and he's got a ticket...
Two more light-hearted articles caught my eye in the press this week. One was a Guardian editorial praising Casper, a commuting cat. Casper used to commute on the N° 3 bus in Plymouth, queueing patiently at the bus stop for a ride into town and back again. Sadly, he was run over by a car and the regular passengers on the bus are in mourning. On a more scientific note, last Saturday’s Financial Times carried an article about Moscow’s 35,000 stray dogs. Some 500 of these live in the metro stations and about twenty of those have learned how to ride the trains. According to Andrei Neuronov, a specialist in animal behaviour, ‘They orient themselves in a number of ways. They figure out where they are by smell, by recognising the name of the station from the recorded announcer’s voice and by time intervals.’ Whereas most of Moscow’s stray dogs are slowly regressing to their genetic origins in the wolf family, these clever dogs seem to be going the other way.
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