It's hard for some people to understand the value of an animal's life until they come face to face with that animal, because the animals they encounter in the human world are either pets or pests.

Because of this detachment from nature many humans have a hard time caring about the fact that certain animal species are endangered or going extinct, like the Shoebill (only 5-8,000 in the wild) and the Saiga (critically endangered) above.

And look at how handsome this Iberian Lynx is, can you believe there are only 326 of them left in the wild?

British photographer Tim Flach felt seeing a portrait of these disappearing species might be just the thing to make people care, so he spent two years taking perfectly poignant portraits of the world's endangered species.

Look these Ring-Tailed Lemurs (pop. 2000 as of 2017) in the eyes and tell them you don't care if they live or die or disappear from the planet entirely. Go on, I'll wait...

Couldn't do it, could ya?! Check out the rest of Tim's series Endangered at his site and you'll see dozens more reasons to care about the plight of endangered animals like these poor White-Bellied Pangolins, current population unknown.

See Photographer Spends Years Taking Photos Of Endangered Animals, They're Heartbreakingly Beautiful here

Meowsondeck posted a picture of a friend's cat that had been playing with a lizard. I believe the lizard won that game. SchnoodleDoodleDo had to write a poem about it. 

my name is cat

i play wif liz

i don tink he

knoze wat fun is -

you bite my lip

il getchu back

n eatchu for

a little schmack

don test my skills

i fas n punctual

how qwik youl be

a reptile disfunctual

You'll have to forgive her for the lack of capitalization and punctuation. Cats are not good at those things. Of course, she's referencing an earlier meme.

You might fall in love with pictures of a certain breed of dog and get it in your head that you want one of those. But do you know what that really entails? Personality matters more than over the long run, and adopting a dog is a lifetime commitment. That said, most mutts are pretty sweet and normal, even though they each have their own personality. But if you are pining for a particular breed, you need to be informed about what you are in for. Comic artist Grace Gogarty, who goes by little tunny on her Tumblr blog, captures what these breeds are generally like in hilarious cartoon form.   

See a gallery of 24 different breeds, illustrated, at Bored Panda. See more of little tunny's work at Instagram.

You've seen wiener dog racing, but you've never seen it like this! The Daytona 500 race is coming up, and the dachshunds Crusoe and Oakley are getting into the spirit. Watch them race around in their little wiener dog cars!

(YouTube link)  

See more of Crusoe the Celebrity Dachshund in previous posts. -via Tastefully Offensive

Dogs can destroy tough stuff like boots, furniture and wooden fences in no time flat, but dogs usually destroy in short bursts unlike cats, who usually like to go slow and shred stuff over time.

Cats also normally like to hide the destruction from their humans so they don't get in trouble, but when kittehs stop caring about what their humans think they go paws to the wall and act like little furry wrecking balls.

(YouTube Link)

This hilarious compilation by Tiger Productions reminds us our stuff is only in one piece because our cats haven't decided to destroy it yet, so be kind to your kitty and make with the treats...or else!

Our cats seem to be okay with the cat trees we've given them, and they seem to appreciate the effort when we build them a cat tree that looks like a prop from a movie.

But then again they're happy with any cardboard boxes we leave lying around the house too, so maybe they're not as content on their cat tree as we think.

Maybe they'd prefer a swanky tree with a modern look like the NEKO cat tree created by the Japanese cat product company RINN as designed by Yoh Kamiyama.

The NEKO tree has a marble base and hardwood slates surrounding the platforms, so it looks cool and your kitties can scratch on it without tearing it up. Plus the slates are spaced so your cat can look out from inside the tree and feel like they're in the safest feline fortress in the world.

-Via DesignTAXI

When Nicole Renae was 14 years old, she had to give up her beloved little black dog named Chloe. Years passed, Nicole grew up, got married, had a baby, and wanted to adopt a dog for her daughter to grow up with. So she started checking online ads. A notice of an elderly dog that needed a home caught her eye. The dog was named Chloe, and looked like her long lost dog from childhood, but this dog was gray. Nicole decided this was the dog she wanted.

Upon meeting her "new" dog, Nicole was struck with an uncanny feeling.

"She just ran up to me and started licking my face," she said. "As the day went on, all these characteristics just reminded me of my old dog."

Chloe, it seems, knew her adopter was her old friend from the start — and soon Nicole was convinced of it, too.

"She just kept hugging me. I was crying — it reminded me so much of my Chloe," Nicole said. "I never thought I’d see my dog again, but I just knew in my heart that it was her."

Although eight years had passed, Noel was able to get information from the dog's microchip to confirm that she was, in fact, the same Chloe that Nicole had as a child. Read their story and see plenty of pictures at The Dodo. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Nicole Renae)

Bulldogs are the laziest of all dogs, and they'd rather spend their lives laying around snoring and drooling than running around chasing critters and balls like their canine cousins.

But Bosco the English bulldog takes laziness to a whole new low, low energy that is, and he is such a sleepy pooch he doesn't even lift an eyelid when the Roomba starts "attacking" him for getting in the way of its cleaning.

In fact, Bosco seems to think of the Roomba as his own personal robo-massager!

(YouTube Link)

-Via Laughing Squid

Callie Schenker of Bolivar, Missouri, came home one night last week to find that her neighbor's Corgi had sneaked into her pony's corral. What was he doing there? He was riding horseback! The pony didn't seem to mind, but Schenker knew no one would believe it without video proof.  

The 22-year-old posted the video on Facebook with the message, "I can't make this stuff up!!! So we pull back in our driveway tonight and this is what we see. This is not our dog! But apparently him and Cricket the one-eyed wonder pony are best friends." The video has received 5.3 million views as of Tuesday morning.

Schenker says the Corgi's owners are Mennonites who avoid going online, so they likely don't know their dog is gaining internet fame.

(Facebook link)

You have to wonder if he does that every night. -via Katy Andersen‏

What does your dog do to help around the house? Bark when the mailman comes? Morgan is a 6-year-old Newfoundland who has mastered a variety of useful tasks, including running a snowblower. It's a step up for her, as she was previously clearing snow with a mere shovel.  

(YouTube link)

"She has a number of tricks she does, she can cook hotdogs on fires, she can get beverages out of coolers, she can go in the fridge and get a beer for me ... and she vacuums," said Morgan's owner, Dean Edwards of Sunnybrae, near Salmon Arm, B.C.

Morgan will even close the fridge door behind her and throw away empty cans when you're finished drinking, Edwards says.

Morgan is a championship show dog and a certified therapy dog. She's been in training for various jobs since she was a puppy. Read more about Morgan at CBC News. -via Metafilter

Mario always looked cuter and more approachable when he was wearing an animal costume, so casting a cat to play Mario in a live action Super Mario Bros. short is a brilliant idea.

Then they cast a cat as the damsel in distress Princess Peach, which was a similarly perfect casting job, so why is Luigi played by a human in this MrTV Cow production?

Because somebody needed to wrangle the cats! All kidding aside SUPER MARIO CAT BROS. is seriously cute and very fun to watch, so hopefully it's the first in a new series!

(YouTube Link)

-Via Geeks Are Sexy

(YouTube link)

Under normal circumstance, a coyote and a goat would be predator and prey. No so for these two. They are pets who live together in Idaho. We can assume that they both have access to a generous supply of goat chow and coyote chow, or they wouldn't be the obviously happy friends they are. Let's just hope that goat doesn't ever go out on her own to make friends.  -via Boing Boing

If you've never fallen in love with a hedgehog then you've never met Princess Pricklepants, and if you don't think hedgehogs are adorable then you probably don't dig cute critters and therefore won't dig these silly Hedgehog Facts.

But if you love Pricklepants, and all hedgehogs, as much as I do then these Hedgehog Facts will amuse, amaze and astound you, because they're absolutely astonishing!

Who knew hedgehogs were such mighty and mysterious creatures?

Hedgehog Facts like these don't come along every day, so when you have the chance to right click and save a bunch of them to share with your social media circles you should grab that JPG treasure and run!

See more Hedgehog Facts at The Pleasantries of Princess Pricklepants

Twitter has become one of the most annoyingly political, and volatile, social media platforms since the 2016 election, and most people I know happily ditched Twitter and never looked back.

But if there's one thing Twitter is good for it's advertising and promotion, and if there's one thing that could bring people back to Twitter it's pictures of cute animals.

So when the National Zoo tweeted a pic of an adorable gray seal pup other zoos saw it as a challenge, so they started a cute animal tweet off battle with the hashtag #challengeaccepted.

Soon the Bronx Zoo, Zoo Atlanta, Virginia Aquarium, Zoo Miami and the Philadelphia Zoo started battling it out by tweeting their most adorable critter pics, at which point people must have started coming back to Twitter in droves!

See Zoos Get Into Brutal #CuteAnimalTweetOff Battle, And It's Exactly What The Internet Needed here

Housecats ain't no dummies when it comes to the ways of humankind, and they know exactly which things in their owner's house are most scratchable, most delicious and most fun to bat around.

And kitties who live in a cold area always know exactly where to go in the house when they want to get warm, which is why Ryuji Tan's cat Busao doesn't wants to leave his beloved heater's side.

You see, Ryuji and Busao live in Ibaraki Prefecture, where winters can get particularly cold, so Busao has made it his life mission to stay right next to the space heater at all times.

A post shared by りゅう爺@ぶさお。1世 (@tanryug) on Jan 25, 2018 at 2:36pm PST

Ryuji shares pictures of Busao and his Akita Rin on their Facebook fan page Busaophoto and on their Instragram account @tanryug, but there's something about Busao's special relationship with the heater that warms my heart!

A post shared by りゅう爺@ぶさお。1世 (@tanryug) on Jan 29, 2017 at 4:03am PST

See more at Laughing Squid