truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

One trick that zookeepers have used to get male pandas interested in mating with dowdier females (according to a December dispatch from Sichuan, China, in Australia's The Age) is to let an attractive female roam around a pen, leaving her scent, and then, in darkness, with the male in the pen and frisky at the scent, to introduce the less attractive female into the pen, back-end first, so that the pre- excited male will quickly begin copulating. Said zookeeper Zhang Hemin, "When the males find out

In November, BBC News previewed an upcoming story for its wildlife TV magazine show "Spy In The Woods," derived from film footage from a stationary hidden camera in the Quingling mountains in northwest China. Featured on the show was a panda doing a handstand against a tree, apparently for the purpose of extending the vertical reach of his urine, to more dominantly mark his territory.

In Ruthin, Wales, the owners of the bull Picston Shottle said in November that they believe that piped-in Mozart music helped develop his amazing productivity as a stud; his semen is sold out until April, with enough output to create about 500 "doses" a day (at a price of about US$65 a dose). And sheep farmer Barry Walker touted his flock's production of superfine Australian merino wool at his operation in New South Wales, helped along, he said, by a secret diet of grains and the piped-in music of Italian singer Andrea Bocelli.

In October, the federal appeals court in San Francisco dismissed a lawsuit against the Navy, filed in the name of marine mammals, claiming that Naval sonar disrupted their underwater communication; the court said federal environmental laws can be challenged only by people (or legal entities), not whales.

Glen Paul Darby, contesting his drug conviction at the state Court of Appeal in Sydney, Australia, in September, argued that he not only was "searched" (sniffed) by a drug dog without probable cause but was also "assaulted" when the dog nudged Darby's pants with his snout to indicate just where the drugs were. A civil liberties advocate argued that some people are unusually traumatized by a dog's thrusting his snout against that area of the body.

In 2002, News of the Weird mentioned a Wall Street Journal dispatch from Cuba, suggesting that Fidel Castro's 1987 vision of "apartment cows" was still a ways off. (Castro had pushed farmers to breed small cows, not much larger than dogs, that families could keep in small homes and that would supply their minimum daily quantities of milk.) Two months after that story ran, a farmer in Rockwell, Iowa, said he had bred such miniature cows but that they were not good milk producers. Cut to September 2004: An Associated Press dispatch from San Juan Y Martinez, Cuba, touted rancher Raul Hernandez, who has now apparently successfully created a small herd of 28-inch-high cows that can deliver about five quarts of high- quality milk.