Irwin is extra cautious as he moves around since he knows that the croc is a bit of a wild card.“Casper has such a wild behavior and since Dad first got Casper, he’s had that instinct,” he says, referring to his late father, Steve Irwin, who died in 2006 after being attacked by a stingray.

“They have been stigmatised as evil because they are thought to be amoral,” says the philosopher and writer John Gray, author of Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life .“Cats are a window outside the human world,” says Gray, “They are themselves, and they stay themselves.

Readers of Gray will recognise this book as a postscript or coda to Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals , the 2002 bestseller in which he elegantly dismantled the history of western philosophy – with its illusory faith in our species living somehow “above” evolving life and outside the constraints of nature.

The Lincolnshire Wildlife Park said they moved the five African gray parrots into aviaries away from public view after the nonstop profanity ruffled some feathers.

Donia Youssef (right) with Cookie (left) who is three quarters Boston Terrier with a bit of French bulldog and Chihuahua, from Grays, Essex (Picture: ITCHPet).Archer (left), the Chow Chow, and Andy (right), from Sheffield (Picture: The Kennel Club) Do you have a doppleganger pet?

Dog trainer Jay Gray has shared some pearls of wisdom ahead of Bonfire Night (Picture: Jay Gray/iStockphoto)Bonfire Night can be an absolutely hellish occasion for pets across the country who are petrified of loud bangs from fireworks.

Evie the cat has moved up in the the Cabinet Office to be the new face of the Equalities Unit. The corridors of Whitehall might hold nothing more menacing for Evie than a large mouse or Chris Grayling, but in the time of the Pharoahs, cats could be relied upon to protect their humans from poisonous serpents.