The Great Badger Escape! Plus Brainy Chickens & Talking Dogs
Are animals smarter than we think? On this fascinating and funny episode of Animal Party, Deb Wolfe explores the remarkable intelligence of our animal friends, starting with Stoffel, the Houdini of honey badgers, whose ingenious escapes from a South African sanctuary repeatedly landed him in trouble with lions! Discover how chickens communicate danger to protect their flock, and meet Stella, the clever dog who found a creative way to communicate when her talking button stopped working. Plus, Sasquatch calling contests, the World's Ugliest Dog competition, two adventurous pygmy goats who hopped aboard a city bus, and the surprising ways our perceptions influence which animals we love and fear. And don't miss the remarkable Larry the Cat, who's outlasted a parade of British prime ministers! From brilliant badgers to brainy birds, Deb reminds us that the animal kingdom is full of surprises!
Listen to Episode #284 Now:
Transcript:
Hello, you're listening to Animal Party on Pet Life Radio. And if you think the way I introduce this show is something with my hello, well, maybe you ought to check out these Sasquatch calling contests that are happening all over North America, including places like Whitehall, New York, Glenburne, Maine, Moncton, New Brunswick, and places in Alberta, NBC. And basically what it is, is people get together and they tell stories and they show photographs and videos and all the information they can about sightings of Sasquatch.
And then usually sometime during the event, oh, and they sell stuff, costumes and, you know, all kinds of campy stuff. And then usually sometime during the event, they have a big contest. Well, I was excited to see that a seven-year-old boy won one of these contests and his call is really quite convincing.
So Sasquatch calling, would you do it? Would you make a noise like that? It's sort of like a moose call. It's sort of like a howl or a grunt or a growl. Do you believe in Sasquatch? Well, the latest sighting, the most recent sighting of Sasquatch was in a place in Canada, in the Rockies, in Jasper, which is a town that a lot of people know.
It's famous for tourists. It's beautiful, beautiful place. And April 24th, 2026, Sasquatch was sighted.
So do you believe? Well, maybe. They interviewed quite a few people at some of these different events. And one of them, an American who now lives in Maine, was insisting that he was a skeptic and a non-believer until he spent 10 years living in Washington state.
That's kind of near where I live, but an hour, I'm about 40 minutes from the border with Washington state. If I do it at midnight, it's probably a 25 minute drive. So it's mostly just traffic.
So that's pretty close. And, um, Washington state and Maine have similar ecosystems, similar terrain and the ocean nearby and such. So he figures that after living 10 years in Washington, he has no reason to doubt Sasquatch anymore.
Okay. So I guess he saw it, heard it, felt it, sensed it, was being watched. I don't know.
He doesn't elaborate, but now he lives in Maine and he's trying to spread the word in Maine because he thinks they're probably there too. So a lot of interesting people involved in this Sasquatch world and listening to them, Hal is a real treat for me. Okay.
So today we're going to talk about animal intelligence. That's a frequent topic on my show. And that's mostly because I believe animals are underestimated, underrated, tested by human means, and then declared unintelligent for our convenience most of the time.
So we can treat them however we want, because we seem to think intelligence is the only thing that merits good treatment, which is weird because in our own communities, it's actually the reverse. If you have a child who's less intelligent than the rest, you don't treat it worse. You treat it more gently.
You treat it more kindly. You give it more care, not less. So it's a really interesting double standard.
But every time they try to measure intelligence with scientific measures in animals, they tend to find surprises, right? They always think they're going to go in and prove that the animal really isn't very smart and then boom, whoops, wrong. It's smarter than we thought. So I've got a couple of examples coming to you today.
One's a badger that you may have heard about over in Africa. And the other is just your average everyday chicken. I'm also going to talk about cats today and dogs, of course.
So stay tuned on Animal Party Pet Life Radio. We'll be back after the first break. And the first thing we're going to talk about is that amazing badger.
You won't believe what he was doing. No, you won't. All right.
Stay tuned on Animal Party Pet Life Radio. Hello, we're back on Animal Party on Pet Life Radio. And today's trivia question, before I get too far ahead here, is who is the most stable figure in British politics right now, in British politics? Who is the most stable figure outlasting them all? Hmm.
Interesting question, right? That's my trivia question today. Okay. So the badger.
The badger is called Stoffel. And the badger was living at a sanctuary. I hope I get this right.
Called the Maholoholo Sanctuary in South Africa. And this badger was so clever. I've actually posted footage of this on DubWolfe Pet Expert on Facebook, because I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
There's a lot of footage of this guy. He's so clever. He's so ingenious.
He's so inventive. He's like a little MacGyver guy. He's like, he invents things, creates things, outsmarts things.
There's nothing they can do to keep this guy in his cage. So they've nicknamed his cage Alcatraz because he got out so many times. He would use ladders.
He would use a broom to climb. I mean, you'll see it all in the footage on DubWolfe Pet Expert Facebook, but okay. So this badger was the most amazing escape artist.
And no matter what they did, he was too ill to be released in the wild. So he's not even a fit badger. He's like a poor example of badgers.
Okay. This is just a mediocre badger, already injured and not as fit as all the ones that live in the wild. Okay.
So we got this not so great badger living in captivity, and yet he kept outsmarting all the staff, getting out of his area. Now, why did they care about that? Well, he had a bit of an obsession, not a good obsession. He was determined to fight the lions.
Yeah. No kidding. So he would get out of his pavilion and then go in with the lions and then basically lose and require weeks and weeks and weeks of surgeries and vet care.
And then they'd get him back and they'd secure his pen again and he'd get out again and he'd taunt the lions again. And this kept happening, kept happening. So they decided, okay, maybe if we get him a wife, he'll be happier.
And they picked this really well-adjusted, happy-go-lucky badger called Hammy and they brought her over to meet Stoffel. Oh, Stoffel and Hammy, they got along perfectly well. The only problem is Stoffel taught Hammy and the two of them became the best escape artists.
Now he was even better at it because she could hold one part of something and he could climb up and trigger the other. I've got examples of that too. They started to work together.
So now he was truly unstoppable. So I just want to let you know that badgers are more clever than we always thought. And chickens, chickens are more clever than we thought.
So here's the thing with the chickens. First of all, you might think, well, I don't really care about chickens. I don't have a chicken.
I live in the city. I never see chickens. Who cares? Well, you probably eat them, right? And if you don't eat them, do you eat eggs and you don't eat eggs or chickens and you don't live around chickens? Well, do you know how many chickens are on the earth? More than the amount of humans.
Okay. So wake up and learn something about chickens. They are important.
Now, here we go. So chickens have monocular vision. Okay.
So what does that mean? That means their eyes can move completely separately. They can see two things at once. We can't do that.
They can do that. Let's see. What else do you need to know about chickens? They recognize themselves in the mirror.
They know what me is, what I am. I'm an I. I'm a me. I'm not just one of many.
And I don't, they recognize themselves just like we do. They tested something. They tested the chickens to see if their alarm call was truly communication or just a reaction.
And the way they did this was they put a rooster because that's who does the calling. They put a rooster in a contained area where he could not see any other birds. And then they had a shadow of a hawk, a predator fly over.
So he would perceive a threat. And when there were no other birds around, the rooster smartly stayed absolutely silent. But when there was another bird in a pen next to him, the rooster would alert the other bird with the call, danger, danger, danger call.
So there's another evidence of communication, not just intelligence, but self-sacrifice. The rooster is aware that it's a risk to make that call. I mean, you're alerting the hawk to where you are.
You really shouldn't call. But for the good of the flock, he's doing it. And it's not just an instinctive reaction to seeing the hawk because if he's alone, he doesn't do it.
But if he has a friend, he needs to tell. He does it. It's pretty amazing.
So, yeah, just another thought about the roosters. I'm going to remind you of our trivia question today, which is, who is the most stable figure in British politics? Outlasting prime ministers, outlasting other politicians. Who is the most stable figure in British politics? Okay.
So we had other contests. There was the Sasquatch calling contest. But there was also the ugliest dog contest in California.
And I gotta say, it's no surprise who won. If you had to guess right now, what breed would win the ugliest dog contest, what are you going to guess? I know, I know. I guessed right away.
I thought, I wonder if it's a pug again. Yes. Yes, it is.
It's a pug. It's a pug that cannot put its tongue back in its mouth. That seems to be a winning feature year after year.
I've noticed this. If they can't put the tongue back in the mouth, they're a contender for ugliest dog. Now, some people think pugs are ugly.
Some people think they're adorable. Maybe adorably ugly is the way to consider it. But either way, this dog went away with a prize.
Now, ugly. Here's something I was thinking about on our last show, because it kind of came up. And I noticed that we really do have a tricky standard.
It's cultural. It's time and place. It's how we're raised.
It's religious. What animals do we love? What animals do we hate? What animals do we fear? They put a bunch of babies, toddlers in a room with a whole lot of snakes, harmless snakes, big, big, scary snakes. And they had the parents behind a mirror watching.
And the kids, the kids just played with the snakes. They touched them. They copied them.
They, they picked them up. They kissed them. They did all kinds of things with the snakes while the parents watched in horror behind the mirror.
And so that's not a, that's not something we're born with, fear of snakes. There isn't a natural reason for us to love ladybugs and hate cockroaches or spiders, right? It really does transcend how we treat animals. In North America, dogs are really beloved, but in some countries they're hated.
And the same can be true, you know, in some countries, some animals are eaten and others they're cherished. And so much of this has to do with perception and folklore and myth. And I just thought it reminded me of something I read years back when studying philosophy.
So I thought I'd just give you this from Nietzsche. He says, if you crush a cockroach, you're a hero. But if you crush a beautiful butterfly, you're a villain.
Okay. Let's go to break and come back on Animal Party on Pet Life Radio. Hello, you're back on Animal Party on Pet Life Radio.
Who is the most stable figure in British politics right now? I'll tell you by the end of the show. So one thing I've told you before is that dogs recognize certain words. And interestingly, there's another dog called Stella who was trained just by an amateur trainer.
It's not really a scientific experiment, but she's been videoing everything this dog does and they had buttons for different words. And so there was a word for beach and that button broke. And the dog used to hit that word all the time, beach, beach, wanted to go to the beach, obviously.
So Stella, this dog, when she wanted to go to the beach and she hit the button and it wouldn't speak, it wouldn't say the word beach like she wanted. Instead, she picked two other buttons, three other buttons, actually. She picked the buttons for help, water, outside.
So here's a dog trying to communicate beach. I want to go to the beach and she's been taught push that button. It says beach.
There's another button that says food. There's another button says treat. Now the button says walk.
Like I'm just giving you hypotheticals. There's a whole bunch of buttons, maybe 25 buttons, all with different things the dog might want. And she wants to go to the beach.
So she hits beach. It doesn't work. So what does she do? She hits help, water, outside.
The owner thinks this might just be random. So she asks her again, what do you want? And she goes and hits beach. It doesn't work.
And then she goes, help, water, outside. And that to me is evidence of sentence structure, of independent thinking, of very sophisticated communication in another language. We can't work like that.
We need AI to speak to whales. We can't do it. So I'm amazed by this and so happy to see it.
So thank you for sharing all that. It's pretty incredible what dogs can do. Now, my cat listeners love it when I talk about cats and I'm about to talk about cats.
But just before I do that, I want to give a big shout out to the people of Portland who not only put up with, but assisted two pygmy goats who tried to ride the bus. These two pygmy goats got away from their farm, went on a little walkabout, went up to the bus stop, got on the bus, and the people on the bus helped them get home safely. So shout out to those people.
Pygmy goats are pretty smart and animals are very good at observing what we're doing. They could see people waiting for that bus. I wonder where they thought they were headed.
All right. So the answer to today's trivia question, before we end the show, who is the most stable figure in British politics? Did you guess? It is Larry the cat. That's right.
Larry the cat has, after Keir Starmer's resignation, Larry the cat has now outlasted six UK prime ministers and is welcoming the seventh at 10 Downing Street. So this is the cat that lives in basically the White House of England, basically, little house, but beautiful little house that the prime minister always lives in, 10 Downing Street. And now this cat lives there and has outlasted all these prime ministers.
So kudos to Larry the cat. You must be easy to get along with. And I guess even if a prime minister were allergic, I guess he wouldn't be able to get rid of Larry the cat because he's a pretty popular guy over there in England and they need somebody to count on.
They can count on Larry. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening on Animal Party, Pet Life Radio.
From me, Deb Wolfe and Pet Life Radio. Ciao meow. Be good, dear animals.