An iguana rests on a man's head during a pet blessing ceremony a day after World Animal Day, at a mall in Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines on October 5, 2025. (Photo by Noel Celis/Reuters)

Los Angeles native Mike Stilkey has always been attracted to painting and drawing not only on vintage paper, record covers and book pages, but on the books themselves. Using a mix of ink, colored pencil, paint and lacquer, Stilkey depicts a melancholic and at times a whimsical cast of characters inhabiting ambiguous spaces and narratives of fantasy and fairy tales. A lingering sense of loss and longing hints at emotional depth and draws the viewer into their introspective thrall with a mixture of capricious poetry, wit, and mystery. (Photo by Mike Stilkey)

A pet owner holds his guinea pig named Riec as Father Francisco bestows a blessing on the pet rodent during a feast day Mass in honor of Saint Anthony, the patron saint of animals, at the Saint Fernando church, in Mexico City, Saturday, January 17, 2015. Many people in Mexico bring their pets to churches to be blessed by the priest on this day. (Photo by Marco Ugarte/AP Photo)

A member of India’s Dongria tribe faints in trance during the two-day long Niyamraja Festival atop the Niyamgiri hills near Lanjigarh in Kalahandi district, Orissa state, India, Sunday, February 22, 2015. Every year, members of this indigenous group celebrate this festival sacrificing animals and birds in worship of their deity. (Photo by Biswaranjan Rout/AP Photo)

Reuters photographer Siegfried Modola gained access to a circumcision ceremony in rural Kenya for young girls of the Pokot tribe, in Baringo County. Here: a Pokot girl, covered in animal skins, walks to a place where she will rest after being circumcised in a tribal ritual in a village about 80 kilometres from the town of Marigat in Baringo County, October 16, 2014. (Photo by Siegfried Modola/Reuters)

Professor Xie Yong works on an art installation of a beaver, which is made out of plastic and around 300,000 needles, in Shenyang, Liaoning province, July 23, 2013. The needles, according to Xie, represent the pain felt by animals when their fur is taken off to produce clothing. (Photo by Reuters/Stringer)

An excavator removes a dead bear at the zoo in Tbilisi, Georgia, June 17, 2015. Tigers, lions, bears and wolves were among more than 30 animals that escaped from a Georgian zoo and onto the streets of the capital Tbilisi on Sunday during floods that killed at least 12 people. REUTERS/David Mdzinarishvili

In this February 4, 2016 picture a masked participant of the traditional carnival parade poses in the streets of the village of Kippel in the Loetschental valley, southwestern part of Switzerland. During this sinister carnival, participants wearing wooden masks and animal furs, crowd the streets of the villages to scare the people. (Photo by Dominic Steinmann/Keystone via AP Photo)