Unlikely Loves

by Jennifer S. Holland

  And in the spring, Kate and Pip’s bond continued to grow, the two walking in the woods together as if it were perfectly normal, even joining forces to scare away a bear that showed up on the property. “The bear stood on its hind legs not twenty feet from us,” Isobel recalls, “and Kate and Pip shot after it like bullets. I was stunned! They chased it for about a hundred yards until it ran through the fence and was gone. The look on Kate’s face when they returned was priceless. They both seemed to think this was perfectly normal behavior!”

  Meanwhile, even as Pip embraced her deer-ness more and more, Isobel marvels that this near-wild animal and the giant black dog who raised her continued to share licks, nuzzles, and rambunctious play. “I knew that there was so much more to their relationship than just one animal that helped another in need. This was really special.”

  Pip has since given birth to a number of fawns of her own, and the wild play with Kate has eased into more gentle communications between them. But Isobel says they continue to show a loving familiarity when Pip comes around, and their youthful frolicking of days past always sticks in her mind. “They developed a body language that’s a compromise—not quite deer, not quite dog,” she says. “Something in between that only they share.”

  Columbian Black-Tailed Deer

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Chordata

  Class: Mammalia

  Order: Artiodactyla

  Family: Cervidae

  Genus: Odocoileus

  Species: Odocoileus hemionus

  Subspecies: O. h. columbianus

  {Florida, U.S.A., 2012}

  The Old Mare and the Dog

  At a special place called Misfit Farm in Florida, animals get a second chance at life . . . and sometimes at love when they need it most.

  An old Arabian mare named Candy came to the farm after her owners lost interest in caring for her. She was in poor shape after years of neglect, but Mindy Ziler and her husband were good with horses, having two of their own already, so they offered to bring the animal home. They cleaned her up, fixed her worn hooves, and fed her well. The Zilers grew very attached to the old horse, and she was comfortable in her new life, settling into the rhythms of the farm.

  A beautiful dog named Woolf, meanwhile, was a long-standing resident at Misfit. Mindy’s husband had discovered the white shepherd–husky mix some years earlier—homeless, collarless, and chasing squirrels in a parking lot near his workplace. With a single “Here, boy!” he had the dog in his arms, and brought him to the farm intending to find him a new home.

  “But I couldn’t let him go,” Mindy says. He turned out to have an incredibly gentle demeanor and sweetness with children; he seemed the perfect candidate for being a therapy dog. So Mindy began the required training, which the dog took to with ease. “I don’t know what it is, but he has some magical connection with people,” she says. (He now regularly visits needy people of all sorts, and is even a courtroom companion for children facing traumatic trials.)

  Arabian Horse

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Chordata

  Class: Mammalia

  Order: Perissodactyla

  Family: Equidae

  Genus: Equus

  Species: Equus ferus

  Subspecies: Equus ferus caballus

  With a heart that kind, maybe it isn’t surprising that Woolf also bonds tightly with nonhuman animals in need.

  “Candy was old when we got her,” Mindy says, “but last winter her age really started to show. She began lying down a lot and didn’t seem to feel well. And that’s when Woolf suddenly took to her.” Mindy’s dogs aren’t usually allowed in with the horses, but they dug a hole under the fence so Woolf could squeeze under and lie down next to her. And when another animal went to inspect Candy, “Woolf barked and bared his teeth—I’d never seen that kind of aggression from him before.”

  Now, Woolf had never paid much attention to the horses before, except to chase them along the fence. But as long as Candy was unwell, the dog would run to check on her each day and then refuse to leave her side. “I think he sensed Candy was sick—he seemed to smell it in her,” says Mindy. “He was going to lie there and protect her so she could rest, so she could eat, so no one would bother her. If she got up to graze, he’d stay where he could see her.”

  Candy, for her part, let Woolf be her companion and protector even though normally she was grumpy toward the other animals. Whether the dog was lying with her or sniffing her or even nibbling at scraps from her food, she seemed content, even welcoming, of his attention. “He comforted her,” Mindy says.

  But eventually the horse’s stubborn strength wore down and her owners decided they had to put her to sleep.

  The day the family buried Candy by the barn was a somber one. “Woolf went over to the area where we had kept her, sniffing around as if looking for her. He could tell she was gone.” Mindy hopes he knew he’d helped carry her through her end of life and that she was no longer in pain.

  “Looking back, I absolutely think there was a special affection there,” Mindy says. “Nothing bothers this dog. But when Candy was sick, he was defiant with me when I wanted him to come in or get away from the mare. He’d give me a look that clearly said no! He wanted to be with her. I think he knew she was dying and wanted to ease her pain.”

  Mindy says since Candy died, Woolf has begun showing special interest in her cat.

  Uh-oh.

  Shepherd–Husky

  The most decorated war dog of World War II, named Chips, was a mix of these two wonderful breeds.

  {Yorkshire, England, 2012}

  The Terrier and the Duckling

  If a duck gets lost in the woods, will it make a sound? And if it does, will someone come to see what all the quacking is about?

  The answers in this case are yes, and yes. Very fortunate for little Fifty Pence, squeaking away on a wooded path, her life certainly headed for a swift end were it not for the kindness of strangers.

  Here is Skip the terrier, born to working-dog parents (and so with the killer instinct in her DNA) and trained to hunt. Yet this pooch showed loving-kindness to the feathered morsel that would have fit as nicely in her mouth as cuddled against her side.

  Now, fortunately for the outcome of this story, working terriers aren’t duck hunters. In England, where our characters found each other, the dogs are trained to go after fox, rodents, groundhogs, and other burrowing creatures—sometimes actually following them underground. Ducks and other birds just aren’t on the list of quarry.

  Still, you wouldn’t expect a terrier to be a duck’s surrogate mom and BFF.

  The bird, a mallard duckling, was just a day old when a couple walking their dogs in a Yorkshire wood near Eggborough noticed her sitting alone on the ground. They decided to continue their stroll, hoping the mother duck would come back for the lost baby, but on the return the ball of fluff was still there—and this time she was about to become lunch for a fox. Eager to save her life, the couple scared off the predator and took the duckling to a local woman known to care for abandoned wildlife.

  When Annette Pyrah answered her door that day, she didn’t know a duckling was about to change her life. She now runs a small animal rescue shelter for British wildlife out of her home in Barlby, a village in North Yorkshire, but at that time she’d been training to be a legal secretary. It was after the duckling’s arrival that she began accepting all kinds of creatures, and she soon became their full-time caretaker, her legal career diverted.

  Annette called the animal Fifty Pence after her coinlike smallness. To make the bird feel at home, “I used a feather duster and mop head to make a nest—keeping her warm like a mother duck would—in my conservatory,” she says. “It’s a trick I often use for abandoned birds.” Meanwhile, she noticed that her dog Skip was keeping a watchful eye on the orphan.

 
Soon after hatching, ducklings will begin following and learning from whatever bigger animal they see first, typically the mother bird (what biologists call filial imprinting). Without a mom in her sights, Fifty Pence would be seeking a replacement parent. Annette didn’t want the duck to imprint on her—because that would make it hard to later release the animal back into the wild. “But I needn’t have worried,” she says, because, like the dog for the bird, “Fifty Pence only had eyes for Skip.”

  With the intrigue obviously mutual, Annette finally decided to let the duck out in the yard with her two dogs. “She went right to Skip—ignoring my other dog, Holly—and wanted to play.” Wasting no time on formalities, the duckling began chasing Skip around, grabbing at her tail. As she got a little bigger “she even tried to fetch,” Annette says. “I’d throw the ball and she’d do sort of a flying run, flapping her wings, so she could get to it before Skip did. Of course, she couldn’t pick it up in her beak.” The bird also took to Skip’s bed, and the two shared it, nestled in together as Fifty Pence groomed the dog with gentle nibbles and pecks. The dog seemed to appreciate the attention and remained soft-mouthed in return—even when the pecking clearly became a bit annoying, Annette says.

  Mallard Duck

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Chordata

  Class: Aves

  Order: Anseriformes

  Family: Anatidae

  Genus: Anas

  Species: Anas platyrhynchos

  “What touched me most was the trust this little duck showed,” she says. “Here’s this tiny, vulnerable thing putting her faith in an animal that might have been her enemy—it’s like going to a lion for affection! I suppose she was lonely and wanted companionship, and normally she’d have had her mother and siblings. So she turned to Skip. And for some reason, this dog with the instinct to attack decided to be loving instead.”

  Annette says her plan was, eventually, to take Fifty Pence to a nearby pond where other mallards congregated with hope that the bird would recognize and join her own kind, maybe even find a mate. (Annette had been bringing pond algae to the duck to eat so she’d get used to natural food.) But then, about three months after the duckling’s arrival, came an upsetting day.

  “I’d gone out shopping, leaving the animals playing ball in the yard,” Annette recalls. “And when I came back, Fifty Pence was gone. I found out later that some teenage boys had been over chasing and scaring her, and she’d flown away.” She says that both she and Skip went looking for the duck. A neighbor claims to have seen her on a nearby street, “but we couldn’t find her. We all felt lost—she’d been part of the family. I think Skip was really sad; they’d been so close.”

  Before that day, “she was flapping her wings, almost ready to go, and I knew someday she’d leave us,” Annette says. “It’s a very special experience to rehabilitate animals, but when they’re weaned, you have to take a step back and let them know that humans aren’t usually good news for wild animals. That’s what I always try to do.” But this wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. “It’s very upsetting not knowing if she’s okay, but we’re hopeful she’s fine and will come back in the spring—fingers crossed. I do have a big pond here, so maybe she’ll return.”

  Until then, Annette and no doubt Skip, ears perked and nose up, will be watching the sky for a familiar shape and affectionate quack, Fifty Pence coming home to the family who loves her.

  Working Terrier

  Quick on their feet and sensitive of nose, terriers of many sorts have long been the darlings of fox hunters, though the act of hunting fox with dogs—whether for sport or to control fox populations—continues to stir up considerable debate; not all agree it is humane.

  {Yorkshire, England, 2011}

  The Donkey and the Sheep

  There may not be a wedding vow about leaping in front of an oncoming train to prove your love. But it is probably fair to say that most of us, in an uncomfortable or scary situation, would try to protect a loved one from insult or harm—even if it meant putting ourselves in a tough spot.

  Taking risks to save someone special is by no means a people-only deed. Social animals of all kinds are regularly put to the test in the wild, defending territorial and familial boundaries, fighting rivals over mates, sending up warning alarms, and scooping up their young and running from danger. And even our more domesticated friends, in the least likely scenarios, can prove to be heroes at heart.

  Meet Dotty. Dotty is a donkey, round and content from years of excellent and affectionate care by her owners. It’s amazing to see her now and know of her history. As just a little tyke she had been left tied by the side of a country road in a Yorkshire village, clearly abandoned. A man driving by glimpsed the animal and was upset by how emaciated and wobbly she was. Ever the animal lover (and married to another one), the man couldn’t leave her there to die, so he loaded little Dotty into his truck and whisked her home to live with him and his wife, Ann, on their 50-acre farm. There, the donkey grew and thrived.

  Also at the farm was Stanley the sheep. He was a marshmallow of a creature, woolly and round, with a smooth white face, his ears always a-twitching this way and that. He, too, had a bit of a rough start. He and brother Sidney were orphans that Ann brought up on the bottle.

  From early on, Dotty and Stanley shared a stable and field with each other and the menagerie of other creatures that Ann cares for—llamas, goats, rabbits, horses, and chickens, to name a barnful.

  “Dotty and Stanley were good friends from the beginning,” recalls Ann. “They’d go out in the field and play together, along with another sheep named Simon. The two sheep would chase Dotty, then Dotty would chase the sheep. They’d run around and wrestle—it was so fun to watch. They’re a bit old for that now, but they used to do it all the time.” The fact that both animals are “too old” for roughhousing now is wonderful news, because that means both survived a horrible ordeal that took place a few years back.

  “It’s still very vivid,” says Ann. “These kinds of things tend to stick in your mind, don’t they?” It was a Saturday afternoon around five, she says. The animals were out in the field, and she was in the yard nearby. “Suddenly, there was commotion at the gate, and Stanley came running like I’d never seen before. He was literally dragging a dog. It was a pit bull, and he had his teeth dug into Stanley’s neck and wasn’t letting go.”

  There was a terrifying frenzy, she says, as the sheep struggled and the dog bit harder. Ann, frantic to help, rushed around looking for something to use as a weapon against the offender. She grabbed an old piece of drainpipe and rushed to help Stanley.

  “But then came a scream of rage,” Ann says. “It was Dotty! I can’t describe the sound any other way—I’d never heard anything like it. She came tearing down the field in hot pursuit of the dog and leaped on him, digging her jaws into his neck. The three of them were locked together like that for what seemed like a long time. It was so frightening.”

  Ann moved out of the way when she realized her efforts to help were futile. And anyway, Dotty seemed to have the upper hand. “She was doing a better job than I was,” Ann remembers. The pain from the donkey’s tight clamp must have finally gotten through to the dog, because he suddenly let go and ran off. But he wasn’t done yet; on his way through the field he actually bit two horses, one just a pony. Then, finally, he was gone.

  Sheep

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Chordata

  Class: Mammalia

  Order: Artiodactyla

  Family: Bovidae

  Genus: Ovis

  Species: Ovis aries

  With Dotty standing by “looking concerned,” Ann says, “we quickly got Stanley up and to the vet. He was in bad shape and the vet wanted to put him to sleep.” But Stanley was a pet, and the family didn’t want to lose him. “We just wouldn’t have that. So instead we had them take out a broken tooth
and clean him up and we took the poor thing home.”

  Stanley was paralyzed on the bite side of his face for about a year, and couldn’t eat properly. Sheep, like cows, regurgitate their food and re-chew it (called chewing their cud), but his food would fall right out because his face muscles weren’t working. “He struggled,” Ann says. But she kept Dotty and Stanley together, as they had been before the incident, to avoid changing the routine in a stressful way. It seemed to be the right decision. After a while he started to heal. And eventually, he made a full recovery, with Dotty by his side—sleeping “in a heap” with Stanley and another sheep, eating, and walking in the field together.

  Donkey

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Chordata

  Class: Mammalia

  Order: Perissodactyla

  Family: Equidae

  Genus: Equus

  Species: Equus africanus

  Subspecies: Equus africanus asinus

  “I think without the love and support of us and of Dotty, he wouldn’t have survived. He would have died of shock.”

  Recently, Dotty was recognized for her heroic act by the PDSA (People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals), a well-known veterinary charity in the U.K. The award usually goes to dogs that have served in the military, but this time a brave donkey got the prize, the first time a nondog was acknowledged. “She had the TV people come and see her about it,” says Ann, “but at that point I think she was just fed up with the attention. Too many cameras in her face!”

  Who can say why Dotty made the ultimate sacrifice, putting herself in a dangerous situation to help Stanley? “I myself certainly thought twice about getting near that dog,” Ann admits. “But Dotty didn’t. She saved him without worrying for herself. That’s love, I think.”