Last week was ...

a Good Week for flamingos, as a pink flamingo at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago became the first of its species to be given an artificial leg. A prosthetics maker had designed a plastic leg for the bird after its limb had been shattered in an accident.

a Bad Week for cows, which have just been told by geneticists that they are more closely related to whales than to pigs.

a Good Week for Ollie the parrot, which was returned to its home in Barnes, London, after spending a week in Wormwood Scrubs jail in the cell of a man sentenced to life imprisonment. "Ollie actually came back fatter than he went in," said his owner. While in jail, he had been fed on chocolate biscuits.

a Worrying Week for mice, as a paper in Nature reported than mice bred without one of the brain's four types of adenosine receptors are not stimulated by coffee. They do, however, appear to be more anxious than normal mice.

a Good Week for specialists, as a study in Hartford, Connecticut, concluded that infants who are circumcised in traditional Jewish manner by a mohel suffered less discomfort than those who had the operation performed by a doctor.