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- The panel are shown a selection of unusual tools and are asked how vets use them to treat animals.

- A leaf blower: In 2007, vets made a ventilator using a leaf blower to keep three giraffes breathing under anaesthetic. They took a hose to the giraffes' windpipes, and they blew into the animals, and the only amendment made was an extra valve fitted so they could release the pressure.

- A vacuum cleaner hose: A 1964 paper by vets said that if you take a vacuum cleaner, remove the dust bag, and attach it to a big respiratory system such as that of an elephant, under anaesthetic, the valve can pump in and out, assisting with air supply.

- A mallet: If you want to get inside an elephant's tusk to disinfect it, you can use a mallet to get in and a garden hose to clean out a sore.

- Bubble wrap: Mittens were made out of bubble wrap for a tiger, to keep him warm during a root canal appointment in 2020. They also used an electric blanket and a duvet to keep the tiger warm. However, they also had a shotgun.

- Tangent: Tom asks why they don't use woollen mittens, leading to Tom to make a fake appeal to the public to make their own woollen mittens for tigers.

- Tangent: American dental vet Brook Niemiec once performed five root canals at the same time on a jaguar. During the procedure the jaguar went into cardiac arrest and stopped breathing. Niemiec revived the jaguar by yanking on the animal's testicles.

- XL Tangent: Medieval vets used to rely on magic. In Europe, horses with fistulas were treated with a salve made from mashes vipers and frogs. Vets would also consult horse horoscopes before treating them. For example, if a horse was being blood-let, you should not do it from a part of the body that corresponds with the moon's position at the time. Blood-letting was a very early veterinary technique, possibly starting with ancient Egyptians who watched hippos going down the Nile and apparently pierced themselves on reeds to let blood out. The hippos returned looking renewed and refreshed, and Egyptians thought this was a good idea. However, they failed to realise that the red liquid released by the hippos was actually sweat.

- Vampires are good donors because they give blood to those who are lacking in it. Vampire bats are the only mammals that feed solely on the blood of other animals, mainly that of cows, horses and birds. If the bat goes without feeding for more than three days, it will starve. This, the most successful hunters amongst them will help out the hungrier bats by regurgitating blood and passing it to them mouth-to-mouth. The bats will even provide blood if the two of them are unrelated, in the hope that hungry bat will return the kindness back to them again. This is known as reciprocal altruism, and this is extremely rare in the animal kingdom and indeed amongst humans. This works because the more altruistic bats are treated better by others, whereas selfish bats will eventually find themselves rejected.

- XL Tangent: The moment a vampire bat starts feeding, they almost immediately start urinating at exactly the same time, in order to make space. They are able to take in as much blood as their body weight, so the bats have to lose weight immediately so that they are still able to fly. The saliva of vampire bats contains an anticoagulant called Draculin. This was discovered in 1998, and since them it has been developed to treat strokes in humans, by breaking down blood clots in the brain.

- XL: The kind of sucker drinks from boobies is the vampire ground finch of the Galapagos Islands. The finch normally eats insects and seeds, but under hostile weather and when there is not enough fresh water, they will eat bird blood, often that of the blue-footed booby bird. While the boobies are 73 time heavier than the finches, the boobies let them feed because they don't want to abandon their eggs. The boobies themselves dive down for fish to eat. They also have sexual dimorphism, with the female boobies being bigger than the males.

- XL: The main disagreement between pro-doggers and anti-doggers is about whether to use dogs in animal experiments. Pro-doggers were anti-vivisections against the use of living dogs in experiments, while anti-doggers were medical students who wanted to experiment on live animals. In 1907, there were riots between the two groups. Two Swedish women named Lizzy Lind af Hageby and Leisa Schartau enrolled in medical classes in London to get more information for their anti-vivisection campaign, attending dog vivisections at UCL. They found the experiments to be cruel, and they documented one story of a brown terrier who was experimented on for months until it was finally put down. They published their diaries about this experience under the title The Shambles Of Science, "Shambles" being a pun as it also means a slaughterhouse. This book sparked a full anti-vivisection movement. Pro-doggers installed a memorial statue in Battersea to the brown terrier, which anti-doggeres demanded should be removed, and this led to riots. 1,000 medical students turned up in central London to join the protest, then the suffragettes got involved because they equated the treatment of women and animals at the hands of male scientists and other men in general. It cost so much to police this statue 24/7 that in 1910, it was removed under cover of night. In 1985, a new statue was put in remembrance of what became known as the Brown Dog Riots.

- The thing that has a vagina that is large enough to walk through is a frog. Strictly speaking, a frog doesn't have a vagina, but a cloaca which does defecation, urination and sex. The Japanese water scavenger beetle is something that is regularly eaten by frogs, but they are able to walk down a frog's entire digestive tract and come out unharmed from the cloaca. The beetle takes between six minutes and four hours to complete the journey. Some believe the walking of the beetle stimulates the frog's sphincter. (Forfeit: Blue whale)

- Tangent: A blue whale vagina is eight-to-ten feet long, but is only two feet in diameter. You could lie down in it, but not walk down it.

- XL Tangent: Some animals breathe through their anuses. These include bottom-breathing turtles. In 2021, Japanese scientists discovered that if you pump highly oxygenated liquid into the intestines of mice and pigs, they did not have to breathe through their mouths. It is possible they could use this technique to ventilate humans in an emergency.

- The panel are shown several animals are asked what the upside would be to be bitten by one of them.

- Russell's pit viper: About a third of the people bitten by one go through puberty backwards. The pituitary gland does not produce enough hormones, meaning you lose your sex drive, lose your hair, and you stop your menstrual cycle. You are also likely to die either of cardiac failure or kidney failure.

- Funnel web spider: There is something in its venom which may help people recover from a heart attack. When you have a heart attack, the blood flow slows down and your cells don't get all the oxygen that they need. This triggers a death signal that tells the cells to kill themselves. The venom contains a protein called HI1A that blocks the death signal to humans before it is too late.

- Brazilian wandering spider: The bite of this spider can cause erections that last much longer, although also more painful, and may cause impotence in the long-term. The chemicals in the venom are being used to treat erectile dysfunction.

- Tangent: Alan recalls reading a book by one of Hugh Hefner's wives, which claims that Hefner took so much Viagra that it made him deaf.

- Cone snail: One of the most venomous animals in the world. The venom from a single small snail can kill 700 people. They fire out a toxic tooth and then reel the prey in like a harpoon. There are over 1,000 species. One species, the geography cone, is nicknamed the cigarette snail, because if you are attacked by it the victim would have just about enough time to smoke a single cigarette before you died.

- The people who make a habit of sending strongly worded letters to vermin are 19th century Americans. In New England, some people thought that the best way to get rid of rats was to send strongly worded letters to them. One found stuffed into a cell wall in New Hampshire, written by Mrs. Abigail Weed in 1845 read: "I cannot find words bad enough to express what I feel. We are preparing water to drown you, fire to roast you, cats to catch you and clubs to maul you. You Satans, quit here." A man in 1889 wrote: "Dear Rats. It may be news to you that there lives not far away a French family, much given to rich gravies, sweet meats and delightful pastries. You would fare better there. Of course we should miss you, but we feel we could bear it. Yours politely, the people of this house."

- Tangent: This practice can be dated back to at least the 10th century. A Byzantine book of Greek agriculture advice describes this practice. The author however said that he did not believe it worked.

- XL Tangent; In the USA, there was an attempt to get rid of Burmese pythons from the Everglades. They caught pythons, inserted transmitters into them, released them, and then tracked them to their mating spots so more pythons could be found and killed. In India, there was a time when the government paid people to get rid of cobras, but it backfired because people bred more cobras in order to make more money.

- The world's biggest baby is the offspring of the tsetse fly. Most insect reproduce by laying eggs, but these flies give birth to live young, lactating internally, so the larva is getting all its nourishment inside. When the larva emerges, it is as big as and even heavier than the mother. The mate also injects a chemical into the female to make her less interested in sex, so she only mates once, and that initial male sperm is stored inside her body. The sperm can re-impregnate her repeatedly.

- Tangent: Tsetse fly fever is an extremely dangerous thing to have. Sandi has it as a child. She was living in the bush in Africa and was only a few weeks old. The doctor came and did not know what to do to reduce her fever, so they put Sandi in a fridge. Sandi says she doesn't remember it, but she has enjoyed eating ever since.

- Tangent: Aphids give birth to live young, but they do not need a male for fertilisation. They are capable of parthenogenesis, where a female can reproduce on their own. The female can be pregnant with a pregnant embryo. There is also a species of mite called adactylidium which is born with pre-fertilised eggs that hatch inside the female. There is a single male in the brood with impregnates all the females while they are still inside the mother, in utero. They then eat their way out of the mother, killing her in the process. The female offspring head out and they are going to reproduce, while the male does nothing. The whole life cycle lasts just four days.

- Tangent: There are species of shark which are ovoviviparous, meaning they lay an egg into their own womb, where it hatches while it is nourished all the while. The problem however, is that they are in utero cannibals. The mother has two uteruses, but only the first of the many eggs hatch in each uterus will survive, because the firstborn will eat the others. This was discovered by a researcher who put their hand inside a shark and got bitten.

- Tangent: The desert grassland whiptail lizard is an all-female species of reptile found in North America. They reproduce via parthenogenesis, but in order to ovulate the female have courtships with other females. They mimic the rituals of opposite-sex species, so they are basically lesbian lizards.

General Ignorance

- The geological period in which you would encounter a velociraptor is the cretaceous. This occurs about 70-80 million years after the Jurassic period. Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, probably based his creatures on a different dinosaur called the deinonychus, which looked like a velociraptor, but was about twice the size. The velociraptor was about the size of a miniature poodle. The period where dinosaurs lived was huge. For example, the stegosaurus lived in the Jurassic period, but by the time the T-Rex had evolved, the stegosaurus had been extinct for 80 million years. (Forfeit: Jurassic)

- XL: The thing that whales squirt out of their blowholes is water vapour, air and mucus. When a whale blows from its blowhole, it is akin to a sneeze. The idea of them blowing water out is a widely held myth, perpetuated by children's books. In 2016, four researchers analysed 116 children's books on whales and dolphins, and found that 63% of them contained errors. It is important to correct this error, because people mistakenly think that you should pour water down blowholes in order to help stranded whales, but in fact you would be drowning the whale. (Forfeit: Water)

- The deadliest member of the cat family is the black-footed cat. Africa's smallest feline; it is about 8 inches tall, making it smaller than the average house cat. It can typically kill more animals in a single night than a leopard will kill in six months. It has three times the success rate of a lion, and on average kills one animal every 50 minutes. The San people say it can jump on the neck of a giraffe and bite it, but in reality they mostly seem to hunt rodents and small birds.

- Tangent: The question is illustrated by a picture of a woman called Nellie Chapman in 1847, who was a lion tamer. She once gave Queen Victoria a private audience.

- XL Tangent: The population of feral cats in Australia is estimated to be about five million, and they kill about one billion animals a year. The tame house cats of Australia kill about half a billion animals a year. Melanie's brother went away for a weekend and he had the cat flap open with an automatic feeder to keep the cat going. However, a neighbour trying to be helpful decided to put the cat inside and closed the flap. The neighbour did not know however that when you close a cat flap, you just close it one way. As a result, cats could get into his house, but not get out, and when he got back home his house was full of cats.

Scores

- Melanie Bracewell: -2 points
- Desiree Burch and Tom Allen: -9 points
- Alan Davies: -48 points