Portal:Zoology
Seal Clubbing is a team-based sport popular in northern Canada, Greenland, Norway and Russia. It is the third most popular sport in Canada after hockey and moose bludgeoning, as well as the official sport of the Territory of Nunavut. Seal clubbing has remained “in the fringe” for most of its history, although it has recently been catapulted into the limelight due to a great deal of negative press it has received regarding the safety of its players.
Seal clubbing began as a native Inuit game. Feuding tribes would meet at a designated area, select a number of seal pups, and bludgeon them to death with blunt clubs en masse as a means of resolving disputes. When it became apparent that such a practice was detrimental to the seal population—upon which the Inuit livelihood depended—the Inuit halted seal clubbing as a means of conflict resolution, opting instead for bludgeoning each other. Seal clubbing, however, survived as a recreational sport.
The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus can be found in the temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula on the west coast of North America. Their habitat lies on the eastern side of the Olympic mountain range, adjacent to Hood Canal. These solitary cephalopods reach an average size (measured from arm-tip to mantle-tip,) of 30–33 cm. Unlike most other cephalopods, tree octopuses are amphibious, spending only their early life and the period of their mating season in their ancestral aquatic environment. Because of the moistness of the rainforests and specialized skin adaptations, they are able to keep from becoming desiccated for prolonged periods of time, but usually prefer resting in pooled water.
Psychology
With the largest brain-to-body ration for any mollusc, the intelligent and inquisitive tree octopus explores its arboreal world by both touch and sight. Adaptations its ancestors originally evolved in the three-dimensional environment of the sea have been put to good use in the spatially complex maze of the coniferous Olympic rainforests. The challenges and richness of this environment (and the intimate way in which it interacts with it) may account for the tree octopus's advanced behavioral development.
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| Toby in happier times. |
The government of Mali has been forced to apologise after a camel, given to French President François Hollande as a present, was eaten by a local who later described the beast as 'delicious'.
President Hollande was given Toby the camel in February as a gesture of thanksgiving after France had sent troops to Mali to regain the north from a loose coalition of militant Islamist groups. As is traditional when Western leaders receive weird shit from the natives, Hollande smiled bravely, made a good natured joke, and promptly left the camel with a nearby family, to be "taken care of".
The head of that local family, Dioncounda Yamyam, took care of Toby particularly well for about 10 minutes, posing for photos, before stabbing him through the brain with a dagger and making him into a tagine.
The incident has caused much embarrassment in Mali, and Yamyam was forced into hiding. He told us, "I am really sorry, but when he said 'take care of this for me' I thought he meant it in the Mafia sense.…
| Archive | Article credit: Leverage | (more...) |
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