This reminds me of Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling. It was a collection of stories written by him in 1894 about a boy brought up by wolves in the wild.

There are real documented accounts of humans brought up by animals. Check this site out:

http://www.feralchildren.com

The boy was found by policewoman Alicia Lorena Lindgvist, who discovered the child by a canal in the Christ King district of Misiones.

“I was walking and noticed a gang of cats sitting very close together. It is unusual to see so many like that so I went for a closer look and that’s where I saw him. The boy was lying at the bottom of a gutter. There were all these cats on top of him licking him because he was really dirty.”

“When I walked over they became really protective and spat at me. They were keeping the boy warm while he slept,” the policewoman said.

The boy’s father is a homeless man who lost the boy a few days ago, and according to him, cats have always seemed to be protective of his son.

Some animal experts doubt the contention that the cats really cared for the boy and were merely acting according to instinct to huddle around some warm object (like the boy) and keep themselves warm. I think animals are smarter than that, and those cats really thought the boy needed some help….

Source: Telegraph UK

If the animal doesn’t adjust well, it will likely fall ill and die. So, getting your new pet adjusted as soon as possible is crucial.

Here are a few tips that may be helpful…

1) Don’t buy puppies or kittens less than 8 weeks old. They could develop some behavior problems later on, especially in pedigree breeds. Also talk to the petshop owner before you decide, try to get as much info as you can. If the animal has been abused, the chances of it growing up into a misfit, is there.

2) Take a piece of soft cloth with you when you pick up your pet from the petshop or breeder, and rub it on the fur of the animal’s mother and siblings. When you get home, put the cloth in the pet’s bed. This will remind it of its family.

3) If your new pet is a fish, do not let out the fish from the plastic bag but let it float in the aquarium for about 1 hour. This is to get the water temperature in the plastic bag equalized with the main aquarium. Also feed the other occupants of the tank so that they are happy. Observe the reaction of the other fishes. Are they hostile? If yes, you should remove the new fish and put it in a seperate tank.

4) If your pet is crying a lot at night, it probably still misses its mother. What you can do is wrap a ticking clock in a towel, and place it beside the animal’s bed. This simulates a heartbeat. You could also wrap a thermoflask containing hot water in the cloth that you used in point 2) and place it in the animal’s bed.

Hope this helps.

Here’s a series of pics showing the development of a baby panda.

Scientists determined the ocean quahog’s age from counting the rings on its shell, and found it to be something between 405 to 410 years old! This may not be the final record, as there are many ocean quahogs still living deep under the ocean, and besides them, there are also many other species of marine life that may well live many hundreds of years or more, down there.