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Monday, Nov 9 · Five good things · Three minutes
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NATURE • Nice News
A kitten-sized piglet now weighs 330 pounds and comes when calledSomeone left him by a road at a day old. Someone else didn't.
A piglet found alone on the side of a road in England in March, one day old and roughly the size of a kitten, now weighs around 330 pounds and comes when called. Carole Webb, an 82-year-old retired veterinary nurse who runs the Farm Animal Rescue Sanctuary in Stratford-upon-Avon, took him in after a stranger kept him safe overnight. Webb believes a sow gave birth while being transported and the piglet fell from the trailer. She hand-reared him indoors with hot water bottles and heat pads. Named Tom, after the Lord of the Rings character Tom Bombadil, he now roams a three-acre field and acts more like a dog than a pig. “He’s really friendly with the chickens, he’s got a lot of chicken and cat friends,” Webb told SWNS. He also has a big fluffy toy pig. He likes to lie on top of it. Read the full story → | |||
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KINDNESS • Woman's World
A mom's letter about Will built a half-million-dollar playgroundThe city had the space. It had no money. So she got to work.
Teresa De Young spent five years raising nearly half a million dollars to build an all-abilities playground in New Richmond, Wisconsin, for her son Will and kids like him. The idea started on a park bench. Will, who has Down syndrome, sat quietly on a swing while his younger sister Gracie raced between the slide and the monkey bars across rocky, uneven ground he couldn't manage. When a leadership training program asked De Young to design something for the community, she had her answer. The city offered space but no money, so she wrote a letter introducing Will and delivered copies to scores of local businesses. Grants and 5K races followed. She also asked other parents what they needed. Fencing came up often, from a mother tired of chasing her child instead of watching him play. Will's Playground now has rubber matting, ramped slides and an adaptive tire swing. Will has an opinion about it. "Every playground should be a Will's Playground," he says. Read the full story → | |||
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NATURE • Upworthy
A starving baby otter he saved still kayaks with himThe hardest part was letting her go. She keeps coming back anyway.
Mats Janzon found Leya curled alone in the grass near his home in Sweden, a starving baby otter barely breathing. He had been walking in the woods when he heard a soft peeping. He waited hours for her mother to return, then searched and found she had been killed on a nearby road. Janzon, a former pilot who left his career to care for wildlife, had never raised an otter. He fed her around the clock, started her swimming in a backyard kiddie pool, and eventually took her to the lake. "It felt like a dream, this wild, free otter choosing to trust me," he told the TikTok account SoulPaws Tails. Leya is wild now, gone for days or weeks at a time. But when Janzon kayaks out on the morning lake, her nose still breaks the surface and she swims over to climb aboard for a ride. Sometimes she brings a snack. Read the full story → | |||
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KINDNESS • Good News Network
He hid an AirTag in a stone. It caught the thief.The police had no cameras. The councillor had a spare AirTag.
A councillor in Rufford, Lancashire caught the thief who had been stripping historic capstones from a 300-year-old village wall by hiding an Apple AirTag inside one of the loose stones and waiting for it to vanish. Around 30 stones disappeared over several months from an 18th-century wall along a half-mile stretch of road. Police said they could not help, citing no CCTV and no forensic opportunities. Councillor Matt Smith, 43, tried signs reading "Smile, you're on camera" first. The thief was unmoved. After a third raid in October, Smith, a landscaping contractor, planted the tracker and went to bed. Within weeks his phone pinged overnight that the stone was on the move. Police traced it to a Manchester man's backyard, where they found coping stones worth roughly 7,000 pounds, plus dozens more taken from across the country. The man, 41, was arrested and sentenced. "I'm glad we stood up, and didn't just tolerate it," Smith said.
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NATURE • Good News Network
31 dogs learned to sniff out invasive plantsAn ordinary dog walk. An extra job for the nose.
Scientists in Leipzig have trained 31 dogs and their owners to sniff out invasive plants, and the teams located target species in the wild with 75% accuracy. The feasibility study, published in PLOS One, ran from 2021 to 2023 and focused on three problem plants, among them Himalayan balsam and Japanese knotweed. Of the 12 teams that completed the field test, 11 passed. Invasive species are a leading cause of biodiversity loss worldwide, and early detection has long been costly and slow. Dr. Annegret Grimm-Seyfarth of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research led the work, which recruited volunteer handlers as citizen scientists. "What we find particularly exciting is the opportunity to turn something people already love doing, spending time outdoors with their dogs, into a meaningful contribution to biodiversity conservation," she said. The dogs, it turns out, can switch from sniffing out scat to sniffing out plants without much fuss. They are built for this.
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