Pets are People Too

By Jeremy Caplan

THE HUMAN ANIMAL IS A BIZARRE BEAST. HAVING popularized pet yoga, doggie "bark mitzvahs" and other novel anthropomorphisms, animal lovers keep blurring the lines between man and his animal-kingdom friends. And sometimes the animals do the blurring. --By Jeremy Caplan

o WATCHDOG After speed-dialing 911 for her unconscious owner and barking into the phone, a Rottweiler in Richland, Wash., let the cops inside

o GORILLA FLASHING Three women are suing Koko's handlers in California for pressuring them to submit to the ape's sign-language requests to see their breasts

o BIRD BRAINIACS To rank the relative creativity of different bird species, Montreal biologist Louis Lefebvre has unveiled an avian intelligence index showing that crows and jays are tops

o CROC DOC Having kept patients waiting, a physician in Zagreb, Croatia, may be fired for spending two hours examining a sick crocodile, assessing the reptile with an ultrasound