animals (Page 8)

Biologists who study animal behavior are becoming convinced that all mammals have a moral code of conduct, not just primates (like us) and more advanced species. Anne Strieber can attest to this! And why have some animals traditionally become tamed, while others haven’t. It turns out our pets have a “tameness” gene.

US ecologist Marc Bekoff believes that morality is “hard-wired” into the brains of all mammals and are the “social glue” that allows aggressive and competitive animals to live together in groups (even humans can’t always do that!)
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SARS and bird flu aren’t the only diseases that humans can catch from animals. Between 2,000 and 2,005, around 50 million people caught diseases from animals such as dogs, cattle, chickens and mosquitoes, and almost 80,000 of them died. Sometimes animals pass diseases between species. And it works both ways: some HUMAN diseases are killing animals.

Jeanna Bryner writes in LiveScience.com that diseases that humans catch from animals are called zoonotic illnesses. Netherlands researcher Jonathan Heeney says that zoonotic illnesses seem to be increasing, and there are no vaccines for most of them. Heeney thinks that doctors and veterinarians need to work together to solve this problem.
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When your dog gets sick, you take him to the vet, where he’s given some medicine. But the drugs your dog is taking could be sensed by other dogs, and since dogs are pack animals that rely on their noses, this could turn him into a social outcast. In order to prevent this, we need to understand how animals think.
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Long ago, our ancestors may have become human to get away from snakes. They may have left the water in order get away from poisonous fish! There are actually more poisonous fish than poisonous snakes. Biologists have now identified 1,200 species of venomous fish (there are also over 1,500 types of poisonous lizards).

Robert Roy Britt writes in LiveScience.com that the number venomous fish tallied in the new study is six times previous estimates. More than 50,000 people are poisoned by fish bites every year, and some of them actually die from them.Poisonous fish live in all bodies of water, from streams to oceans, and at all depths. Most of them are in the tropic, although there are a few in California.
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