Love hurts (animal crackers)
Time for another, one question quiz.
If I’d ask you to tell me the first thing that sprang to mind when I mentioned the words ‘animal lover’, would your answer be:
a) something annoying with kittens
b) something annoying with kittens
c) something annoying with kittens or
d) something annoying with kittens
What, none of the above? Ah well, never mind.
Still, I’m reasonably sure you didn’t think of this:
A swan who fell in love with a swan-shaped paddle boat now refuses to fly south for winter without his mate.
Hearing about the swan’s plight Allwetter Zoo agreed that both swan and boat could spend the winter on their pond near the elephant enclosure, which is more protected from the elements than the lake. Zoo director Joerg Adler said:
“This arrangement could go on for ever because the animal now firmly believes he has found a partner for life.”
Yes, stupid swan – behaving like some silly, old goose:
At a German farm a donkey is making an ass out of herself after falling in love with a gander. The gander, whose name is Hannibal, met Heidi the donkey when he was put into her enclosure for being too aggressive to be kept with the other birds.
Staff say the couple quickly fell for each other, eating and sleeping together and are now completely inseparable.
Animal lovers indeed.
Some animals that don’t give a fig about other animals are still very passionate about other things:
A Finnish squirrel with a sweet tooth heads to a Finnish grocery shop at least twice a day to steal chocolate-shelled eggs.
The confectionary, which is intended for children, has a toy inside. The squirrel removes the foil carefully, eats the chocolate and leaves the store with the toy.
Anyway, it’s not just animals loving animals – or animals loving chocolate, of course; most people still love animals too.
Some of them not too wholeheartedly, it must be said:
Over-indulging pets can spell disaster for singletons hoping to attract a new partner, according to a nationwide survey of attitudes to pet ownership.
Women were particularly unimpressed with men who owned spiders, with 48% admitting to being repelled at the prospect.
Men were turned off by partners who pampered pets, spending more than £100 a week on accessories and upkeep. One in four men said they would not date a woman with two or more cats.
Still, where some people are, at best, lukewarm about having pets, others have a somewhat extremer view. People who have been on demonstrations against nuclear energy at the Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant, for instance, can become positively hysterical when certain animals are mentioned:
The nuclear power plant has become the main breeding ground for a giant lizard.
“Like a Godzilla movie,” laughs Kevin O’Hare of Florida Power and Light.
The high ground is so ideal for laying crocodile eggs that Turkey Point has become an enormous crocodile nursery. It’s now home to about 500 full-grown crocodiles — a quarter of the country’s entire adult crocodile population.
Nevertheless, for every sincere animal hater, there’s at least a Wembley stadium full of sentimental animal lovers – and probably a handful of true animal nuts whom you really, really, really do not want to have living in your street, let alone under your own roof:
A 43-year-old man exploded with rage and killed his elderly parents with a number of blows to the head with the back of an axe, after his mother laughed when the man’s pet cat Tootie had died.
In other words, a typical case of ‘loving with a vengeance.‘
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