Mental Floss

PETS

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Whenever I cry, my beagle, Sadie, jumps into my lap and nudges me with her nose. Is Sadie’s intuitiveness unique, or can dogs really understand human emotions?

Meghan Holohan
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The generic name “Pol” for a parrot can be traced back to England since at least the early 1600s. In his 1606 comedy Volpone, Renaissance playwright—and close friend of William Shakespeare—Ben Jonson assigned many of the characters animal personas which r

Kara Kovalchik


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If you’ve ever seen a cat wiggling around in its sleep, or come across three different-sized beds after eating porridge in a bear family’s inexplicably furnished home, you’ve probably wondered if animals are capable of dreaming.

Alex Watt






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For humans, sudden gyrations of the head and neck—whether they’re from car accidents, rollercoaster rides, or chiropracty gone awry—can tear blood vessel linings in the neck, leading to clots that can cause stroke. Not so in owls, which can quickly rotate

Erin McCarthy
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I could write a book on the strange stuff my cat does, but when I switched her food from dry to wet recently, she started doing something really weird: She’d maneuver her way around her food dish, pawing the ground as she went. Her behavior was odd enough

Erin McCarthy
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Every dog seems to have one—that special spot on his belly or flank that, when scratched, sends his back leg kicking like crazy. It’s odd and amusing, especially because some dogs seems to be as confused by it as their owners are. What’s going

Matt Soniak


We’ve seen bookstore cats, animals trained to sniff out bombs and heroic dogs, but now we're here to focus on animals who have served, or are currently serving, their local police departments. 1. Momo, Nara Police Department, Japan http://www.youtube.com

Jill Harness


At some point in the last few thousand years, someone in India or Southeast Asia decided to try catching one of the wild fowl than ran through the jungles and roosted up in the trees. We don’t know exactly what that person was intending, but the bird prob

Matt Soniak




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Dog turds are stealth weapons. People with 20/20 vision often fail to notice them until they appear hours later, on the bottom of a shoe. How the heck is someone who can’t see supposed to track down and eliminate these sidewalk scourges, then?

Matt Soniak