Animals Facts

Mike the Headless Chicken lived for 18 months after a Colorado farmer swung an axe in 1945. The axe missed his jugular vein and left most of his brain stem and one ear intact. Farmer Lloyd Olsen kept him alive by feeding him with an eyedropper. Scientists at the University of Utah examined Mike and confirmed the story was real. Fruita, Colorado still holds a festival in his honor every May.

In 1943, Polish soldiers in Iran bought a bear cub from a young boy, bottle-fed him on condensed milk, named him Wojtek, and enrolled him in the army. At Monte Cassino in 1944, he carried 100-lb artillery shells to the guns without dropping one. The 22nd Artillery Supply Company still uses a bear carrying a shell as its official emblem.

A homing pigeon shot through the breast with one leg hanging by a tendon flew 25 miles to save 194 men trapped behind enemy lines. The survivors carved him a wooden leg. He still stands at the Smithsonian today.

A stray puppy was smuggled onto a troopship in a coal bin in 1917. He served 18 months in the WWI trenches, warned his regiment of mustard gas attacks, located wounded men in No Man's Land, and bit a German spy's leg until soldiers arrived. He is the most decorated war dog of WWI and the only dog promoted to sergeant through combat. His body is at the Smithsonian.

Nils Olav, a king penguin at Edinburgh Zoo, is the official mascot of the Norwegian King's Guard. The name and rank have passed down through three penguins since 1972 - knighted by King Harald V in 2008 and made Major General in 2023. At the 2023 ceremony, over 160 soldiers paraded past him so he could inspect the troops.

Sergeant Reckless was a Mongolian mare bought for $250 by US Marines in 1952. During one day of battle in 1953, she made 51 solo trips hauling ammunition to the front lines, covering over 35 miles under fire. She was formally promoted to Staff Sergeant by the Commandant of the Marine Corps - with a 1,700-Marine parade in her honor.

Buford, a Pyrenees-Anatolian ranch dog, found 2-year-old Boden Allen alone in the Arizona desert and walked him 7 miles home through mountain-lion country. State police spotted two mountain lions on his trail. Boden told his rescuers: "I followed the dog back." Buford became an honorary search and rescue member.

The horse behind DreamWorks' 2002 film Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron was a real Kiger mustang named Donner. Animators brought him to the studio and spent months watching how his muscles moved and his face changed with his mood. After the film, DreamWorks donated him to a wild horse sanctuary in California, where he was renamed Spirit. He turned 31 on May 8, 2026 - and fans still visit him.

Ronin is an African giant pouched rat, roughly the size of a small cat. Belgian charity APOPO trained him to sniff out landmines in Cambodia. From 2021 to 2025, he found 109 landmines and 15 other unexploded devices there. That broke the Guinness World Record set by his predecessor Magawa. A rat clears a tennis-court area in 30 minutes. A human deminer takes up to four days.

Tama was a stray calico cat near Kishi Station in Japan when the railway was about to close. The company made her stationmaster in 2007, paying her salary in cat food. Over 8 years she was promoted 4 more times - ending as the company's third-highest executive. She drew 55,000 extra riders in her first year alone and saved the line. When she died in 2015, thousands attended her funeral.

A murmuration of starlings - sometimes hundreds of thousands of birds - swirls as one shape-shifting cloud with no leader and no plan. Each bird follows just three rules: stay close, match speed, avoid collisions. Scientists discovered each bird tracks only its six or seven nearest neighbors. When a peregrine falcon strikes, a wave of evasion sweeps the whole flock at once.

Pablo Escobar smuggled 4 hippos into Colombia for his private zoo in the 1980s. When he was shot dead in 1993, the animals were abandoned at his estate. They bred freely in the Magdalena River, with no natural predators to slow them. Colombia now has an estimated 170 to 215 feral hippos - the largest population outside Africa - and is spending $10,000 per animal to surgically sterilize them.

Scarlett was a stray cat living in an abandoned Brooklyn garage when it caught fire in March 1996. She ran into the flames five times to carry each of her five kittens to safety, one by one. Her eyes were blistered shut by the end. Unable to see, she touched each kitten with her nose to count them before she collapsed. She survived, was adopted, and the clinic received over 7,000 letters from people wanting to give her a home.

Stubbs the cat served as honorary mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska, for more than 20 years. The role was ceremonial - the town has no real government. But that didn't stop up to 40 tourists a day from coming just to meet him. Each afternoon he walked next door for catnip water served in a margarita glass. He died in July 2017 at age 20, still in office.

Simon the cat was smuggled onto the Royal Navy frigate HMS Amethyst as a stray kitten in 1948. In 1949, Chinese forces fired on the ship and Simon took four pieces of shrapnel. He kept hunting rats and visiting sick sailors through 100 days trapped on the Yangtze River. The Navy awarded him the Dickin Medal - the highest honor any animal can receive. He died before the ceremony.

Wally is a five-foot alligator from Jonestown, Pennsylvania - and a federally licensed emotional support animal. His owner, Joie Henney, says Wally is believed to be the first reptile ever certified as one. Wally visits senior centers, sits with Joie through cancer radiation, and gives hugs and kisses to anyone who asks. A Loki writer revealed Wally was their real-world visual reference for Alligator Loki on Disney+.

Every winter there's a migration bigger than the Serengeti's - and almost nobody has heard of it. Hundreds of millions of sardines surge up South Africa's east coast in a shoal over 7km long. Dolphins herd them into bait balls near the surface. Sharks rush in from below. Cape gannets plunge at up to 86km/h and a Bryde's whale swallows the whole ball in one pass. Scientists still debate why the sardines bother.

Bear was an Australian koolie nobody wanted. His family gave him up - he ate through the walls of their apartment. Researchers saw his obsession as a skill. They trained him to sniff out koalas in burned forests, up to 20 times faster than any human search team. During Australia's 2019-20 fires, he found over 100 koalas. He retired in 2026 after ten years of service. The drive that no family could live with saved hundreds of koalas.

African giant pouched rats can screen 100 TB sputum samples in under 20 minutes. A lab technician takes at least four days to do the same work. APOPO trains these rats, called HeroRATs, to spot TB cases standard tests miss. They also sniff out buried landmines. Too light to set the mines off.

Cambodia carved a giant stone statue of a rat. It honors Magawa, who spent five years sniffing out landmines there. He became the first rat ever given the PDSA Gold Medal. That medal is the animal world's version of the George Cross. Magawa found 71 landmines and 38 unexploded bombs before he retired in 2021. He cleared ground equal to roughly 20 football fields.

Harry deLeyer arrived late to a 1956 horse auction. He paid $80 to save a gray plow horse already headed for the dog food factory. He later sold the horse to a neighbor. The horse jumped five foot fences again and again just to walk home. So deLeyer bought him back. Two years after that auction, Snowman was the national show jumping champion. He won it again the next year.

Old Abe was a real bald eagle who fought in the Civil War. He rode into more than 30 battles with the 8th Wisconsin Infantry. He perched on a custom shield and screamed over the gunfire. Confederate soldiers were ordered to shoot him down. He made it through every battle and went home to Wisconsin. Today his profile rides on the shoulder of every 101st Airborne soldier.

A brutal freeze hit the Texas coast in January 2026. Sea turtles went stiff and floated like they were dead. It's called cold-stunning, and it happens when the water drops below 50 degrees. This time it hit 42 degrees. Rescue crews combed the coast for days and found 1,126 turtles still alive. Vets warmed them slowly. Crowds later gathered on a Galveston beach to watch over 100 of the survivors swim free.

American cavalry soldiers teamed up with German troops who had just surrendered to them. Together they fought off the SS to save more than 1,200 horses in Czechoslovakia. The herd included Lipizzaner mares and foals that stock Vienna's Spanish Riding School. Colonel Charles Reed organized the raid days before Soviet tanks reached the farm. The Lipizzaner bloodline survived the war.