Behold Human: King of the Strange Animals

The animal kingdom features prominently in these strange security-adjacent stories that caught our editors’ eyes over the last month. However, in each of these stories, the animals are just being themselves. But humans—they’re strange.

As usual, while we treat these stories with a lighter touch, we understand security is a serious business and do not mean to diminish any suffering felt by any person—or animal—as a result of these incidents.

Feliks the Eagle Rescued from Poachers: Sure, perhaps this story makes this list because we like that it’s about Feliks the Eagle, which manages to sound both cool and dorky at the same time. But it’s a good story, too, about a Serbian imperial eagle straying very far from home, getting captured, found, and ultimately rescued.

That’s Cheating! And Cruel! This is the story of a teenage girl and her horse, but it’s not the Hallmark Movie variety. No, in this story, the girl is determined that she and her horse will take the top cash prize at the barrel-riding competition in a rodeo being held at the South Point Hotel, Casino, and Spa in Las Vegas, Nevada, so she allegedly knifes the other competitors' horses.

Hey, If You Build a Criminal Empire, You’re a Kingpin No Matter the Criminal Endeavor, Right?: Although it’s true that the competition for earning the moniker Australia’s Cockroach Kingpin can’t have too many entrants, it did have at least one. But thanks to officials in the Australia Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment, and Water, that title is back up for grabs. Avoid the photos in this story if you want to keep the heebie jeebies at bay, but the Cockroach Kingpin was discovered with 100,000 live Madagascar cockroaches (the 2- to 3-inch variety), which are contraband in the country.

The Bear Is Just Being a Bear While a Japanese City Freaks Out: Japan’s bear population is increasingly wandering into populated areas. According to this article in The Guardian, a record 50,000 bear sightings have been reported in the last year in the country. When one medium-sized black bear was spotted in Utsunomiya, human population 500,000, the city took no chances. It closed all 94 primary and secondary schools, sent urgent safety messages to the population, and engaged the police and the local hunting association to neutralize the threat.

Another Bear Story, This One Involving Lunch: Where would Strange Security be without doorbell cameras? This amazing footage shows a man surprised to find a small bear in the front of his truck enjoying the man’s lunch. While at first it looks like the bear has the upper hand, this man figures out how to handle a bear. (Japan, take note.)

And a bonus this month, because it’s just too strange to pass up—and it fits with the theme of human weirdness, if not the (nonhuman) animal kingdom’s involvement:

The Devilishly Ingenious Way to Take a Nap While Driving: According to Wired, there is a growing trend of Chinese Tesla drivers trying to fool the automobile’s alert driver safety feature while the vehicle is in self-driving mode. They do so by affixing a tiny doll head to their rearview mirrors, which, if you get the proportions right, affords the driver the luxury to give full attention to their mobile device, or nap, or do even the tricky New York Times crossword, all while getting where they need to go.

Finally, in other strange news, police have to investigate the strangest things. In Hungary, a man was collecting body parts from cemeteries, while in New York City, surveillance footage shows people stopping traffic in the middle of the night to pop off a manhole cover and crawl in.