List of unusual animal anecdotes

This article provides a list of unusual animal anecdotes - unique or particularly absurd circumstances involving animals - recorded throughout history. This bestiary focuses mainly on exotic animals such as tigers, lions, crocodiles and monkeys but also includes more ordinary animals when the circumstances are especially unusual.

To be included on this list, an anecdote needs to be sourced, preferably by a primary source and should in some way be extraordinarily strange or notable. As anecdotes, they are commonly told through sources with some sense of a narrative rather than a simple statement of facts. They may not appear on other articles due to difficulty of categorizing.

Historical
In Rome

*252 BC: The first elephants seen in Rome were captured after the victory over the Carthaginians and looked upon with contempt. Approximately 140 of them were paraded into the Circus Maximus, whipped into a frenzy in order for the Roman people to properly hate them and then killed with javelins.

*65 BC: When the giraffe was introduced to Rome, it was called "camelopard" because it appeared to be a combination of the two known species. The scientific name for the giraffe remains Giraffa camelopardalis.

*61 BC: On September 19th, consul Marcus Piso pitted 100 bears against 100 Numidian tribesmen.

*58 BC: A hippopotamus appeared in Rome alongside 5 crocodiles in the games of Marcus Scaurus in a special channel of water made to hold them.

*50 BC: Lucullus built a fish pond that actually cut through a mountain near Naples in order to allow sea water to flow in. After his death, the fish from the pond were sold for 4,000,000 sesterces. Because of the ostentatiousness of his plan, Pompey referred to Lucullus during his life as "Xerxes in Roman dress."

*48 BC: Mark Antony is said to have broken lions to a yoke and according to Pliny, was the first person in Rome to harness them to a chariot. He did this after the decisive battle in which Caesar defeated Pompey, in part to symbolize that wild spirits can bow to a master.

*2 BC: On May 12th, Emperor Augustus held games that featured gladiators and the killing of over 260 lions.

*39 AD: Incitatus was the name of Roman emperor Caligula's favored horse. Some have indicated that the horse was attended to by 18 servants, and was fed oats mixed with gold flake; according to Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Incitatus had a stable of marble, with an ivory manger, purple blankets and a collar of precious stones. Suetonius wrote also that Caligula planned to make Incitatus a consul. Caligula even procured him a wife, a mare named Penelope. It has also been said Caligula claimed his horse to be a "combination of all the gods" and to be worshiped as such.

*39: Caligula performed a spectacular stunt by ordering a temporary floating bridge to be built using ships as pontoons, stretching for over two miles from the resort of Baiae to the neighboring port of Puteoli. It was said that the bridge was to rival that of Persian King Xerxes' crossing of the Hellespont. then proceeded to ride his favorite horse, Incitatus, across, wearing the breastplate of .

"A killer whale was actually seen in the harbor of Ostia, locked in combat with the emperor Claudius. She had come when he was completing the construction of the harbor, drawn there by the wreck of a ship bringing leather hides from Gaul, and feeding there over a number of days, had made a furrow in the shallows: the waves had raised up such a mound of sand that she couldn't turn around at all, and while she was pursuing her banquet as the waves moved it shorewards, her back stuck up out of the water like the overturned keel of a boat. The emperor ordered that a large array of nets be stretched across the mouths of the harbor, and setting out in person with the praetorian cohorts gave a show to the Roman people, soldiers showering lances from attacking ships, one of which I saw swamped by the beast's waterspout and sunk.' …"— From "On Natural History" by Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD)

*77: Pliny tells the story of a literate elephant who could write the phrase "I, the elephant, wrote this" in the sand with its trunk. Pliny, who felt that elephants were exceptional learners, wrote of one who was so embarrassed by its inability to master its lessons that it stayed up late to practice alone.

*117: The Roman emperor Hadrian was a passionate hunter. In northwest Asia, he founded and dedicated a city to commemorate a she-bear he killed. It is documented that in Egypt he and his lover Antinous killed a lion. Later, he decapitated a running ostrich with a specially designed dart and afterwards carried the bleeding head of the dead bird and his sword over to the section where the Senators sat and gesticulated as though they were next. On another occasion, Commodus killed 3 elephants on the floor of the arena by himself. Finally, Commodus killed a giraffe with his own hands, which Gibbon comically describes as the "the most useless of the large quadrupeds" in a footnote.

*1514: As a gift, King Manuel I of Portugal gave a white elephant named Hanno to Pope Leo X. The Pope loved the elephant and featured Hanno in two processions. It was said that when the elephant saw Pope Leo it would genuflect loudly and could "cry like a woman and shed tears." After two years in Rome, the elephant fell ill. He was given a purgative containing gold, but died shortly after with the Pope by his side. Leo X commissioned Raphael to create a life-sized painting of Hanno above the animal's tomb and wrote a eulogy to commemorate him.

*1514: Pope Leo X also possessed a cheetah which was trained as like a hunting dog. The cheetah made its debut in Rome riding on a horse alongside a procession consisting of princes and noblemen. Cheetahs have been trained to hunt in other instances; Rudolf II had one himself. They are led on leashes with their head covers, similar to hunting falcons, and rewarded when they catch prey.

In history
* 800 BC: Ashurnasirpal II writes in a proclamation "I slew 450 might lions... I cut down 200 ostriches like caged birds and 30 elephants I cast into the pit."
* 344 BC: Bucephalus, a horse, was offered to King Philip of Macedonia for purchase. After dismissing the horse as unmanageable and impossible to tame, his ten-year old son Alexander (who would later become Alexander the Great) offered to pay for it if he failed to tame it. According to Plutarch, Alexander spoke soothingly to the horse and turned it away from its shadow, and so tamed the horse. The horse accompanied Alexander into many battles. It died at the Battle of the Hydaspes between the ages of 28 and 30, a long life even by today's standards. After its death, Alexander founded a city, Bucephela in the horse's name.
* 323 BC Alexander the Great and Aristotle were said to be passionate about animals and natural history. During his campaigns, Alexander ordered his new subjects to report anything of zoological interest to Aristotle. Also, the surveyors, scientists and botanists — namely the Greek philosopher's nephew Callisthenes — sent their information back to Aristotle. This may have been how he was able to write his History of Animals.
* 312 BC: Ptolemy I staged a parade led by 24 chariots drawn by elephants and a procession of lions, leopards, panthers, camels, antelopes, wild asses, ostriches, a bear, a giraffe and a rhinoceros. According to scholars, most of the animals were in pairs — as many as eight pairs of ostriches — and though the ordinary chariots were likely led by a single elephant, others which carried a golden statue of Alexander may have been led by as many as four.
* 1261: The first giraffe brought to Europe was a present to Fredrick II of the Two Sicilies in exchange for a white bear that he had given to the sultan of Egypt.
* 1470: Leonardo Da Vinci not only believed in Unicorns but wrote on how they could be captured. Believing in their "lack of temperance", he wrote that a young virgin could be used as bait. When the unicorn is overcome with desire and goes to sit in the lap of a young maiden, he believed that hunters could take it. Da Vinci later sketched a profile of a woman and a leashed unicorn kneeling next to her, presumably tamed by her touch.

* 1500's: Bear-baiting was popular in England until the 19th century. From the 16th century, many herds of bear were maintained for baiting. In its best-known form, arenas for this purpose were called bear-gardens, consisting of a circular high fenced area, the "pit", and raised seating for spectators. A number of well-trained hunting dogs were set upon a chained bear, being replaced as they tired or were wounded or killed. The main bear-garden in London was the Paris Garden at Southwark. Henry VIII was a fan and had a pit constructed at Whitehall. Elizabeth I was also fond of the entertainment; it featured regularly in her tours. In 1575, a baiting display for her had 13 bear, and when an attempt was made to ban baiting on Sundays, she overruled Parliament.
* 1500's: Englishman created a breed of dogs to do household work, specifically to turn meat on a spit. These Turnspit Dogs ran in a wheel, powering a rotisserie loaded with slow-roasting meat and which spun over an open flame. Now extinct, a few stuffed, preserved specimens remain.
* 1516: King Manuel I of Portugal sent a as a gift to Pope Leo X on board a ship. Its journey was ravaged by horrible storms. The ship struck rocks off the coast of Italy and was quickly shredded and sunk. As the crew swam to safety, the rhinoceros drowned, chained to the ship. Oftentimes, the rooster's legs would break, in which case it was supported by blocks, increasing the length of the game. Variations include "goose squealing", where the rooster is replaced with a goose, and "cock thrashing", where the rooster is put in a pit and blindfolded participants try to hit it with a stick. Utopia author Thomas More referred to his ability to cast a cokstele as a boy.
* 1630: Hanksen was a female elephant that toured through Europe, demonstrating circus tricks. She could wave a flag, fire a pistol, strike a drum, hold out her front feet, pinch money from pockets, put on a hat, carry a bucket of water, and pick up coins from the ground.
* 1816: One of the first elephants imported to America, named Old Bet, was ambushed and murdered by a man named Daniel Davis in Alfred, Maine while traveling between circus appearances. Davis was jailed for two days for trespassing, then released and never tried. Old Bet's owner, Hack Baily responded by building a three story memorial called the Elephant Hotel which now serves as a town hall.
* 1835: In the early 19 century, apes were still foreign to Britain. Queen Victoria called them "frightful, and painfully and disagreeably human." The first ape to arrive in London, a male named Tommy, was dressed in a sailor suit. The second, a female named Jenny, was put in a dress. Both were taught to eat with spoons.
* 1877: Jack, a baboon, performed railroad duties for his paraplegic owner. In addition to household chores, Jack learned how to operate the levers that set the railroad signals and the tower controls that opened and closed switches, effectively performing the duties of a human signalman.
* 1900s: On a trip West, Theodore Roosevelt killed more than 119 animals in less than 30 days, including a grizzly bear "right through the brain" and a jack rabbit "cut nearly in two."
* 1929: When the hills around Hearst Castle caught on fire, the groundskeepers ran from cage to cage freeing the animals in William Randolf Hearst's private zoo. One of his employees wrote in their diary that while most of the animals immediately ran away, Hearst's pet tapir ambled to the Neptune Pool where it swam and rested until the fires were put out.
* 1930: Researchers digging beneath the London Tower unearthed the skulls of two lions, 19 dogs, and one leopard. They were likely part of the "lion tower" built by King Edward I in 1276.
* 1964: Jack Ruby the killer of U.S. President John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, had a dachshund named Sheba who he often referred to as "his wife."
* 1989: When the King of Thailand banned logging, the price of timber soared and led to guerrilla and illegal deforesting. Because heavy machinery is too noisy, poachers used elephants to drag and lift heavy logs. In attempt to speed up the efforts, many were fed amphetamines and later became addicted. Thailand's zoos and veterinary facilities received an influx of ill elephants suffering from anorexia, hypertension, blurred vision and gastric ulcers.
* 2001: The state of Texas passed the Dangerous Wild Animal Law that banned the ownership of tigers, lions, bear and alligators. At the time of its passing, Texas estimated that there were over 5,000 privately owned wild tigers in the state and more than 60,000 across the country. He often fought them or baited them against other animals in large festivals for visiting Popes or dignitaries that traveled to Florence.

*1900: Upon arriving at Archduke Franz Ferdinand's country seat, château Konopiste, on a semi-official visit, Wadl and Hexl, Kaiser Wilhelm II's famous pair of ferocious dachshunds, promptly proceeded to do away with one of the Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince's priceless golden pheasants, thereby almost causing an international incident.

*1806: Lewis and Clark presented President Thomas Jefferson with two bear cubs as a gift, his only listed presidential pets besides a mockingbird

*1824: As an attempt to soften France's alliance with Greece in the Greek War of Independence, Mehmet Ali Pasha, the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, presented Charles X of France with a female giraffe, only the third seen in Europe at that time. After transporting the giraffe to Marsailles via boat (with a hole cut through the deck to fit her neck), she embarked on a 900 km walk to Paris. Covered with a two-part yellow coat and shoes, the giraffe was a spectacle in each town she passed through. Upon her arrival to Paris, she was greeted by a crowd of 100,000, approximately one-eighth the population of Paris at that time. When she died in Paris 18 years later, her corpse was stuffed with straw and displayed in the foyer of the Jardin des Plantes before being moved to the museum at La Rochelle, where it remains.

*1934: City planner Robert Moses redesigned and upgraded the Central Park Zoo as a personal favor to his patron, former New York governor Al Smith. After the governor had fallen from power, Moses heard he was depressed and lonely, prone to cages at the zoo while talking to the animals. Smith was horrified to learn that in case of a fire, the animals were to be shot rather than rescued and was said to have deeply missed the small menagerie he'd kept at the governor's mansion.

*1993: United States Republican Congressman Dan Burton publicly questioned the use of White House staff and taxpayer dollars to answer letters addressed to President Bill Clinton's cat Socks. He later admitted that this was a "mistake" and blamed one of his staff members. The Romans later fought successfully against the elephants by setting squealing pigs among them, which had been greased and lit on fire.

*162 BC: At the Battle of Beth-zechariah, Eleazar Maccabeus died while attempting to kill a royal War elephant. Seeing one in special armor, he presumed it belonged to the Seleucid King Antiochus V and so, charging in to battle, Eleazar rushed underneath the elephant, thrust a spear into its belly, and when it collapsed upon him, he died with it.

*1942: An orphaned bear named Wojtek became part of the Polish army when adopted by soldiers. The orphaned bear was found by an Iranian boy and sold to the soldiers for a few cans of meat. As the bear grew, he was used to carry mortar rounds in battle. The only way for Wojtek to travel with them was to officially enlist him - so he was given a name, rank and number. He traveled with the army to Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and southern Italy. The bear was fed with fruits, marmalade, honey and syrup, and was often rewarded with beer, which became his favorite drink. He also enjoyed eating cigarettes. Years later, after the war, Wojtek was stationed in the Edinberg Zoo, where he became a popular attraction. Polish soldiers visited him, and upon hearing their Polish accents, Wojtek would sit on his backside and shake his head, reportedly his way of asking for a cigarette.

*1942: In World War II, the Soviet Union trained German shepherds as "anti-tank dogs." The dogs were trained to find bones underneath tanks. They were then starved and deployed in battle with explosives attached in a backpack. When the dogs approached German tanks in search of food, the explosives were detonated.

*1945: One of the lesser known side-plots in World War II was the rescue of the Lipizzan horses, a rare breed exclusive to Vienna and associated with the Spanish Riding School. During World War II, Alois Podhajsky, leader of the Spanish Riding School, relocated the horses to St. Martin in Upper Austria due to bombing raids in Vienna. Although safe from bombing attacks, there was little food for animals or people, and starving refugees sometimes attempted to steal the horses, viewing them as a source of meat. In 1945, the United States Army took control of St. Martins. General George S. Patton of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry Group had been a fellow equestrian competitor with Podhajsky in the Olympic Games prior to the war. The two men renewed their acquaintance, and the Americans agreed to place the stallions under the protection of the United States until they could safely be returned to the people of Austria after the war.

*2008: German shepherds are trained by British special forces to jump from aircraft. They will be used in Iraq and Afghanistan to seek out insurgent's hideouts with the use of cameras attached to their head.

*2008: Nils Olav, an emperor penguin at Scotland's Edinburgh Zoo, was knighted for longtime service as the mascot of the Norwegian King's Guard. In the formal ceremony, Nils walked through rows of soldiers, stopping occasionally to peer at the soldier's uniforms, before having the king's sword dropped on both flippers.

*2008: In the midst of the war with Georgia, Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin took a visit to a wildlife reserve in Siberia to observe how tigers are monitored. On this visit, an Ussuri tiger escaped from its restraints and threatened those in immediate vicinity, including a television camera crew. Before the tiger could do any damage, however, Putin intervened, shooting the tiger with a tranquilizer gun.

In science

*1626: Francis Bacon died of pneumonia contracted while filling a chicken with ice in order to prove that freezing preserves food.

*1787: French naturalist Comte de Buffon asserted that the climate of North America with its "stagnant waters" and "unproductive soil" would have weakened the stature of its primitive animals. Because of this, he said that the country would have had almost no large mammals. These remarks incensed Thomas Jefferson, who immediately dispatched twenty soldiers to the New Hampshire woods to find a bull moose for Buffon as proof of the "stature and majesty of American quadrapeds."

*1820's: Reverend William Buckland, the renowned geologist who was the first person to catalog a dinosaur fossil, claimed to have eaten his way through the animal kingdom: zoophagy. The most distasteful items were mole and bluebottle; panther, crocodile and mouse were among the other dishes noted by guests. He is said to have found the mole to be particularly disgusting.

*1825: Richard Owen, who first used the word dinosauria, was such an expert on animal anatomy that he was granted right of first refusal on any freshly dead animal at the London Zoo. His wife once arrived home to find the carcass of a newly deceased rhinoceros in her front hallway.

*1960: Oliver, a chimpanzee, sparks controversy for its bizarre combination of human and ape morphological features. He possessed a flatter face than chimpanzees, walks bipedally, and prefers human females over chimpanzee females. She is the longest-lived vertebrate on record.

*1995: A team of wandering scientists in Riwoche Valley of Tibet stumbled upon an undiscovered breed of tiny, ancient horses. The horses unseen since pre-historic cave paintings were still in widespread usage among the villagers. It was found with laying on a rock and the bone measurements are among the largest ever recorded for a male lion. The wear on the teeth of the animal indicate that it was very old and likely kept in captivity until its burial in the 1400 BC. The frilled shark is sometimes referred to as a "living fossil", due to the fact that fossils of the species have been dated back to 800 million years ago. It is rarely viewed alive as its natural habitat is up to 1,000 feet underwater, deeper than humans can dive.

*2008: Nearly 30 hungry bear surround and attack a team of Russian geologists in the town of Kamchatka. The scientists were trapped in their survey site as the bear laid siege until they were given permission to shoot and kill them.

*2008: A polar bear who swam over 200 miles from Greenland to Iceland was shot immediately upon landing in front of a horrified crowd of 60 people. Authorities didn't wish to wait for a tranquilizer dart to arrive. It was the first polar bear to appear in Iceland since their disappearance from the country.

*2008: A 3,300 pound stingray was caught off the coast of Eastern China. The stingray, which measured 16 1/2 feet in width, is believed to be one of the largest stingrays ever caught.

In religion
* 943 BC: The Ancient Egyptian city of Bubastis is built as a city of worship for the feline-goddess Bast. Large parts of the city are dedicated to tombs for cats. In 1888, an Egyptian farmer accidentally discovered a large tomb hosting tens of thousands of mummified cats.
* 0: In the second book of Kings, Elisha, a biblical prophet, traveled to Beth-el after healing the waters of Jericho. As he was traveling, children mocked him saying "Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head." Elijah cursed them and two she-bears came out of the wood and killed all forty-two children.
* 1254: Louis IX gave Henry III an elephant as a gift. Henry organized elaborate plans to build a house 40 feet wide and 20 feet deep at the royal menagerie in the Tower of London. The elephant, believed to be one of the first seen in England, was given a diet of prime cuts of beef and expensive red wine. The elephant died in 1257 after drinking too much red wine.
* 1514: Pope Leo X, the owner of the short-lived Hanno, had an extensive menagerie before he got the elephant. When he was installed in the Vatican, he brought with him civet cats, leopards, bear and monkeys.He kept them near the Cortile del Belvedere. Leo also imported Renaissance Rome's first chameleon for his zoo for the purposes of his "delight." ) The courtyard, cages and sloping hill next to the Vatican is where Leo kept almost all his animals, including Hanno and multiple lions (a common state gift), all at papal expense. The tigers are fed with cooked meat, which keeps them from developing a taste for blood.

Cultural
In pop culture
*1924: William Randolf Hearst was an avid lover of dachshunds. He had as many as 70 of them in kennels at his castle in San Simeon. When his own dachshund Helena died, he eulogized her in his "In The News" column.

*1969: Two Australians living in London, John Randall and "Ace" Bourke, purchased a lion named Christian from Harrods department store. The lion lived in the basement of their furniture shop and they often drove it around in their Bentley. After a year, Christian had grown to 185 pounds, too big for the basement. His owners sent him to Kenya as part of a conservation program. After Christian was successfully rehabilitated in the wild, Randall and Bourke visited Kenya to see Christian. The video of their reunion became a internet phenomenon with over 6 million views.

*1992: Damien Hirst, a British artist, preserved a 14 foot tiger shark in a formaldehyde-filled vitrine and titled it The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. The piece sold for $8 million dollars in 2004. The shark began to deteriorate and had to be replaced, leading to a debate about whether it constituted a new piece of art.

*1992: Artist Jeff Koons created a 43 foot tall sculpture of a puppy called that featured 70,000 fresh flowers and 25 tons of soil. The modern art experiment was an immediate sensation and was eventually displayed in Rockefeller Center nearly a decade after its completion.

*2003: A female wild turkey named Zelda has lived in New York's Battery Park since mid-2003. It is presumed that she entered Manhattan's north end from the Bronx and then journeyed south (downtown). During Spring 2003, there were several turkey sightings in Manhattan at points progressively further south, all prior to Zelda's taking up residence in the park. In 2004, she ventured out of the park to Tribeca before being captured and returned to Battery Park.

*2004: Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch featured a zoo with giraffes, elephants, snakes, orangutans, tigers and crocodiles. Animal rights organization PETA accused Jackson of neglect, but an investigation by the US Department of Agriculture ruled that the animals were living in appropriate conditions.

*2006: The lions in Disneyworld's Safari Adventure ride are kept out on Pride Rock by strategically located air-conditioning that keeps the sunny area cool.

*2007: Reggie, an alligator believed to have been raised in illegal captivity, became feral and eventually took residence in South Bay, Los Angeles. "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin pledged that if the gator ever emerged, he and his crew would go to the lake and attempt a capture. Irwin's death in 2006 prevented this from happening, though Reggie was later caught and moved to the Los Angeles Zoo.

*2008: Artist Damien Hirst listed a collection of animals in formaldehyde including a zebra, unicorn, bull's heart, shark and a calf with golden horns and hooves for sale at around $65 million dollars.

*2008: Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion hosts a private zoo with monkeys, rabbits, pheasants, flamingos, parrots and exotic birds. It is the only private residence in Los Angeles County with a zoo permit.

In literature
*1957: Author Jorge Luis Borges wrote The Book of Imaginary Beings. The book models medieval bestiaries except that every animal in the book is fictional or mythological. The metafiction work speaks scientifically about dragons, axhandle hounds, hippogriffs, krakens, spinxs and unicorns, complete with footnotes and sources.

*1971: On the final page of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Thompson calls his attorney and demands that he order an albino Doberman because Denver is a "national clearing house for stolen Dobermans." He also inquires about buying an ape from a man at Circus Circus for $750.

*1984: In Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City the second person narrator breaks into the office of a literary magazine similar to The New Yorker and releases a wild ferret in his boss's office that he'd purchased from an exotic animal dealer off the street.

*2006: Cormac McCarthy's The Road features a scene where the nameless characters collect hundreds of snakes, pour gasoline, and set them on fire. After watching them burn, the group simply disbands and disappears.

Bizarre
*1916: A circus elephant in Tennessee named Mary was sentenced to death by its owner as punishment for killing a circus employee. The elephant was hanged by the neck from a railcar-mounted industrial crane. The first attempt resulted in a snapped chain, causing Mary to fall and break her hip. The severely wounded elephant died during a second attempt and was buried beside the tracks.

*1935: Hachiko, an Akita dog, belonged to , a professor in the agriculture department at the University of Tokyo. Every morning, the dog saw his master off at the front step, and then waited for him at the nearest railroad station when his master was due to return. In 1925, Ueno died of a cerebral hemorrhage while at the University and never made it home. The dog waited at the station until midnight, and then returned the next day and waited again. It did this every day for 11 years, until it died in 1934. The dog so touched passers-by, that a bronze statue was erected at Shibuya Station in Hachiko's memory.

*1945: After having its head cut off by its owner, a rooster miraculously continued to live for over 18 months, during which time it toured as a sideshow attraction known as Mike the Headless Chicken.

*2000: A small city in Northern Spain was forced to abandon its tradition of tossing a goat from a belfry after participants were threatened with a $15,000 fine.

*2000: In Australia, a rhesus monkey named Johnnie drove a tractor as part of a sheep-farm.

*2003: A domesticated badger named Boris went on a two-day rampage in England, attacking five people. One man needed surgery and two skin grafts to repair the damage done by Boris' bites. At one point, he forced two police officers -- who were trying to capture him -- to retreat back to the safety of their patrol car.

*2003: Police recovered a 400 pound Bengal Tiger and 3 foot alligator from a Harlem apartment after receiving an anonymous tip that stated "someplace in the city, there was a large wild animal." The owner later sued the city for entering his residence without a search warrant.

*2003: In a response to illegal exotic animal cases in the city, New York Post reporter Al Guart purchased a lion cub online as part of an attempted expose. The cub was likely weened too early and when it began having breathing problems, he dropped it off at wildlife reserve in Cleveland.

*2004: A blue and yellow macaw named "Charlie" causes a media frenzy when it is reported that it once belonged to Winston Churchill. Believed to be the oldest parrot in England at 104 years old, Charlie's favorite sayings are "Fuck Hitler!" and "Fuck the Nazis!" Churchill's daughter denied that the parrot ever belonged to her father.

*2008: Police recovered a three year-old lion from a Romanian man's backyard when his neighbor called the police after hearing a roar. They also found three deer and two peacocks.

*2007: A prostitution village in Borneo employed an orangutan named Pony as a sex slave. According to Michelle Desilets, Director of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation: "If a man walked near her, she would turn herself around, present herself, and start gyrating and going through the motions."

*2008: After a Colorado man committed suicide in a remote wooded area, his dog kept watch over the body for six weeks. The dog, a German shepherd named Cash, survived by hunting mice and rabbits.

*2008: Off the Australian coast, Colin, a baby humpback whale formed a strong attachment to a yacht that it believed to be its mother, following it everywhere and attempting to suckle from it. It was later discovered that Colin was a female, thus renamed Colleen in the media. The whale was later put down.

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