Yesterday was a ...

Good Day for English elephants, as Howletts Wild Animal Park celebrated the birth of the first elephant to be both conceived and born in Britain.

Anxious Day for Russian elephants as a Russian airline won an order to carry four to six elephants from St Petersburg zoo to the Ugandan capital, Kampala, where they will be used in the making of a BBC documentary. The elephants will fly in containers on an Antonov-124 jumbo jet in September.

Dismal Day for other pets as the RSPCA reported a 27 per cent increase last year in convictions for cruelty to cats. The figures for 1996 include 892 owners convicted of cruelty to dogs, 235 for cruelty to cats, 168 for cruelty to cattle and 65 for cruelty to pigs. In all, 1,303,481 telephone calls were made to the society's cruelty line.

Thirsty Day for Garfield the cat as a worker on the English language paper The News in Islamabad, Pakistan, blacked out the word "beer" from a Garfield cartoon in which a character was drinking (non-alcoholic) root beer. Alcohol is against the tenets of Islam.