But let's start with the barking parrot: In a pet shop in Hiroshima, Ruby the parrot has spent so much time around dogs that she is starting to sound like one.

This has been going on every year for the past 20 years. Needless to say, she has become something of a local celebrity and receives scores of human visitors every owl-rearing season.
The winged visitors, meanwhile, began showing up shortly after the woman's husband died. "It as if they sensed my loneliness," she says.
Animals — how lonely we would all be without them.
(Some of this information is from a version of the story that has since disappeared from YouTube. Also, towards the end of the linked-to video, the woman takes a young owl outside, but he seems reluctant to fly away. By nighttime, however, the owl had indeed returned to the wild.)
And now for the walking cat: In the wonderful short story "The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles," the titular feline lives in the Japanese capital of a thousand years ago, enjoying a blissful life there until one day, the ground begins to shake . . .

—Mellow Monk
blog feed, facebook, reviews, teas, tweets, videos