A staff member of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife examines a sanderling that was contaminated by the oil spill in Huntington Beach, California, on October 4, 2021. The major spill off the coast of Southern California fouled popular beaches and killed wildlife while crews scrambled on Sunday to contain the crude before it spread further into protected wetlands. #

Bubba Wallace, the driver of the McDonald's Toyota, celebrates in the victory lane with his dog Asher after winning the rain-shortened NASCAR Cup Series YellaWood 500 at Talladega Superspeedway, in Alabama, on October 4, 2021. #

Participants take part in Key4Life’s rehabilitation program for youth offenders, which includes work with horses at a residential retreat center, on September 22, 2021 in Butleigh, near Glastonbury, England. #

A hyena stands chained to its handler at a circus in Gabasawa, Kano State, Nigeria, on July 27, 2021. Although hyenas are often viewed as sinister, in parts of northern Nigeria some men keep the creatures in their homes, display them at festivals, and even use their dung to make remedies. #

An Arabian sand gazelle, known as "reem," is pictured at a resort on the outskirts of the city of al-Ain, at the far east of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, on January 26, 2021. #

A whale shark swims next to volunteer divers after they removed an abandoned fishing net that was covering a coral reef in a protected area of Ko Losin, Thailand, on June 19, 2021. #

A hatchery truck unloads juvenile Chinook salmon from the Iron Gate Fish Hatchery in Siskiyou County, California, into the Fall Creek facility on July 7, 2021. Because of multiple heat waves and drought this summer, California fish and wildlife officials decided not to release more than 1 million hatchery-raised baby Chinook salmon into the wild, and instead drove them to several hatcheries that could host them until Klamath River conditions improved. #

Hoglets snuggle up to Yasha the cat in the house of its owner Ksenia Krasilnikova, in the village of Okhotnikove outside Yevpatoria, Crimea, on June 14, 2021. Krasilnikova found seven abandoned baby hedgehogs in her yard and fed them, while her male cats Yasha and Murchik comforted the hoglets and kept them warm. #

A wild boar walks in a road in Rome, Italy, on September 27, 2021. Garbage bins draw out families of boars that emerge from the extensive parks surrounding the city to roam the streets, scavenging for food. #

The zookeeper Unnar Aervarsson attempts to weigh a midwife toad on a weighing spoon, during the annual stocktake at ZSL London Zoo, in London, England, on August 26, 2021. #

An endangered mouflon sheep runs in the forest on March 26, 2021, near the abandoned village of Varisia, inside the United Nations–controlled buffer zone that has divided the Greek, southern and the Turkish, northern areas of Cyprus since the 1974 Turkish invasion. The sheep are one of many rare plant and animal species that have flourished inside the UN buffer zone that cuts across the Mediterranean island nation. Devoid of humans since 1974, this no-man's-land has become an unofficial wildlife reserve. #

A one-legged stork rescued by an animal sanctuary eats fish while wearing a new 3-D-printed leg inside its enclosure near Františkovy Lázně, Czech Republic, on September 1, 2021. #

Kim Gea-yeung (right), the manager of an animal shelter for abandoned dogs and cats, and Kim Young-suk, sit with abandoned dogs at a shelter in Anseong, South Korea, on August 11, 2021. At the time, South Korea had announced plans to amend its civil code to grant animals legal status, protecting them from abuse and abandonment. #

A violet-bellied hummingbird (Damophila julie) flies at the Rio Blanco viewpoint, in the Chocó Andino de Pichincha Biosphere Reserve in Pichincha province, Ecuador, on September 25, 2021. #

Melissa Jeuken, a herder, looks at a goat named Norma from her herd of "Old Irish Goats," a breed introduced to Howth Hills in a bid to reduce wildfires and protect species from going extinct, in County Dublin, Ireland, on September 28, 2021. #