Animals also commit suicide like humans

Many animals have strange behavior such as collective suicide, or always head towards the north pole when eating.

Just like humans, animals also have so many special actions and abilities that are difficult to understand according to their species and personality. It is clear that Earth is a diverse ecosystem and to understand all the animals in nature is not simple. There are some animals on Earth that have quite strange habits in dealing with their own, their partners or their children.

Others do rituals before doing an important job, but if we look at it we don't understand what it means. But maybe all of them have their reasons. Here, please introduce some strange actions of some animals that we do not know yet.

The turtles like colorful colors

Turtles are a fairly quiet animal. They use hard shells to protect themselves from predators. To find reasonable food and shelter, turtles often rely on their eyes and observation ability. In fact, the eyes occupy an extremely important position for this species. Unlike many other animals that can sniff, smell and taste, turtles mainly use their eyes to see everything around them.

And what's interesting is that through studies, we have found that turtles seem to be attracted by the colorful colors like red, cold and yellow. When you find a variety of foods of different types and colors, they will choose to eat foods of the preferred color first and not very much depending on the category. Of course that happens in case they can freely choose. Either way, this is an interesting and new discovery.

Animal suicide

Suicide, also known as suicide, is a problem in the modern human world. This is the action of a person who deliberately causes his own death. Suicide is often associated with a state of despair, or due to some basic mental disorders including: depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism and drug abuse. The more society develops, the more people commit suicide due to difficult psychological problems. More than one million people die from suicide every year. And for the animal world, suicide also happens, not even rare.

The suicides of animals began to be recognized by humans in 1845 in London. The London News reported at that time, a Newfoundland dog tried to commit suicide for several days - he threw himself into the water or immersed himself in the bottom of the lake. The owner sent the animal to a veterinarian to help him regain balance, but then the dog fled and stabbed his head into a car on the road.

In Scotland, a strange phenomenon has been recorded for decades. That is the long snout dogs such as collie, retriever and labrador constantly committed suicide in Overtoun, Scotland. Within 50 years, more than 50 dogs jumped and died at the Overtoun Bridge. The strange thing is that the dead dogs here dance in the same position.

Over time, the number of suicidal animals is more and more scary. On November 18, 1998, in New Zealand waters, more than 300 dolphins from the ocean rushed to the shore and laid themselves on the hot, dry beach. Many tourists and rescue workers tried to bring them back to the sea but the other dolphins continued to crash into the shore in an unintelligible way.

In 2005, many people witnessed a strange event, nearly 1,550 sheep jumping down a cliff in Turkey. The shepherds were stunned by this phenomenon. And despite all the ways to prevent them, the sheep were still frantically plunging into the pool. Nearly 450 children died immediately, the remaining 1,100 were handicapped, slightly injured due to lying on the dead bodies of the previously dead. However, they also tried to bang their heads on the cliff to finish their lives.

Most experts say that animals are not able to commit suicide for social reasons like humans, but all are temporary neurological disorders that lead to uncontrollable action. There are many factors affecting neurology such as illness, injury, old age or disorientation in space.

In addition, many species have the habit of self-injuring themselves when being abused by humans. This behavior is due to negative effects such as stress, isolation, fear, disease, malnutrition and depression for a long time. The zoo bird when starved can self-prune their feathers to death. Primate animals can bite into arteries to kill themselves, or most notably, bears in farms that take suicide.
Besides, some scientists have hypothesized that mass suicide of animals is related to their ability to predict disasters. Animals that find themselves unsuitable will commit suicide so that other children can survive, helping the race to overcome scary dangers.

Buffaloes and cows always turn their heads towards the North pole when grazing

Images from Google Earth show that buffaloes and cows tend to stand in the north-south axis, in which their heads are pointing north. Many scientists claim that Earth's magnetic field can affect the behavior of animals. In fact, the Earth is a giant magnet, with the north pole and the south pole close to the two poles. Many animals - including birds and salmon - use Earth's magnetic field to navigate during migration. Some studies also demonstrate that bats, a mammal, also have the ability to orientate by magnetic fields.

Dr. Sabine Begall and colleagues from Duisburg-Essen University (Germany) conducted research on cattle to find out if they were capable of orientation based on Earth's magnetic field. They collected images of 8,510 buffaloes, crawling at 308 grasslands across the planet through Google Earth. Animals are taken in many positions: grazing, resting, standing in the flock, feeding. Since all images are taken from satellites, it is difficult to find high resolution images.

Experts cannot distinguish the heads and tails of animals, but they find that they tend to stand along the north-south axis. Finally, they concluded that the Earth's magnetic field was the main factor causing cattle to face north. That explains why their ancestors could make thousands of kilometers of travel from Africa to Asia and Europe.

The strangeness of flamingos

Almost none of the birds are as beautiful as the flamingos - the tropical bird with the fur changing from the radiant pink to the burning red like the setting sun. With a long, curved S-neck and the longest, thinnest legs in all birds, flamingos look amazingly graceful.

But this bird has very unusual walking and standing patterns. When standing, they only stand on one leg. Once tired, he shifted his weight to the other leg. When they go, one leg folds, making their bodies lower to the knees, then they lift their feet in the direction perpendicular to the ground, their toes pointing down, and step forward. The whole process repeats with the other leg. With that way, the flamingos hardly caused a ripple in the warm water that it waded through.

The flamingos have to walk around like that for a very good reason. Most of their wading time is to find food on the bottom of the water. The long legs allow it to wade into deep water, and the long neck helps it to fall below the surface to find tiny clams and snails with a beak. Flamingos catch crabs in the head upside down. Actually, they look like virtuous circus artists.