Unlikely Loves

by Jennifer S. Holland

  For Wendy it was fun to see the pig go from pint-size to giant, eventually surpassing her surrogate mother in all dimensions. Did Puggy realize early on that this little piggy she’d befriended would soon be an outsize beast with enough strength to put a boxer on her back? “Perhaps,” Wendy says. “And maybe that’s why she was so nice to her from the start.”

  Boxer

  A common (and likely false) explanation for the boxer’s name is that it comes from the dogs’ tendency to “box” with their front paws when they play. But in truth a boxer boxes more with its head—swinging its muzzle hard enough to knock a cat unconscious!

  {Michigan, U.S.A., 2012}

  The Mama Mutt and the Kittens

  Motherly affection . . . it may just be the most common interspecies love connection in the animal kingdom. And here is a particularly sweet story about a beagle–terrier mix who adopted a whole pile of kittens and became their mother not just in deed but in body and soul.

  Tiny squirming felines, just a week old, needed someone to get them on their feet. Heather Rector, a young woman living in Michigan, saw a posting online that the kittens were available and required special attention—they weren’t bottle-feeding very well. Soft-hearted Heather couldn’t stand the idea of the cats going hungry, so she said she’d give them temporary care.

  “I got them home, they were in a box on the floor in my kitchen,” she recalls, “and within about ten minutes, my dog, Sydney, poked her head into the box, sniffed the kittens, and then began carrying them one by one by their little scruffs and dropping them in her bed.” It’s how she had picked up and carried her own pups when they were newborns, Heather says.

  Domestic Cat

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Chordata

  Class: Mammalia

  Order: Carnivora

  Family: Felidae

  Genus: Felis

  Species: Felis catus

  Heather thought it was a sweet behavior on Sydney’s part, but it didn’t solve the problem of getting the kittens to eat. She tried dripping milk off her finger, off the corner of a rag, everything she could think of, to no avail.

  A day or two later, Heather planned to visit her fiancé. Sydney, she says, refused to leave the kittens, so Heather had to pack up the whole zoo and take them with her, bed and all. It was at her fiancé’s house that the couple got a beautiful surprise.

  “My fiancé was petting Sydney, and suddenly he noticed this white liquid all over his hands,” Heather recalls. “It was milk! Sydney was lactating—making milk for these babies that weren’t even hers.” Sydney’s last litter (of pups) had been weaned more than a year and a half before, so there was no reason for her to be producing milk anymore. But dogs can have “false pregnancies” or can lactate if the right hormones hit certain levels. It appears that the needy kittens’ mewing and squirming against her had sent Sydney’s brain the message that it was time to make milk again. Her motherly instinct triggered her body to be motherly, too.

  Best of all, the kittens seemed perfectly happy to latch onto Sydney and drink the dog milk as if it came from their own kind–getting the sustenance they needed to fatten up.

  Sydney continued to be the kittens’ loving parent and protector. When Heather’s other cat came near, the dog would chase it through the house to keep it away. “She’s a wonderful, friendly dog—never aggressive,” Heather says. “But if she thought the kittens were in danger, she showed a very protective side.”

  As for the kittens, they warmed right up to Sydney, following her around and climbing on her, cuddling up with her at night. When Sydney would go relieve herself outside, the kittens would follow her there, too. “We had a hard time getting them to use the litter box,” Heather says, “because they wanted to go out and do what dogs do.”

  As the kittens began taking solid food, their dog-mom broke it into tiny pieces to make it easier to swallow. Then she’d lick her wards clean. It’s like they were hers from the start, Heather says.

  Heather herself was pregnant during this time, so she could understand Sydney’s motherly gestures. “In motherhood, there’s this unconditional love, an unbreakable bond, and I think she feels that for them,” Heather says.

  Cats and Dogs

  According to the Humane Society of the United States, there are currently about 78 million dogs and 86 million cats kept as pets in U.S. homes. More than a third of all households have at least one canine and another third at least one feline.

  {Shrewshire, England, 2010}

  The Hen and the Pups

  Hens. They sit on eggs. They toddle around the yard pecking at seed. They squawk. They’ve got that cute little red comb like wiggly fingers sticking up from their heads. They . . . adopt puppies?

  Not typically. But here’s Mabel, and she’s no typical hen.

  She lives on a farm in Shrewshire, England, a dog-bone’s throw from the Welsh border. If you exited the barn, turned left, and walked 100 miles, you’d hit London. But there’s no sign of the city here: This is a peaceful spot of woods and pasture, where horses graze, doves coo, and geese visit the little lake out back. No wonder Mabel is a homebody—who wouldn’t be? And though her owners build hen houses as part of their farm business, this hen prefers a warm kitchen to any bird box, no matter how nicely made.

  “We’ve always had chickens, love having them about,” says farm owner Edward Tate. “But Mabel, the infamous Mabel, she’s been quite a special bird.”

  It began when Mabel met the hoof of a horse. She’d been ambling about where the horses were tied up in the yard when one accidentally trod on her foot. She squawked and limped away, and soon her bum leg earned her the Tates’ sympathy.

  “It was a particularly cold spell, so we brought her into the kitchen to recuperate,” Edward explains. (Or recooperate, if you will.)

  Meanwhile, Nettle, the family’s black-and-tan Jack Russell terrier, had recently given birth to four lovely pups. The Tates had them in a big padded box—also in the cozy kitchen. Nettle was a good mom to her litter, but sometimes even the best parent needs time away from her little ones.

  “Nettle would go out into the yard to sniff around, and that’s when we saw Mabel eyeballing the puppies,” Edward says. “She got nearer and nearer to the box. And then one day after Nettle left, she hopped right over the side, settled down over the puppies, and spread out her wings to cover all the bits. I’m sure it was quite nice and warm on top of those little furry bodies.” If a pup face poked out from underneath, Mabel would gently push it back or shift to make sure no one was left exposed.

  “After a few days of this, we imagined Nettle thinking, Oh, it’s that awful old hen again trying to take my place! We’d have to move Mabel out of the way—she didn’t want to get up,” Ed says. Meanwhile, the puppies didn’t seem to care what species was sitting on them, as long as they were safe from the cold. “For them, it was like having a feathered, heated duvet,” he says.

  Edward’s daughter Miranda recalls that Nettle was “cross at first—after all, those were her babies under there!” but she soon came to tolerate the hen. “Sometimes Mabel would wait by the box for the dog to leave, then climb in and play mom until the real mom returned.” Though sure the hen was drawn to the puppy heat, “I definitely saw it as motherly affection, motherly love,” Miranda says. “Mabel was at the age to have her own babies. I think she really saw the puppies as her own.”

  Eventually the dogs were old enough to be adopted out, and Mabel, all healed, went back to her wanderings beneath the horses—either not having learned her lesson from her previous injury or, in this case, having learned it very well. Perhaps another broken foot would get this mother hen back to her brood?

  Chicken

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Chordata

  Class: Aves

  Order: Galliformes

  Family: P
hasianidae

  Genus: Gallus

  Species: Gallus gallus

  Subspecies: Gallus gallus domesticus

  {Oklahoma, U.S.A., 2012}

  The Goat and the Pit Bull

  Julie and Nate Free live near Tulsa, Oklahoma, on a dead end of a rural road, where horses and fishponds and barking dogs set the scene. And goats. Nate has a bunch of them. Late one April night, while away on a trip, he called his wife and asked her to please check on a certain goat that was soon to give birth. She was a first-time mama and he was worried about her.

  “It was midnight,” Julie recalls, “and yes, the goat was fully in labor.”

  “Mama delivers the first baby,” Julie says, “and it isn’t moving. The mom runs to the other side of the pen, not interested in him, so I scoop him up and chase after the mother because suddenly she’s having another one. And then, a third! In all my husband’s years of owning goats, he’s never had triplets before.” When goats have three kids, as they’re called, one usually doesn’t make it. (Some mammals and birds have evolved to have an “extra” baby as insurance—to boost their chances of ending up with at least one healthy offspring.) Unfortunately, that seemed the likely fate for that first kid.

  “I called my husband and said I didn’t know if this little boy was going to make it. But of course I had to do everything I could.” Julie carried the runt, still motionless, into the house and laid him on a towel on the floor so she could go get a heating pad.

  Goat

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Chordata

  Class: Mammalia

  Order: Artiodactyla

  Family: Bovidae

  Genus: Capra

  Species: Capra aegagrus

  Subspecies: Capra aegagrus hircus

  Julie and Nate have five dogs, but at the time all were in their crates for the night. Except Piper. “Piper is the only well-behaved one,” Julie says, laughing. She’s laughing because Piper is a pit bull, and everyone expects if you have a bad dog and a pit bull, they must be one and the same. “She’s just not what you’d expect,” Julie says. “If the other dogs are in an argument, she’ll go hide in the closet.” Not exactly the ferocious monster of repute.

  “So Piper is watching this whole scene. And then she starts acting very strangely,” Julie says. “She’s looking at the goat, then looking at me and making a very low woof, then looking back at the goat, back at me, the woof, over and over.” Julie realized Piper wanted to inspect the animal, so she gave her the okay.

  Piper went straight to the goat and began licking him. “She licked and licked it all over, and after a while, the goat started to come around! It’s as if it suddenly came to life.”

  Piper and GP (“Goat Puppy”) were like mother and son after the dog revived the little goat that night. Piper would clean little GP’s milk-coated chin and lovingly wrap herself around him as he napped. GP would take dog walks with Piper, Julie, and Nate—a goat on a leash. “Neighbors would just stop and stare,” Julie says. And when Piper was in agility training—running and climbing and leaping over obstacles—GP was right there with her, trying to follow her lead.

  At one point, unfortunately, GP began dragging one of his legs. He may have gotten caught up in the fence or perhaps one of the bigger goats injured him—Julie and Nate aren’t sure. At first they hoped it would heal on its own, but instead the circulation became so bad that it was clear it needed to be amputated.

  “Now, I’m used to working with small-town vets,” Julie says. “And they put up with a lot from me. But when I show up on a Sunday with a broken goat and a pit bull, saying, ‘This is Piper’s goat and she keeps him calm and needs to stay with him’—they might have thought I’d finally gone crazy.”

  Still, the vet allowed Piper in the room during the operation on GP. And at one point, Piper put her paws up on the operating table trying to see what was going on. “She was asking, What are you doing to my goat?” says Julie.

  As GP recovered from surgery and began running around again, Piper continued to watch over him, play with him, and favor him over the other animals. “We have a pit bull that loves a goat, and vice versa,” Julie says. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

  Piper’s love of GP, and GP’s love in return, has brought a special joy into Nate and Julie’s lives. “GP has a home forever here with us,” Julie says. And Piper certainly isn’t going anywhere. After all, she’s got her goat.

  Goat

  These animals have always been valuable (for milk, meat, and pelts) and popular. A couple of brushes with fame: Abraham Lincoln’s sons kept two goats that lived in the White House. And Mahatma Gandhi is said to have consumed goat milk every day for more than 30 years.

  {South Adelaide, Australia, 2012}

  The Spotted Lamb and the Dalmatian

  First of all, let’s dispel the rumors, shall we? No, a ram did not mate with a dalmatian to produce Lambie, the remarkably dalmatian-like lamb in this story. (Come on, the thought did cross your mind, didn’t it?) Nature doesn’t work that way. Dogs and sheep may show affection for each other, but they don’t make babies together.

  Still, the coincidence, call it biological serendipity, was awesome.

  Julie Bolton of South Adelaide, Australia, breeds dalmatians, including seven-year-old Zoe, a gorgeous champion in the dog-show world. She’s also a take-charge kind of animal, her owner says. In her own litter, “she was the first one out, and she made eye contact with me first—she was just a little more forward than the others.” That forwardness even translates to her breeding schedule; she comes into heat (is ready to mate) regularly before the other female dogs, as if to prove she’s number one. She also happens to be a very good mother.

  Julie and her family keep other animals besides dogs on their 32-acre Australian homestead. Sheep included. One day, one of the female sheep (called an ewe) gave birth to a tiny lamb that looked more like a spotted puppy than a sheep-to-be. The ewe took one look at the slippery runt on the ground and ran to the other side of the paddock, utterly disinterested in doing her motherly duties. (Almost certainly, the lamb’s looks had nothing to do with her being abandoned; sheep focus more on smells and sounds when it comes to recognizing their young.)

  Though she wasn’t thrilled to have an orphan lamb on her hands, Julie couldn’t help but laugh at the strangeness of the situation. “A lamb like a spotted puppy born in a home full of dalmatians,” she says.

  And the story gets better. With the lamb left parentless, “Zoe immediately went to it, drawn by that newborn smell. And she started to lick it, automatically doing what the mother would do.” Meanwhile, the lamb-that-looked-like-a-dalmatian-puppy wanted milk and was looking for its mother. “Normally, mother sheep will make an eeeeee sound and the baby will reply with an eeeeee, which helps mothers know whose baby is whose in a flock,” Julie explains.

  But this lamb’s mom made no noise; she had zero motherly know-how. So the lamb transferred its own instinctive behavior onto Zoe. The shape and size of the animal was close enough, so Lambie went for where the udder would be, head butting, looking for a drink. Zoe, without milk at the time, turned and nuzzled it, Julie recalls. “I fed the lamb with a bottle and Zoe stayed there with me, cleaning it up. Very motherly.”

  Although Julie continued with the feeding duties (by bottle), the bond between the two spotted creatures was set. “It was instant love that day,” and if Zoe could have fed Lambie herself, no doubt she would have. The abandoned lamb thrived only because Zoe was there to fill in for the ewe. “Lambie has never been sick, has always eaten well, has never acted depressed,” Julie says. “For its health, that psychological and physical connection was so important. If you put a lamb by itself, it won’t be as robust.”

  With time, Lambie has become more independent, eating grass out in the sunshine and doing lamb things, and even its coloration has chan
ged to where it is less spotted than before. But when Julie takes Zoe for a walk, the lamb trots along with them, sometimes tapping its nose to the back of Julie or Zoe’s legs as it would to keep from getting separated from its mother in the tall grass. And other times it runs along full of joy, like a gazelle with all four feet coming off the ground, what Julie calls “the Lamb Olympics.” Zoe and some of the other dogs will play with Lambie when the animal is in such an exuberant mood, but they are gentle with the unique baby.

  As Julie reminds us, the lamb turning to Zoe when the ewe bolted was simply instinct. “Survival, you see. A baby needs to find milk. If it had seen a pig moving around,” she says, “it would have bonded with the pig.” A lamb needs two things, food and the flock, she says, and will seek those things in whatever animal is present. It didn’t have to be Zoe.

  But in this case, the little spotted lamb happened to bond with the big spotted dalmatian. And that makes this love story perfectly delightful.

  Dalmatian

  According to the American Kennel Club, the dog we know as the dalmatian has played many roles over its history, including that of dog of war, draft dog, shepherd, ratter, fire-apparatus follower, firehouse mascot, bird dog, trail hound, and accomplished retriever. Most significant, it is the first and only coaching dog—guardian of the horse-drawn carriage.

  {Powys, Wales, 2009}