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According to a Facebook group, this is one of Lowell Friday's horses.

​A horse boarder in East Bethel has been charged with 35 counts of animal cruelty stemming from years-long investigations by the Animal Humane Society into conditions at the man's ranch.

Five years ago, neighbors, former employees, and reporters took note of Lowell George Friday's emaciated-looking horse herd. But it's taken until now for formal charges to be handed down. They describe in detail the hellish-sounding conditions that Friday's 60-plus horses allegedly lived under.

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Around 100 people plan to protest Jimmy's death at Wednesday's Woodbury City Council meeting.

​The sad story of Jimmy the cat is prompting some Woodbury residents to say they are "embarrassed" to live in the city.

Jimmy, a diabetic, grey-striped tabby, was killed on December 9 at the Woodbury Animal Humane Society, days after the death of his owner, Woodbury resident Mary Ray.

There was just one rather large problem -- Ray, 71, had left her entire estate, including Jimmy, to Hastings-based Animal Ark, the state's largest no-kill animal shelter.

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Holly Boyd admitted she killed her chihuahua puppy.

​A local dog-killing case that infuriated animal lovers around the world finally came to a close, when Holly Boyd was sentenced today in the gruesome death of her chihuahua puppy.

The description of the puppy's death was so violent that an online petition and a Facebook group sprang up asking that Boyd get the maximum sentence. The decision an Anoka County judge handed down today will likely disappoint many signees.

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Deer are elusive, sometimes dangerous, and not ready for college classes.

​Here's a problem very few major metropolitan police forces will ever have to think about: A renegade deer broke into a St. Paul college last night and went on a brief rampage while students were still in the building.

St. Paul police put the five-point buck down inside a campus building at St. Catherine University, says Howie Padilla, police spokesman.

"A deer doesn't distinguish between people who are trying to be friendly when it's scared and people trying to hurt it," Padilla told City Pages. "Certainly, in the building, that was a concern of ours."

Police got the call around 6 p.m. Wednesday that the deer had broken through a window in the O'Neil Center, a campus building dedicated to academic support for St. Kate's students.

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@NordeastTurkeys

Turk it out, boy.

​With the resurgence of urban farming, big cities like Philadelphia have discovered a new problem -- coop chickens that get loose and become feral, multiplying unchecked in the backyards of densely populated city neighborhoods. (Call it 'hen-trification.')

Well, here in Minnesota, we go big. Our hip urban enclaves are teeming with gigantic, car-pecking, bike-chasing wild turkeys. And their numbers are on the rise.

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These bears will destroy a pumpkin, or each other, or you, if you want.

​Okay, so Halloween is, way, way, over now. If you haven't already bought your Thanksgiving turkey and hung all of your Christmas decorations, you are totally behind and kind of an embarrassment to the neighborhood.

But, for you slackers out there who still have a couple pumpkins on the porch and don't know what to do with them, City Pages and the Minnesota Zoo would like to show you the proper way to get rid of them. It's fast, efficient, and pretty interesting to watch.

Here's how you do it. Step 1: While carrying around your leftover pumpkin, find a couple of grizzly bears. Step 2: RUN AWAY THEY WILL RIP YOU APART. Step 3: Hopefully, you got so scared you dropped the pumpkin. Don't worry, they'll take care of the rest.
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Thomas Hart was arrested for ruining "girls night."

​Thomas Hart might have drawn a few strange looks from other inmates if anyone in Hennepin County Jail asked what he was in for.

The answer is, Hart was doing time for murder. Ferret murder.

Last week, Hart was arrested for the drowning death of his girlfriend's pet ferret, and he's now being charged with felony animal cruelty charges.

Hart's alleged ferret killing stems from an incident in which his girlfriend and another friend were out drinking. When Hart decided that the two women were just having a "girl's night" out on the town, he stormed out of the bar. When Hart's girlfriend came home, had had something to say to her, according to the complaint from the Hennepin County Attorney's Office.

"Yeah," Hart told her. "Yeah, I killed the ferret."
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African penguins now residing at the Minnesota Zoo.

​A group of displaced penguins can stop worrying about where they're going to live. They belong to all of us, now that they've found a home at the Minnesota Zoo.

African blackfooted penguins are endangered in the wild due to overfishing and oil spills. The 11 penguins had been kept at a North Dakota zoo but had to find new digs in June due to overflooding. The displaced penguins first got sent to the Como Zoo in St. Paul but now they're in Apple Valley, where the pools are deeper and the space is wider, allowing for more comfortable waddling.

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John Ardnt allegedly stole hundreds of Iowa pigs.

​A while back, City Pages reported on the mysterious disappearance of thousands of area pigs. First, 750 pigs went missing from two separate farms in central Minnesota.Then 200 more pigs disappeared in northern Iowa.

We now know the answer, at least for what happened to the Iowa pigs. The bad news is, the pigs did not break free, thereby inspiring the most adorable Disney movie in years.

The even worse news is, the guy who was arrested for stealing the pigs is one of us.

Minnesota's own John Arndt, a 44-year-old from Hayfield -- oh, isn't that just perfect -- has been arrested and charged with a felony for the theft of the pigs from Mitchell County, Iowa farms, according to Mason City's Globe Gazette newspaper.
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This turkey just wanted a nice place to sit.

​It's pretty much universally accepted that turkeys are colossally stupid. We can now also confirm not only this, but also that they're also pretty damn tough.

Or, at least one of them, namely the bird that flew into Kathy Ganzer's house -- the hard way.

Ganzer wasn't home on the evening of September 7, but her neighbors filled her in on what they think happened.

Four wild turkeys were hanging around in Ganzer's neighborhood, which is apparently quite the hot spot for these feathered idiots. Something must've spooked the birds, because three of them shot right out of the yard and into a tree.

The fourth went the wrong way, crashing right through Grazer's double pane window and into her den.
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