Is this the most important week ever for animal stories?

Lucy Mangan marvels at a short-legged pony, flossing monkeys and two gay ducks
Mayflower the Shetland pony
Mayflower a grey Shetland pony grazes near to salt marshes by the River Test, Southampton, Hampshire. Fire crews have been called out four times to rescue a pony apparently stuck in the mud only to find that the animal simply has short legs. Photograph: Chris Ison/PA

Through the gathering clouds of fiscal and environmental gloom, still an occasional beam of sunlight breaks through. For this week has been - an exhaustive search of the archives officially reveals - The Best Week of Animal Stories Ever (exclamation mark optional).

Ah, animal stories - how we love thee! But why? Well, the shortest answer to this is, of course: "Because we've met people." The longer answer is - excuse me, but what is not to love about the story of Mayflower the pony who has such wee short legs that passersby who see her grazing in the salt marshes of Southampton keep calling the fire brigade because they think she is stuck in the mud? Look at her! A tiny little pony with even tinier little legs! And she has owners, so she's not going to be subject to brutal Darwinian filtering as she might in the wild. Instead, she grazes contentedly while acting as a conduit for other people's unselfish, if - happily - misguided concerns for her welfare. There is absolutely nothing bad in this story, just as there isn't in the tale of Hope the otter, who was found by Camilla Ravenshear near the River Exe and kept alive by her overnight until she could be handed over to experts at the Secret World Wildlife Rescue centre in Somerset. This story scores extra delightfulness points by being immediately transplantable into an interwar children's novel without even changing the name of the rescuer.

Then there's the news of the two male ducks at the Arundel Wetland Centre who have thwarted the staff's attempts to get them to breed with a female by turning out to be gay. There is something irrepressibly joyful about the idea of gay ducks. It's not quite as good as gay penguins, but it's still pretty splendid. It has a small something to do with knowing that it is one in the eye for evangelical rightwing Christians who like to hold up the natural world as evidence of all that is holy and that human homosexuality is our own, evil choice, but mainly the appeal of their story lies in the general air of insouciant disregard of others' wishes. It speaks to the id in all of us.

What else? How about Mosha, the elephant in Thailand who has been given a new false leg? That's right, a new one. She grew out of the old one, which was made for her after she stepped on a landmine on the Burmese border, so she's been upgraded. You could focus on the landmine issue here, of course, but let's not. Let's look upon Mosha as a rare symbol of the good we can do - or at least the harm we can undo - if we put our minds to it.

There is, however, a batch of animal stories with slightly more sinister overtones involving chimpanzees and our other hairy cousins. First, there were the reports that a chimp in Sweden's Furuvik zoo has taken to stockpiling stones overnight in order to throw them at visitors the next day, thus exhibiting the ability to plan for the future that experts had believed to be exclusively human. This news was swiftly followed by that of a monkey in Thailand who, after years of being beaten by his owner into harvesting coconuts, had killed him by throwing one of said coconuts at his head. By the time you add the macaques living in temple ruins outside Bangkok who are teaching their young to brush their teeth and use fallen human hair as dental floss, you can hardly avoid the conclusion that something is most definitely up. The next wave of primate evolution has begun. Perhaps all the warmly endearing animal activities have been deliberately undertaken to distract us all from ape plans for imminent takeover. Well, we've had our chance at running the world, I guess, and a right bloody balls-up we've made of it too. Good luck to them, I say. I only hope my own stumpy legs charm our new overlords into letting me graze in peace too.