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The other night I was watching a bear rip the flesh off another bear and it was pretty awful.  Turns out the male bear wanted to mate with a female bear but she was fending him off while another female bear cozied up to him. The female bear he wanted got mad at the other female, so she charged her, and when the male bear got wind of this, he killed the other female.  Then the first female decided to mate with him.  Guess she likes her bears manly. Oy. None of that seemed fair to me.  Yet a new study has found that h umans aren’t the only species to react strongly to actions they consider unfair. A similar drive for fairness in monkeys and some dogs has been observed, newswise.com reports. Notice, they don't say bears. Domestic dogs are more concerned with the quantity of treats doled out by a trainer than whether the trainer distributes them fairly, according to Alexandra Horowitz, PhD, of Barnard College. In her study,  dogs had to select a “fair” or “u...

I was really disappointed to read this.  But a new study has found that animals do not improve well-being and care of patients in hospitals and other places that provide healthcare, according to newswise.com. "If you speak with most people they'll say it's a good thing for animals such as dogs and cats to be taken into hospitals, so that patients can derive some form of therapeutic effect from their association with the animals," the Web site quotes lead author  Professor Anna Chur-Hansen , Head of the  School of Psychology  at the University of Adelaide in Australia. But the truth of the matter is that this has just not been proven.  The study found not enough scientific data to say either way whether the presence of animals, though calming and appreciated, really do provide any actual healthcare benefits. "The assumption is that these programs are beneficial – and from the little evidence available they are likely to be – but no-one has yet fully assess...

Say it ain't so!  Max and Ruby!  Curious George.  The three little pigs. The very reason we love them so is now the same one scientists say actually harms our kids. Giving animals human characteristics can lead to "less factual learning"  but also influences "children’s reasoning about animals." Does this mean they'll grow up to pull the wings off birds?  No, of course not.  But researchers also say  that young readers are more likely to "attribute human behaviors and emotions to animals when exposed to books with anthropomorphized animals than books depicting animals realistically," according to newswise.com. “Books that portray animals realistically lead to more learning and more accurate biological understanding,” the Web site quotes lead author Patricia Ganea, assistant professor with the University of Toronto’s Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development. “We were surprised to find that even the older children in our study we...