More than two years after the launch
of Guardian Cities, it
seems high time for a round-up of all the animal-related stories that have kept
us amused along the way. Here’s our top 10 – now tell us yours
Venkman, named after one of the Ghostbusters,
guards the grain at the Empirical brewery in Chicago
Thursday 9 June
201607.30 BSTLast modified on Thursday 9 June 201613.27 BST
Four feral cats, named after the
original Ghostbusters,
are being “employed” in a Chicago brewery to guard the grain from rats. In
exchange, they are paid a daily rate in the only currency they understand: dry
cat food.
As Medill
Reports Chicago explains, the owners of the Empirical brewery in
Chicago decided to employ these cats, rather than pest control companies,
because they are both cheaper and, to quote verbatim, “adorable”.
The programme is part of a wider
strategy to release 3,500 feral cats to deal with Chicago’s unaccountably
virulent rat problem. Chicago is apparently the“rattiest”
city in the US.
That same charity, Tree House, is
also raising funds to build a “cat house”: a
large apartment building in which 200 cats would live alongside a vet and other
feline-specific facilities. Naturally, Tree House has produced a reality TV
show to drum up cash for this initiative – mainly featuring cats behaving
cattily towards each other.
Fur flies during the Real Tree
House Cats of Chicago
If all this makes you think that
Chicago is undergoing a kind of collective delusion brought on by those
parasites that supposedly live in cat litter and embed themselves into the
brain stems of their hosts, to slowly shift human behaviour over time in pro-cat
ways, all we can observe is that it’s not just Chicago, or cats.
Increasingly, wild animals are making their mark on urban environments in a
host of new and inventive ways. Behold ...
Pigeons with backpacks
In London, pigeons have been
equipped with little backpacks to
measure air pollution. The ones over Victoria Park wear Fjallraven. No, not
really.
Vultures with Go-Pros
Lima, Peru has a rubbish dumping
problem so topographically dynamic that it actually needs to be mapped
aerially. So what better animal to track garbage mounds from the skies
(caw!) than a vulture?
Lima’s black vultures,
or gallinazo, are also large enough to wear Go-Pro video cameras, and
well-trained enough by Alfredo Correa at Lima’s Huachipa zoo to return with
said cameras.
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