Farra do Boi

Holy Week in Brazil: Sacred
for Christians, Cruel for Oxen

Easter Sunday brings to a celebratory close the Holy Week for Christians all over. But to many Portuguese descendants in Brazil, it also means to be part of one of the most barbaric popular feasts connected to the Passion of Christ, the 200-year Farra do Boi.
Although illegal, the practice that marks the torture and killing of hundreds of oxen by a mob of believers, is still alive and Continue reading

Animal News

A Flying Donkey, A Crashing
Whale & 500 Dead Penguins

Suddenly, three unusual animal stories broke news yesterday throughout the world. Colltales couldn’t help it but tried to make sense of them all. It couldn’t, of course. Yet, if their deeper meaning eluded everyone, in the end, some sort of twisted justice did prevail.
In a Russian beach, a mentally-challenged entrepreneur paraded for half hour a terrified donkey 50 feet above stunned beach goers on the ground. The police of
Golubitskaya, on the Sea of Azoz, may consider animal cruelty charges against him. Oh the humanity, etc.
Thousand of miles away, in Brazil, other beaches also witnessed a sad spectacle: 500 dead penguins washed ashore, their stomachs completely empty, biologists found out later. These birds are known to beach themselves there at this time of the year but no one had ever seen so many dead together or even has any idea why. Ill-fated migrants.
And to wrap it all up, out of the blue,
for no apparent reason, a 40-ton right whale crashed a sailing boat in the waters off Cape Town, in South Africa. The impact flatten the boat’s mast and terrified the tourists aboard who, up to that point, were having a whale of a good time. But no one put it better than a sailor who saw it happened: “It looked like it was angry or something…” No shit.