Tagged: animals

Some farmers market shoppers plan their visits like sorties, executed with military precision to purchase a set menu of products. Others head to market to learn.

Over the past decade and a half, thousands of market shoppers have learned how to grow butterfly and hummingbird gardens from Folsom’s Mizell family. School trips invariably bend Jim Mizell’s ear to learn about the size of plants and colors needed to attract our fluttering friends.

The latest paternity test at the national sanctuary for retired research chimpanzees confirms that Conan has overcome two vasectomies to father three babies.

Chimp Haven announced the results Monday.

Every male chimp must get a vasectomy before coming to the northwest Louisiana sanctuary. After Conan fathered a baby in 2007, his tubes were clipped again. After a Valentine's Day baby turned out to be his, every male chimp still interested in and living with females got a more complicated vasectomy.

The Louisiana State Animal Response Team has sent 360 bales of hay to St. Bernard Parish Animal Services to horses affected by Hurricane Isaac.

Parish officials said Monday the hay was divided between Poydras Arena and a farm where displaced horses from Plaquemines Parish were being housed. It was also distributed from those two locations to St. Bernard residents whose horses were affected by the storm, which hit the state last month.

A female baby giraffe born earlier this week at the Baton Rouge Zoo has died.

Officials say the giraffe calf looked fairly healthy Wednesday, nursing as she stood with her mother in the grass.

When zookeepers checked on the giraffe Thursday morning, Assistant Director and General Curator Sam Winslow tells The Advocate the calf looked weak and died a short time later.

The cause of death is unknown and a necropsy will be performed. Winslow said the full necropsy results should back in two to three weeks.

The baby giraffe was the 19th born at the zoo.

A deaf dolphin found stranded in March near Grand Isle is heading for Gulfport, Miss.

Suzanne Smith, rescue coordinator at the Audubon Nature Institute, says the 2 ½-year-old dolphin will be taken Tuesday to the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies because he would be unable to survive in the wild.

She says deafness is probably the reason the 6 ½-foot-long marine mammal was stranded on a mudflat where researchers found him on March 6. He was deaf in the frequencies of dolphin sonar and was severely sunburned.