This eight-page report is a practical guide for law enforcement officials: “Distinguishing Real vs Fake Tiger Penises,” Bonnie C. Yates, Identification Guides for Wildlife Law Enforcement No. 6., 2005, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory, Ashland, Oregon. (Thanks to Silvan Urfer for bringing this to our attention.) The author reports: […]
Tag: tiger
Is Silver Vine the new Catnip? (recent study)
Effective though Catnip (Nepeta cataria) might be – in causing cats to sniff, roll over, and undulate the skin on their back (amongst other things) – it only affects about 50% of cats. And usually has little or no impact on Tigers. A new study in BMC Veterinary Research, March 2017, compares Catnip with Silver […]
Animal Fighters Speculation (c.1901)
“Supposing all the animals in the ‘Zoo’ at Regent’s Park [London] were to begin a fight to the death, who would be the ultimate victor?” – asked a syndicated item in The Mercury (Hobart, Tasmania) on Wednesday the 16th of January 1901. The article ran through the various fighting attributes of elephants, lions, tigers, deer, […]
Progress in Automatic Giraffe Recognition
The Forsyth / Fleck ‘Human Nude Detector’ system attracted widespread media attention late last century – featuring, for example, in the pages of Wired magazine. (Paper for Reference: Forsyth, D.A. and Fleck, M. M., “Automatic Detection of Human Nudes,” International Journal of Computer Vision , 32 , 1, 63-77, August, 1999). Less well publicised though […]
Tipu’s Tiger
Maggie Koerth-Baker, Boing-Boing’s ace science observer, is doing a series of essays about “My Favorite Museum Exhibit”. The Bishop of Durham’s rectum, on which we have spent an inordinate amount of time and space, because it has a curious back story, is there. (Well, actually, the Bishop’s bottom, what’s left of it, is in the […]
Statistical: tigers
A single statistic, in isolation, sometimes suggests a misleading part of a larger story. A February 12, 2008 Mongabay report supplies an example. We have highlighted the pertinent passages: 23 tigers were killed to supply parts seen in retail outlets surveyed during 2006 in 28 cities and towns across Sumatra, an island in Indonesia. “This […]