“I want my mommy!”

“Doesn’t anybody love us?”

“We’re hungry!”

“I need burping!”

“Well, at least we have each other.”

“Alright guys! Let’s stick together.”

I guess I am naive enough to think that only humans can be so heartless as to turn away their own children. Not so. A white lion in Schloss-Holte Stukenbrock of Germany rejected her three cubs. What’s up with that? Let me have the little critters. Cute as can be, and whoever thought to put them on a black sheet knew what they were doing when these pix.

So, I wonder aloud here again about the whole zoo thing. Does having these little fellows in a zoo and having humans all around and such have anything to do with the momma lion turning them away? I love animals. Let’s put them back in their natural habitat. And if people want to study them…okay what’s to study. Leave them alone.

What do you think?

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Even if there are new pandas on the block born after the earthquake, not all is happy in panda land. It appears that three giant pandas are suffering from post-quake trauma. In a simple incident where a zookeeper tried to hand a bowl of milk to one panda, the metal bowl dropped and crashed making a loud noise and scaring the panda and two buddies away. It’s been a week, and the pandas are still, uncharacteristically, afraid of the zookeeper and his bowl.

Mei Qian and Qian Qian still need time to heal from the trauma inflicted by the 8.0-magnitude quake it is thought. The bears’ home was damaged during the quake. The three lived with 150 other pandas in the Wolong nature reserve. Six pandas went missing during the quake and one was found dead. Perhaps had the pandas not been confined to the preserve, they would have sensed the quake and went for safety. Did anyone consider that?

The three depressed and frightened pandas, all female, were found in a tree. They have been moved twice, once to escape the ongoing aftershocks. The pandas took their clumsy zookeeper with them to southern China’s Kunming. In Kunming, the playful bears still are frightened by thunder. Caretakers pat them and call them tender names to calm them down.

Okay, I’m afraid, too. Can some cute caretaker come take care of me, please?

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Remember the salmon skin bikini? If not, you should. I’ve been on the look out for one of these for some time now. Well, there’s a guy in China, 71-years old, who thinks he’s found a way to stay cool. Following through on an idea that he had more than 30 years ago, the man has started making shirts out of fish scales.

When his son caught a fish with thumb-nail-sized scales, he remembered the original idea. So…he spent 15 months attaching 14,000 fish scales to one of his shirts. FWIW, it would take me 15 months to count to 14,000. The result, the man says, is cool comfort in the oppressive summer heat. That, he says, made it worth the effort.

I don’t care how cheap labor in China is, if it takes 15 months and enough fish to supply 14,000 scales, I won’t be able to afford one.

This man’s effort reminds me of another Chinese dude who was able to do something with beer bottles that large companies everywhere and scientists are racking their brains to try and do. Solar energy from beer bottles? Okay, then…a shirt made from fish scales.

Where’s my camera when I need it? And why don’t these girls do their thing at a KFC near me, dang it? Topless demonstrators for PETA (People for Ethical Treatment of Animals) were spotted hanging outside a KFC joint in central Sydney.

Here birdie, birdie. Here birdie…

What you hiding there, honey? You got something to say? Then how about saying it out in the open? Other than the ladies that posed nude for the planet, PETA is trying the bare skin approach, too. Good luck girls.

Can I get your autograph?

Yo! Ladies. We have KFCs here in California. And, you know, there are no laws against going naked in San Francisco? I suppose if you went topless there, nobody would care. Well, nobody but me.

Police were called in to arrest the girls and detain them. I suppose there were no shortage of volunteers for that duty at the downtown Sydney police station.

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Four tiny kittens, known as prionailurus rubiginosus, were born at a zoo in Port Lympne Wild Animal Park in Kent.

The rusty spotted cats are about the size of a rat when fully grown and weigh a whopping 40 grams, about one third that of kittens of domestic cats.

The difference, these little guys don’t know how small they are.

In the wild, they are found in Sri Lanka and parts of India. They are also fearless.

“A female with kittens will defend them without thinking of herself. They will quite happily attack us – they are so small we have to be careful not to tread on them,” says one zoo keeper.

“In their own minds these cats are tigers – they think they are much bigger than they really are. They are quite fearless.”

These four kittens are part of a breeding program to ensure they are protected from any catastrophic event that might threaten their extinction.

Lemme see, that would be us trying to protect the fearless. From whom? Us, probably.

The cats will attack and eat anything they can catch not mindful that they might be dinner for some much larger creature. They are nocturnal so as to not be easy prey for birds and bigger cats.

Reminds me of the bumble bee. The bee doesn’t know he can’t fly and does it anyway. GP wonders what these little cats could do if we would just leave them alone.

What do you think of capturing animals to ‘protect’ them?

After seeing these pictures I remember childhood and the way I was hanging out with my friends. We used to walk and walk, with no set destination. Apparently that’s what wolf cubs do, too.

Bjørn and Birgit Sandberg were on a holiday at their cabin in Rendalen, Norway, when six wolf cubs – about two months old – paid them a surprising visit after feasting on a moose in the woods. “There’s clearly been a party here. There were only bones left” Bjørn Sandberg told Aftenposten.no on Tuesday.

They’re supposed to be the offspring of a wolf pair from Østerdalen, that wandered westward.

It was the first time Bjørn and Birgit saw wolves and though they were aware they may be adult wolves in the area they grabbed the camera and got all the six wild wolves pups in a sensational picture. First one in Norway.

Twelve-year-old giant panda, Guo Guo, who was relocated after May’s devastating earthquake in the Sichuan province of China gave birth to twin cubs on Sunday. She became the first panda to bear cubs since the disaster and the first to give birth around the globe this year.

The elder of the two small pandas weighs only 170grams.

Guo Guo was one of the six pandas evacuated from the Giant Panda Research Center in Hetaoping to breeding bases. After traveling more than 100km during gestation, the evacuation process turned out to be exhausting and Guo Guo got medical attention as soon as she arrived in the new shelter. Congratulations to the new mother which has also managed to give birth each year for the last three years.

And if you think pandas are cute, you are sure to get a kick out of these Pandas’ Sneezing Fits.

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In the seaside town of South Shields, in north east England, on King Street a greedy seagull enjoys a sandwich in the sky. How is that possible you may ask? Well, there’s a story, somehow similar (at least to some shoppers) to Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, ‘Birds’.

A 27-year-old woman, from Northumberland, was trying to eat her sandwich when a giant and “ruthless” seagull came from behind and managed to steal the tasty pieces of bread. She’s not the only one. More shoppers complained that they’ve been terrorized by seagulls that are trying to steal food from people walking on the streets.

‘These seagulls are so desperate for food it seems they’ll approach people to take food rather than fight for scraps on the floor’ said Maisie Harrison, 68, from Whiteleas.

The municipality used to spend money on proofing some of the buildings on King Street but their efforts were in vain. Just make sure you don’t have a snack with you when passing by or you’ll get “attacked”, too.

Is there another solution? You guys know anything?

Remember how horny Labord’s Chameleons are?

There’s a guy in China who’s not going to die young of violent sex and he’s blaming it on a vegetarian lifestyle. Or more precisely, that’s what his doctor is telling him. When the guy saw that friends of his were suffering from obesity, high blood pressure, coronary heart disease and diabetes he decided to become fit, the vegetarian way.

It worked, but … he also lost his sex drive. The doctors are telling him, “Animal fats are necessary for human beings to maintain nutritional balance. Sex hormones are affected by eating an exclusively vegetarian diet by virtue of the absence of animal fats necessary to stimulate them.”

Maybe this guy, who lives in China’s northern province of Heilongjiang (that’s cold country, southern Siberia cold where there is nothing else to do but, you know…) needs to get him a pet Labord Chameleon, eh? Vegetarian diets cutting into sex drive? I’m not sure.

Do you know the answer?

After spending most of its lifespan incubating inside its shell, a tiny chameleon that only lives in southwestern Madagascar, hatches, engages in brutal sex and then dies.

Image: Christopher J. Raxworthy

Real name Furcifer labordi or Labord’s chameleon, it’s one of the smallest known chameleons on Earth. It’s also become famous for being able to quadruple or quintuple its body size in just 60 days. Males are slightly bigger (up to 9cm) than females (up to 7cm).

Kris Karsten at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, US, studied the growth patterns, lifespans and behavior of these little fellows. He came out with some great facts that have been detailed in the July 1 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Apparently they hatch in synchrony in early November, for six-seven weeks they grow up to 0.1 inches a day (much faster than any known lizard) and reach maturity, mate and then before April they all die after losing strength – no exceptions.

Image: Daniel Rakotondravony

Just before dying the chameleon females burrow through about a half foot of sand to lay a dozen eggs that will again hatch in November, to continue the cycle.

“It is amazing to think that for most of the year, this chameleon species is represented only by developing eggs buried in the ground,” said Christopher J. Raxworthy, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Too much sex

After studying them for five seasons and seeing more than 400 F. labordi chameleons, Kris Karsten thinks that because of “violent sex” they lose much of their strength, this being the reason why they die so young. Karsten and his colleagues saw several falling out of trees for no apparent reason.

“These males will fight fiercely in long, rather drawn-out combats, and their courtship behaviour is also rather violent,” Karsten told New Scientist.

Most of the chameleons in Madagascar hibernate during the dry season to conserve energy, but not the Labord’s chameleon. Researchers are now trying to figure out why!