Horse-riding is dangerous. Deadly even. Especially when uppity commoners are involved! Mark Phillips is the coach of the US Olympic equestrian team. He has so far killed three team hopefuls this season with his "challenging" new jumping courses. This very much upsets his ex-wife, Princess Anne. "Phillips is about to be crucified as the halfwit menace," said one British journalist (according to Page Six). The problem is that Phillips isn't royalty, even though he was married to a Princess for a while, and only royalty can properly manage this exciting and deadly sport. We don't know if this is good or bad for Lou Dobbs' daughter Hillary, who is sort of American Royalty, isn't she? Thankfully, the world is still eradicating the horse menace. After the jump, terrifying footage of just how dangerous horse-riding can be.

The life of a chimp raised on the Upper West Side is detailed in Elizabeth Hess's Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human. They took little Nim away from the wild while he was still nursing and imported him to New York — and it's all Noam Chomsky's fault! The 1970s experiment was part of an effort to disprove the linguist's assertion that non-humans were "fundamentally incapable of language." Heartbreakingly, Nim was shipped away from his beloved New York family after a year and a half, when the project's funding ran out. "He would just look at pictures of his New York City family, and himself, over and over again." Salon interviews the author, who dishes on Nim's relationship with an ex-circus chimp...

Long before hardass trainer Cesar the Dog Whisperer was putting pups on treadmills in his training camp, our ancient ancestors of 1930 were trying to figure out how to avoid walking their dogs. Solution: an early version of a dog-treadmill, and one of the first documented beginnings of the LOLdog trend. [Modern Mechanix via Boing Boing]

In the wee hours of this morning, Barnum & Bailey's Circus paraded their elephants into Manhattan, in what has become an annual tradition and spectacle. PETA is not too happy about this sort of thing. Is the circus really bad? On one hand, they're cruelly exploiting majestic mammals for the pitiful bemusement of humanity. On the other hand: elephants! Below, a clip of last year's NYC elephant march. Is there an easy answer to this one?

This is my new favorite website. [Dog Report Dot Com]

The puppy torture video will end the Iraq war. [Fimoculous]

You probably suspected that advertising creatives included some bestiality fans. This ad campaign for the German magazine Deutsch [via Copyranter] could reinforce your suspicions. And the theme, it turns out, is not confined to the media space; sadly, it permeates advertising for consumer products, and even public service campaigns. Below, three examples of the indelicate use of animal love by the ad industry—the final one, the other half of Deutsch's two-page spread, is somewhat NSFW.

The Daily News had the perfect story on its hands: an exclusive about a lost animal, with a name, being rescued, from the dark scary subway complete with picture. In case you missed the six News stories on the practically (suspiciously!) made-for-media topic, adorable little "Georgia" here jumped out of her owner's cat carrier and scampered into the subway tracks, where she remained for 25 days. Then, OMG, the cat was rescued yesterday by heroic trackworkers, who are named and interviewed, and NYPD officers, who are named and interviewed, and the NYC Transit President called everyone heroes, apparently in some kind of emergency weekend interview. The News nearly had a perfect story, but then they had to make two puns involving "nine lives" and end on this quote from owner Ashley Phillips: "I can't believe she's going to be in the paper tomorrow." Still, well played. [Daily News]

Ann Curry broke out of her cage—run for your lives! Well, okay, it was a crafty Floridian zebra named after the Today Show anchor. But caging the real Ann Curry might not be such a terrible idea, actually. [Fox]

The teaser trailer the Society posted to its blog is chillingly effective: not only do we expect to be appalled by their trip to one of L.A.'s most popular pet-pushing emporiums, but we're hoping their i-team, disguised as Les Deux patrons in search of a hot after-party, somehow managed to infiltrate Hilton's compound and obtain footage of the walk-in closet where a colony of neglected pups survives on a diet of high-end shoe leather and the contents of discarded water bottles. Stay tuned!

Patrick Waldo, the Huffington Post's video guy, is also an out and proud vegan. Vegans are people who don't eat or use anything that came from animals, so obviously they hate Thanksgiving, the holiday that celebrates our Puritan forefathers' victory over the savage turkeys of The New World. Vegans refuse to exploit animals in any way except to use them to try to make the rest of us feel bad for wanting some honey in our hot toddy and wanting our hot toddy in a leather mug. So yesterday Mr. Waldo wrote a little HuffPo Blog about how he took a trip to a very special kind of turkey farm.

The saga of the happy cat camp at JFK airport has become even more grim today. A memo from Port Authority General Manager Susan Baer reveals just how far the Authority is willing to go to feed their sick blood lust. Airport employees have been ordered not to feed the cats under penalty of confiscation of their airport identification, thus possibly costing them their jobs. If they can't round up and gas the cats they will starve them all.

JFK airport's "happy cat camp" is set to be looted, pillaged, and leveled by rampaging Port Authority agents today. Adorable denizens of the Catemkin Village—which, as we first learned last week, is made of overturned packing containers set beneath a rusty truck near the Delta cargo area—will be rounded up beginning today and euthanized en masse, despite protests and lobbying from "cat group members."

OMG, there's a little village of stray cats and they all live at the airport in "makeshift cubicles made of plastic packing containers nestled in cargo carts that once carried transcontinental luggage" under a rusty old tanker truck. Airport employees, the most bitter and hateful people on this earth, have been taking care of them for years, as these cats are their last, tenuous connection to their own humanity. AND NOW THE PORT AUTHORITY IS ROUNDING THEM UP.

As regular readers/depressives have no doubt surmised, most every weekend around here is about reading the New York Times — that is, ogling the pictures and sniffing the newsprint — and convincing ourselves that, just like Harry Hurt, we could do interesting things if we wanted to, that we aren't just inputs to an industrial contraption presently on a 48-hour cigarette break. The glossy girth of the Sunday Times serves such purposes quite well (so stay in your lane, weekday colleagues); the flimsy flaccidity of Saturday, not so much. Take today's Arts section, which contains reviews of four television programs premiering this weekend. Three of them — 75 percent! — are shows about animals.

The personal essay is just like people: full of too much information, inherently dull, and a staple fascination of weekend media. The men and women of American letters just really love to get personal on their days off. We reward those who go too far.

Way back in May, we were alerted to the presence of a turkey down by Battery Park, seen inside the gates of the Department of Homeland Security and Coast Guard building. It was comforting to see Mother Nature helping to fight the terrorists, keeping New York safe from evil-doers. But via Curbed comes an unnerving update: While still roaming the tip of the island, it would seem that the Terror Turkey has left the DHS and is just gobbling around Battery Park. With Thanksgiving around the corner, now's hardly the time for our beloved weapon in the war on terror to be lazy and unemployed.

Most card-carrying fags and their hags celebrated Gay Pride weekend by flailing about 5th Avenue, but Liza Minnelli had other plans: her rainy Saturday was spent at lesbian watering hole Rubyfruit, where she crowned winners at the Pet Pride beauty pageant. If anyone deserves to reign over a butch/femme pet fashion showdown, it's undoubtedly the Queen of Queens.

• Britney's ratty brown wig is not a wig. Smart move: split ends are harder to see when you hair's dark. [Us Weekly]
• Remember the Meow Mix House? Every single cat from the "reality show" has since been adopted, except for one: Bambi, who hisses and scratches. Best Post sentence ever: "Some say the cat-dorable cat-estant has yet to be cat-dopted simply be-claws the 7-year-old puss is sporting a little Man-cat-tan meow-titude." [NYP]
• Oh, look — it's Amy Sedaris' apartment. Again. [NYT]
• We are a pain in Steve Cuozzo's ass. Finally, we can rest now. [Belle in the Big Apple]
• Snoop shills for Orbit gum. So sad — remember when there was so much drama in the LBC? Those were the days. [Adfreak]
• An open letter to Nicole Richie, so that she may raise Lupus awareness. [Cobain in a Coma]
• Because your Shake Shack obsession MUST be coddled, do enjoy the Shack Cam dashboard widget. [Works Perfectly]