More animals

In the last couple of months I've put up two posts of cat pictures -- and while cats are traditionally the flagship animal of the internet, it's time for some representation for some of the other animals that share this world with us.  So herewith.....

.....humanity's oldest companion, the loyal dog:

(domesticated twenty thousand years ago, long before any other animal)

.....our most powerful war machine for millennia, the mighty horse:

.....our close cousin, the intelligent and sexually-perverted orangutan:

.....the aerially proficient and excessively-large albatross:

.....the sinuous and endlessly-fascinating snake:

(bringer of freedom and enlightenment in the Garden of Eden myth, demonized and shunned ever since)

.....the weird but majestic hammer-headed shark:

.....the ubiquitous and frustratingly-hard-to-exterminate rat:

.....and its perennial trusty companion, the disease-bearing flea:

.....the tiny but industrious leaf-cutter ant:

.....the large and somewhat scary-looking eurypterid:

(yes, this is real, but don't worry, they're all dead)

.....the slow, slimy, slithering snail:

.....the horrifying Amazonian giant centipede:

(those are centimeters, not inches, but still.....)

.....the sinister buzzing tropical anopheles mosquito:

(bearer of the monarch of human-killing diseases, malaria)

.....the indwelling parasitic tapeworm:

I apologize for not making this post realistically representative; for example, the world has more than a thousand times as many beetle species as mammal species, yet I've included four mammals here and not a single beetle.  Still, I hope I've provided a sense of the wondrous variety of the animal kingdom as it extends beyond the familiar domain of felines.

And no, in case you were wondering, I don't actually like animals very much.