Charo says she has a beef with her neighbors. The Spanish-American guitarist and entertainer says she had to give up her pet bull after a neighbor in Beverly Hills, Calif., complained about the smell of its feces.

Charo says she adopted the bull calf after they filmed an anti-bullfighting video together for the animal rights group PETA in 2009. Now that the bull has grown, she says, "Beverly Hills people complain" about the aroma.

A Beverly Hills spokeswoman confirms that officials advised a resident that livestock isn't allowed in the city.

Charo says the bull is named Manolo. She says it lives at a Malibu horse farm but is still allowed to visit her.

The entertainer appears in the SiTV series "Latino 101." She just released the single "Sexy Sexy."

RELATED NEWS ABOUT CELEBRITIES AND ANIMALS:
• Justin Bieber's hair helps rescued farm animals -- wait, what?
• Paul McCartney asks India's prime minister to declare a national Vegetarian Day

-- Lauri Neff, Associated Press

Photo: Charo on Feb. 23. Credit: Mike Coppola / Getty Images

In his latest video, YouTube star Maru -- a Scottish fold cat who hails from Japan and has a devoted following of cat lovers all over the world -- models a series of hairstyles you wouldn't normally see on a non-human animal.

YouTube user mugumogu used Maru's well-established love of boxes to create the hairstyle video, utilizing the same concept -- a head-sized hole cutout in a larger picture -- that has made for many fun family-vacation photos at roadside attractions.

All Maru has to do is stick his head into a picture of a hairstyle with a cat-head-sized cutout to demonstrate how he would look with a bob, a side part and several other styles. Though we're partial to Maru's appearance as it is, we have to admit he looks pretty darn cute with red, wavy hair!

RELATED FUNNY CAT VIDEOS:
• Your morning adorable: YouTube star Maru the cat plays the tambourine with his tail
• Video goodness: Scottish fold cat sits up straight to investigate a potential snack

-- Lindsay Barnett

Video: mugumogu via YouTube

OKLAHOMA CITY — Hundreds of people from the United States and Canada want to adopt an Oklahoma dog that survived an attempt to euthanize it.

The puppy was one of five stray dogs that Sulphur animal control officer Scott Prall put to sleep Friday -- or so he thought. Prall found one of the dogs alive Saturday in a trash bin set aside for dead animals and took it to veterinarian technician Amanda Kloski.

"He was prancing around. He heard me drive up, and he looked up and saw me," Prall said Wednesday.

He said he initially found the stray dog near the animal shelter Friday and tried to kill it by injecting the dog with two lethal doses of a sedative in a foreleg and the heart. Each dose should have been enough to kill the dog, and the second injection was meant to ensure it worked.

Kloski noted the dog's survival on a pet adoption website, drawing the attention of Marcia Machtiger of Pittsburgh, who donated $100 so Kloski could board the dog for a week.

Devoted friend to animals Ellen DeGeneres, a former PETA Person of the Year who was instrumental in the donation of a million servings of pet food to homeless animals through the U.S. Postal Service's "Stamps to the Rescue" campaign last year, has done yet another nice thing for animals in need.

It's a strange one, and it involves Justin Bieber's hair.

Allow us to explain. After the recent premiere of his new movie "Never Say Never 3D," the teen star cut his famous hair and gave it to DeGeneres to auction on eBay, our colleagues at The Times' celebrity news blog Ministry of Gossip report. (The winning bidder, who hasn't been identified publicly, also gets to meet Bieber the next time he appears on DeGeneres' talk show.)

Bieber's hair brought in a staggering $40,668 in the auction, proceeds from which will benefit local farm-animal rescue charity the Gentle Barn. The charity, which houses more than 100 rescued farm animals at its Santa Clarita sanctuary facility, has been featured on DeGeneres' show and is a favorite charity of the comedian and her wife, Portia De Rossi.

DeGeneres and De Rossi are both longtime supporters of animal-friendly causes; De Rossi has been a spokesperson for the feral-cat advocacy group Alley Cat Allies. Bieber is no slouch in the animal-loving department, either; he recently partnered with PETA's youth division, PETA2, on a campaign to promote companion animal adoption.

MORE CELEBRITIES HELPING ANIMALS:
• 'Cove' star Ric O'Barry meets with Sting about Taiji dolphin slaughter
• Paul McCartney asks India's prime minister to declare a national Vegetarian Day

-- Lindsay Barnett

Photo: Bieber at the Golden Globe Awards on Jan. 16. Credit: Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times

We can't get enough of friendships between animals of different species, whether it's a dolphin and a dog, a deer and a cat or a puppy and a duckling. One of the sweetest examples of inter-species friendship we've seen yet is the one between a ewe named Annabelle and a dog named Boomer.

Despite the fact that she's an adult sheep, Annabelle is "still a lamb who thinks she's a dog," explains owner Suzanne McMinn, who writes a blog called Chickens in the Road about her experiences living among sheep, goats, cows, miniature donkeys, dogs and other animals on a farm in West Virginia.

Annabelle doesn't have many friends among her fellow sheep, but she loves both people and dogs. "You can't walk into the pasture without her bouncing right over to you, following you around," McMinn writes. "You might even call her obnoxious occasionally, like when she almost knocks you down -- except that she's so sweet and cute."

Cute she definitely is, especially when she's hopping around like mad, chasing Boomer around a pasture -- and Boomer seems to be having a great time too.

RELATED UNUSUAL ANIMAL FRIENDSHIPS:
• Your morning adorable: Dog and bird play ball
• Your morning adorable: Piglet and dog play together

-- Lindsay Barnett

Video: ChickensintheRoad via YouTube

ALLENTOWN, Pa. — The "ghost cat" is just that.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Wednesday declared the Eastern cougar to be extinct, confirming a widely held belief among wildlife biologists that native populations of the big cat were wiped out by man a century ago.

After a lengthy review, federal officials concluded there are no breeding populations of cougars -- also known as pumas, panthers, mountain lions and catamounts -- in the Eastern United States. Researchers believe the Eastern cougar subspecies has probably been extinct since the 1930s.

Wednesday's declaration paves the way for the Eastern cougar to be removed from the endangered species list, where it was placed in 1973. The agency's decision to declare the Eastern cougar extinct does not affect the status of the Florida panther, another endangered wildcat.

Some hunters and outdoors enthusiasts have long insisted there's a small breeding population of Eastern cougars, saying the secretive cats have simply eluded detection -- hence the "ghost cat" moniker. The wildlife service said Wednesday that it confirmed 108 sightings between 1900 and 2010, but that these animals either escaped or were released from captivity, or migrated from Western states to the Midwest.

At the Ouwehands Zoo in the Netherlands, twin polar bear cubs born in late November ventured outside for the very first time last week.

The cubs, named Siku and Sesi (Inuit words for sea ice and snow, respectively), were born to mother Freedom and father Viktor. Their maternal grandmother, Huggies, also lives at the zoo.

If you can't get enough of Siku and Sesi, might we recommend checking out their nursery webcam on the Ouwehands Zoo's website? (As we type, the cubs are wrestling under their mother's watchful gaze, making it a little difficult to concentrate on the matter at hand.)

See more photos and video of Siku, Sesi and Freedom after the jump!

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Marine researchers say a rare whale tracked across the Pacific Ocean into North American waters this year had been there before.

Photo analysis has confirmed that the highly endangered western Pacific gray whale dubbed Flex -- one of only 130 remaining -- was photographed in 2008 off Canada's Vancouver Island and was assumed to be part of the eastern gray whale population.

U.S and Russian researchers started tracking the male whale Oct. 4 when they tagged him with a satellite tracker off Sakhalin Island, Russia, as part of research into where the animals spend winters.

The whale left Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula on Jan. 3 and began swimming east. It swam halfway across the Bering Sea, turned southand swam between Aleutian Islands into the Gulf of Alaska. It continued southeast to shallow coastal waters off Washington and Oregon. Its last confirmed location was Feb. 4 off Siletz Bay, Ore., where researchers believe the satellite tag fell off. The whale had traveled 5,335 miles over 124 days.

The project stirred the interest of other whale researchers, said Dave Weller, a marine mammal ecologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla.

MOSCOW — Moscow's thousands of stray dogs have something to wag their tails about -- animal rights activists say the city has dropped a plan to round up the dogs and ship them to a camp far outside of town.

Animal rights activists and Russian celebrities had been pressuring the city to abandon the plan, which they said would endanger the dogs by placing them in an environment where diseases would run rampant. Some had compared the planned facility to a concentration camp for dogs.

Natalya Yunitsyna, head of the Hope Bringers charity, told the Associated Press on Tuesday that the deportation proposal was now off the city's agenda.

"We're very pleased that we've won a small victory here," she said.

Moscow city government was expected to endorse the plan Tuesday but the session's minutes, posted online, do not mention the proposal.

The mayor's press office was unavailable for comment, and city hall officials would not confirm the report.

If you're an alarmingly cute animal, we've got a tip for you on how to make yourself seem even more adorable than you were to begin with: Film yourself in slow motion.

We've seen that tactic work quite well in sending an already precious dachshund puppy named Iso into the cute stratosphere with a slow-motion video featuring him cavorting in the snow. (You can also see Iso taking a bath and playing with a laser pointer, among other things, in slow motion on his YouTube channel.)

With his own video above, Alex the chipmunk has proven that you don't need to be a puppy to look darn cute in a slow-motion video. YouTube user TPSFilmStudio says that little Alex's bathtime was filmed in high-definition at 400 frames per second.

RELATED CUTE VIDEOS:
• Your morning adorable: Baby squirrel kicks like a dog while being scratched
• Your morning adorable: Baby squirrel eats a meal

-- Lindsay Barnett

Video: TPSFilmStudio via YouTube

TOKYO — Copies of the 2010 Oscar-winning film that depicts the slaughter of dolphins in the Japanese fishing village of Taiji have been delivered free to its residents, compliments of the director.

Louie Psihoyos, director of "The Cove," said Monday that the film dubbed in Japanese was delivered via regular mail over the weekend to all households, with the help of a local group called People Concerned for the Ocean.

An official at Taiji city hall confirmed that two copies of the DVD had been received, but no one had looked at them yet.

Psihoyos said he was concerned that many Japanese have yet to see the film, but especially the 3,500 people of Taiji in the southwest of the country.

"The people in Taiji deserve to know what millions of others around the world have learned about their town," said the U.S. director.

"The Cove" received a Best Documentary Oscar a year ago for its scathing portrayal of Taiji's dolphin-hunting tradition. It showed about a dozen fishermen scaring the dolphins with metallic banging noises into a cove, then stabbing them as they bled and writhed in the water.

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Four of the world's rarest rhinoceroses were captured by camera traps in an Indonesian national park, an environmental group said Monday.

The footage from movement-triggered hidden cameras showed two mother Javan rhinos and two calves in Ujung Kulon National Park in November and December last year, said a release from the WWF-Indonesia.

Javan rhinos are one of the world's most endangered species, with an estimated population of no more than 50 in Ujung Kulon. A few others live in Vietnam's Cat Tien National Park.

"This is good news to ensure that the population is viable," said Adhi Hariyadi, WWF project leader in the park.

The first "video trap" footage recorded in November showed a mother and calf, identified later as a male, walking steadily toward the camera. Several more videos of the family were obtained later.