Pets are People Too

THE HUMAN ANIMAL IS A BIZARRE BEAST. HAVING popularized pet yoga, doggie “bark mitzvahs” and other novel anthropomorphisms, animal lovers keep blurring the lines between man and his animal-kingdom friends. And sometimes the animals do the blurring. –By Jeremy Caplan

•WATCHDOG After speed-dialing 911 for her unconscious owner and barking into the phone, a Rottweiler in Richland, Wash., let the cops inside

•GORILLA FLASHING Three women are suing Koko’s handlers in California for pressuring them to submit to the ape’s sign-language requests to see their breasts

•BIRD BRAINIACS To rank the relative creativity of different bird species, Montreal biologist Louis Lefebvre has unveiled an avian intelligence index showing that crows and jays are tops

•CROC DOC Having kept patients waiting, a physician in Zagreb, Croatia, may be fired for spending two hours examining a sick crocodile, assessing the reptile with an ultrasound