This is a funny little microcosm of human behaviour, all these people getting bent out of shape about something that shouldn't matter in the least.

Check out comment #142,your can almost hear the vein in his forehead throbbing as he types..

I have a theory, that knowing the world's smallest countries is a special category of trivia. It's something that a certain type of person gets a lot of satisfaction from being the person who can ruin other's self esteem by shooting them down at parties.

"I heard the other day that is the smallest in the world, it's only xxx square km."

"WRONG. BZZZZT. FAIL FAIL FAIL. Obviously you are a complete moron, anyone who has done any research KNOWS that it's the Pitcairn Islands".

There's always some git who thinks he knows a smaller country than anyone else. Well, this list is a direct kick in the nuts to those people.

Of course, Mr 'Design' couldn't be more wrong, at 47 sq km, it's far too big to appear on this list.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcairn_islands

But it's really quite amazing how personally people take this. And then we have the late commenters. Even as late as #123, we get a list of countries that 'proves' this list is COMPLETELY wrong (of course). Never mind that every one of those places has already been debunked by the author and others as being too big or not a country.

As for Sealand, well that suffers from the Pirate Bay idiocy a year or two ago when they tried to raise money to buy it. I recall they managed to raise a decent sum before admitting that they hadn't actually done any real research and in fact the owner of Sealand refused outright to even entertain the idea.

Nevertheless, this has left Sealand with a small group of internet dwellers who believe that not only is it a country, but you could operate a global crime ring from Sealand with no repercussions whatsoever.

It seems there really is no limit to the depths of stupidity, and the internet is like a giant drill going deeper than anyone has before.

@ seefish3:

First off, lose the patronising attitude, people responded civilly to you, don't be a jerk back.

Your first point was 'i'm not sure that animals enjoy spending the hours necessary to train for tricks like this', and people responded that they generally enjoy it.

So now you change your argument to 'I'm not sure that animals kept as pets are as happy as wild animals'.

Well, we can't discuss anything if you keep moving the goal posts. But I agree that a captive animal is unlikely to be happier than a wild one if everything else is equal.

However, if the animal has never even seen a wild habitat, then there isn't much point in worrying about it. Comparing levels of happiness in animals is putting human concepts into them and at this stage nobody really knows what 'happiness' feels like to a bird or a dog. So it's really impossible to judge.

But it's worth remembering that 90% of pets have hundreds of generations of domestication behind them - they don't have a wild habitat and they would be scared and most likely starve to death very quickly if released into the wild alone.

Anyway, a pet being trained using modern, non-violent methods (such as click training) is vastly happier than a pet that is left to just sit around all day. There's just no argument about this.

I've trained all my pets over the years and it's plain as day that they genuinely enjoy three aspects: the mental challenge of understanding what you want, the accomplishment of getting it right, and the feeling that they are helping you.