Two legs bad: Investigators in a small town in the US northwest suspect an uprising by farm animals was behind the death of a farmer who was eaten by his pigs. Only a few remains of 69 year old farmer Terry Garner were found by the time the pigs were finished, including his false teeth. No-one saw the incident but the pigs were known to have it in for Garner – his family said one of the pigs had bitten him a year earlier, after he accidentally stepped on a piglet.
Chimp prankster: Santino, a chimpanzee in a zoo in Sweden, has a reputation for throwing projectiles at zoo visitors he finds especially annoying. Researchers have watched him closely to figure out his pattern, and noted that he carefully stashes stones and other objects around his pen, where he can throw them at people without warning. The researchers decided Santino just “finds it fun” to annoy humans.
Crazy like a fox: An English man returning home from the supermarket was attacked by a fox – who wanted the contents of his shopping bag. Civil servant Seb Baker, 29, said he passed the fox sitting on a kerb by the road, but it followed him into an alleyway. There it circled him like prey, leaped at him, and tried to snatch his shopping bag. Mr Baker said he only got away after offering it some food: “Eventually I opened the bag and gave it a garlic loaf. He grabbed it and ran off.”
Fearsome fish: Also known as the toothpick fish or vampire fish, the tiny South American Candiru bloodsucking catfish is said by folklorists to have the ability to swim up a stream of urine and lodge itself in the human urethra – which is why it is also known as the “penis fish.” Most experts are not convinced that this actually happens, but the most recent case was reported in Brazil in 1997.
Whoo-hoo dunnit? A US writer jailed for murdering his wife is getting a new trial because experts think she might have been killed by an owl. Novelist Michael Peterson was convicted in 2003 of his wife’s murder, which was dramatised as a TV movie called The Staircase Murders. But in 2011, Peterson was granted a new trial – after experts testified that a feather found at the scene suggested a rogue owl had flown into the house and become tangled in the victim’s hair, triggering her fatal fall down the stairs.