar killing at captive wolf in Jim and Jamie Dutcher’s Wolves at Our Door.) Most modern cougar hounds tree the cats or hold them at bay. Very few of them engage in mortal combat with the cats. I seriously doubt that any dog would be able to fight a cougar until it was able to grab it by the ears.
Unless Hall or Sober were very small men, I seriously doubt that he could ride any dogs resulting from his crossbreeding. The biggest mastiffs have exceeded two hundred pounds, but if you’re crossing in smaller bulldogs, bloodhounds, and the slightly smaller Newfoundland of the day, it is very unlikely that anyone would be able to produce animals of that size.
Shoemaker wrote a lot about the folk culture of rural Pennsylvania, and theis story sounds a lot like mountain person’s tall tale. Mountain culture in Pennsylvania isn’t that different from mountain culture here, and I can tell you that telling stories like this one are almost de rigueur, especially when someone starts talking about his hunting dogs. Maybe Shoemaker was playing around with this lore, or maybe someone was playing a trick on him. After all, he was an outsider, a graduate of Columbia and a native New Yorker who had grown up in India. Such outsiders are very often told tall stories, for nothing can make a rural person with limited educational and economic opportunities feel better than when he or she gets some outsider to believe some outlandish story.
He does mention that many people of this region were keeping cougar dogs, but most of the dogs used to hunt cougars were “fices” or “whippets.”
One of the great ironies about cougars is that they were known for having a great deal of fear of dogs. Although they were capable of killing a dog easily, they normally would run if pursued by a pack of them.
Normally, these pursuits end with the cougar a tree and dogs barking at them. My guess is that if a cougar had found itself being chased by Hall’s cougar dogs, it would have run for the nearest tree before the dogs could even get close to it. This would have meant that it would have been next to impossible for the dogs to grab them by the ears. (Unless those horse-sized curs could also climb trees.)
I particularly like the story about the Pennsylvania panther dogs, but I am very skeptical that this story is real. Maybe Hall really did have big cougar hounds, but they didn’t hunt in exactly in the way described. Maybe they held the cats at a bay or pushed them into the trees. Some of them were probably much larger than the typical hunting dog of the region, and thus, they were given such an outlandish size.
Hall’s strain of panther dog went extinct shortly after his death in 1892. We can never really know for sure, but I think the chances of these dogs hunting in the way described are not very good. I can’t imagine that a cougar would allow itself to be held by the ears in such a fashion.
My review of Jon Franklin’s The Wolf in the Parlor is in the November/December 2009 issue of The Bark.
Yes, I’ve been published in a real dog magazine.
warrah or Falkland Islands wolf
Remember my post on the enigma of the warrah or Falkland Islands wolf?
I stated that we didn’t have the foggiest clue what its ancestry was, although early studies of its DNA suggested that it was derived from something like a coyote.
It has been speculated that the culpeo and the other zorros or wolf-like foxes of South America are its closest relatives.
Well, a new study was released yesterday that suggests that the warrah’s closest relative was the maned wolf. The lineage of the two species split 6 million years ago, when the ancestors of both species lived in North America.
Yes, South America might have a great diversity of wild dog species today, but all of its wild dogs descend from North American ancestors. Canids moved to South America 2.5 million years ago.
So the enigma of the warrah has been solved.
However, no one has found any North American canids that could be considered the ancestors of the warrah or maned wolf.
***
I need to say here that the maned wolf is one of the more bizarre wild dogs. In fact, I can’t think of a stranger animal for the warrah to count as its closest relative. Remember, the warrah looked like a dingo, a culpeo, or a coyote. Its appearance wasn’t that strange. It was the fact that it was located on isolated island that made people wonder about it. If it had been found on the mainland, it would have been instantly grouped with the South American zorros.
They stand over three feet at the shoulder but weigh only about 44-55 pounds. Their long legs are an adaptation to living in their grassland habitat, where the grass often grows too tall for a shorter-legged dog to see its prey.
Unlike other large wild dogs, the maned wolf does not form packs. A monogamous pair shares a territory, but they normally are not seen together in that territory. They apparently come together only to mate.
Also unusual for a wild dog of this size, over 50% of its diet is vegetable matter. One particular species of fruit, the “wolf apple (Solanum lycocarpum) is named because maned wolves like to eat it. In captivity, these animals have been fed like normal canids and then have developed bladder stones. Their bodies simply cannot metabolize such high protein diets.
Even more strangely, their urine smells like marijuana. Their urine contains a pyrazine, which also occurs in marijuana. It is possible that their urine gets this distinctive odor from the pyrazine.
The warrah’s only living relative is much stranger than it was!
***
Most wolves that exist today fear people above all things, and if a dog, coyote, or strange wolf pops up in a pack’s territory, it is dead. Even the wolves of Ellesmere kill interlopers in their territories, and these wolves are believed to have experienced no (or at least very little) persecution from man. These wolves do, however, live in land that is very marginal habitat, and any territory that a breeding pair can procure will be defended aggressively.
The wolves of the Great Plains in those accounts were living in a productive ecosystem with plenty of prey. These wolves were very similar to how I would imagine the ancient wolves that were able form a relationship people. They could hunt large prey on their own, but they were curious about humans. These wolves were approaching people who lived off of American bison as a prey species. I can imagine those ancient wolves approaching mammoth and mastodon kills in search of some scraps and maybe a little companionship.
(And yes, I’m fully aware that the bison hunting culture of the Great Plains was a very short-lived culture, but it is just as likely that man and wolf had a similar relationship when they were living on other species. Both Eurasia and North America possessed ecosystems that were very productive and diverse the end of the Pleistocene. Then, agriculture gave rise to large numbers of humans, who then went after most of the megafauna that survived the effects of that climate change–like the aurochs.)
That’s why I continue to say that domesticating the wolf had to have been so easy that a caveman could do it. If the wolves of yore were like these animals, domestication would have been a cinch.
Yes, it’s true.
And while we know that such statements are poor comfort the victim’s loved ones, these attacks are very rare.
I disagree with the biologist who declares that there are no wolf genes in these coyotes. Actually, there probably are some wolf genes in these coyotes, as this study suggests. I don’t think there are any “pure” coyotes in the whole of the Northeastern US or Eastern Canada. They all have some wolf genes.
I know of at least one other fatal coyote attack in the US.
The real story behind only documented fatal wolf attack in North America is not clear.
I’m not even going to speculate. It could have been a garbage-habituated black bear. It could have been those garbage habituated wolves. (I personally don’t think there is a giant international conspiracy to protect the reputation of wolves, considering how freely people talk about the wolves that kill children in India.)
Well, there are two things unusual about this variety of canary.
This particular bird belongs to the red factor canary strain.
Red factor canaries did not appear from a mutation within the canary species. That color does not exist in the normal canary genome.
Instead, this color came about through hybridization with the black-hooded red siskin from South America. The fertility of the canary/black-hooded red siskin hybrids was not very good, but a few were fertile and were bred back into the canaries.
The red coloration that comes from the black-hooded red siskin requires a diet rich in carotenoids. The flamingo requires exactly the same sort of diet to maintain their pink plumage.
At one time, canary association would not allow this color because of the long standing rule that no show canary should be fed an unnatural diet.
But now it is a popular color-bred bird and, for some reason, always available at Petco.
Not this particular bird.
What is unusual about this strain or variety of canary?
