Hero rats

Training rats to locate landmines (FT site registration required).

More things I like

I really want some of these! (Via Brent. It seems reasonable, doesn't it? Two cats and a small herd of pygmy goats: I think really they would be better pets than the capybaras....)

Requiem for the dragon lady

The other set of tabs I've had open on my computer for many days now: obituaries for Anne McCaffrey.  Oh, how I loved her books at age eleven and twelve - especially the Harper Hall trilogy, but really the Pern books more generally, and I think I must have read everything she published, at least if I could get my hands on a copy.  I still think I should have a clutch of fire lizards as pets!  It is the end of an era for me now, with Anne McCaffrey and Dick Francis representing the two pillars of my early adolescent light reading...

Postscript

My favorite animal that I saw in Costa Rica was neither indigenous nor wild. We were sitting at a roadside place eating tipico for lunch and something caught our eye: a little boy walking along the side of the road with the most adorable little black piglet tucked under his arm! The woman he was walking with had another one (each was wrapped in a bandana), and they came over and let us hold them ourselves; NB these were not rustic pigs, they were pigs bred for the pet market, our guide gathered that they cost about $85 each and wouldn't grow to be very large. These little pigs were the cutest things you ever saw! I wanted one desperately...

(There were also any number of appealing dogs wandering around - pets, but untethered pets - dogs of all shapes and sizes, and even a cat or two, including a slightly battle-scarred gray-and-white cat that seemed to live at the Hotel Fonda Vela. Costa Rica is a nation of animal lovers!)

Furry things

The taxidermy of Walter Potter.