And Thunder wasn’t rewarded by the trainers for interacting with the cat, she points out. “It just happened naturally. Visitors loved it, of course.”
But as much as he relished playing with Thunder, Arthur did stick by housecat rules. Unlike dogs that have befriended dolphins, Arthur never leaped from his relatively dry perch for a swim (and, as far as anyone knows, he never fell in by mistake). I guess love has its limits.
Arthur has since passed away, but he’s remembered for his bold moves on the dolphin platform, crossing species boundaries (and risking a cold dunking) in the name of friendship. He was, Janie says, “a very good soul.”
{Lopburi, Thailand, 2008}
The Macaque, the Rabbit, and the Guinea Pig
This next story is not for the faint of heart, but I promise it has a happier ending than beginning.
Boonlua is a long-tailed macaque—a pinkish-faced fruit-loving primate of Southeast Asia that thrives high in the trees of tropical rain forests. Back in 2005, he was living wild in a place called Lopburi in Thailand when he had a near-death experience that would change everything.
The macaque had come down from the safety of the trees one day when he met up with a pack of vicious dogs. Macaques can be plenty feisty when threatened, but the dogs were too much for him, literally tearing him to pieces—he lost both legs and an arm in the attack. Left bleeding and no doubt in tremendous pain, the primate was certainly near death. Yet rather than give up, somehow, with just a single limb remaining, he dragged himself to a nearby temple. Whether the wild animal somehow knew to go to people for help or was just seeking shelter, no one knows. But he ended up in the right place.
When the monks saw the poor creature on the temple steps, they called a vet who, remarkably, saved the animal despite his terrible injuries. The monks then brought him to a place called the Royal Elephant Kraal, which took in animals needing special care.
Former zookeeper Michelle Reedy, Operations Director of Elephantstay (a nonprofit elephant conservation arm of the Royal Elephant Kraal), designed a special enclosure for Boonlua to accommodate his specific needs and abilities. He seemed to feel safe in his new environment, and soon he was so healthy and active that people hardly noticed he was missing so many parts.
Long-Tailed Macaque
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Primates
Family: Cercopithecidae
Genus: Macaca
Species: Macaca fascicularis
With the animal doing so well, the staff became busy with other tasks and Boonlua soon seemed forlorn being left alone. “We decided he needed a friend,” says Ewa Narkiewicz, the communications director at Elephantstay. “But we could not give him another monkey because of his disability.” If the relationship became aggressive, Boonlua would be unable to fight back. “We decided to try a rabbit and see how they got along.” So caretakers brought in Stripe, as well as a guinea pig, Curlywurly Brian.
Despite his habit of nabbing his favorite nibbles from his two furry companions’ food bowls, the macaque is clearly smitten with Stripe and Curlywurly Brian, and they seem unaware of his disabilities, as, it seems, is he. “He used to sleep stretched out on the wooden poles above the floor, but now he stays at the bottom of the enclosure to be as close as he can to the others,” says Ewa. “Even with just one arm, he spends a lot of time grooming the rabbit and the guinea pig. He gets very jealous if others pay too much attention to them—he clearly thinks they belong to him. He’s like a possessive husband!”
“It’s been so important for Boonlua to have constant company,” Ewa adds. “He still enjoys being scratched by the guests and holding on to human fingers. Primates do require more stimulation than some other species. But he has been helped enormously by having these furry friends, who have given him something of his own to focus on.” Their good relationship and Boonlua’s recovery, she says, “show how adaptable animals are to all kinds of circumstances.”
For a once-wild animal that barely survived a violent attack, lost most of his limbs, and has suffered stretches of deep loneliness, Boonlua now has two very soft and sweet reasons to live.
Guinea Pig
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Rodentia
Family: Caviidae
Genus: Cavia
Species: Cavia porcellus
{Somerset, England, 2009}
The Otter and the Badger
Here it is, then, a tale of two mustelids. It’s a sensory tale, in a sense. Because what makes a mustelid a mustelid is how it smells.
Let me explain. This group of animals is known for the special gland near the base of the tail that gives off a musky scent. Family members spread their unique odor on each other; it tells them who is kin and who is stranger. But in this story, friendship was stronger than fragrance, and two different-smelling creatures bonded like brothers.
“It was a cold, rainy day in March,” begins Pauline Kidner, founder of Secret World Wildlife Rescue, located in Somerset in the southwest of England. “We had a report from Devon of an otter cub found near its dead sibling. The person who found it managed to pick it up and wrap it in a towel because the cub was very wet and cold.”
European Otter
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Carnivora
Family: Mustelidae
Genus: Lutra
Species: Lutra lutra
Back at her rescue facility, where she and her loyal team care for some 5,000 wildlife casualties a year, Pauline tucked the orphan—whom she called Torrent—into an incubator to boost his body temperature. Skinny and cold to the bone, he was maybe eight weeks old and by no means guaranteed survival. But soon he was wiggling around, stretching his tiny limbs, and she put him into a pen in the kitchen to give him more space. So far, so good, Pauline thought. But when she tried to bottle-feed him, he refused to drink. “Even using a syringe, he wouldn’t take it,” she says. “He wasn’t interested. He was whistling constantly, grieving and lonely and wanting his mother. I gave him soft toys with warm wheat bags to snuggle up to, but he still wouldn’t settle.”
As it happened, Pauline had three badger cubs in her care, brought to her by kindly people who had spied the young animals in peril (two had been on a road with cars driving around them and the other was lying alone and very cold in a field).
The badgers and Torrent were about the same size, so Pauline decided to put them together, hoping companionship would calm the stressed-out otter. It worked. “Torrent immediately snuggled up with the badger cubs and went right to sleep,” she says. “As they all started to wake up about two hours later, the badger cubs were intrigued by their new friend and included him in their favorite tussling games, biting each others’ ears and rumps. Torrent quickly got the hang of it!” Of course, the different species don’t just smell different but also vocalize in dissimilar ways—the badgers “whickering” and the otter squeaking and whistling. “Yet,” Pauline marvels, “they all seemed to understand each other.”
When that all-important feeding time arrived, Pauline was relieved to see Torrent follow his new friends’ lead. As the badgers ran for their bottles, the otter did the same, competing for the best spot, latching on, and sucking down his meal. Now, Pauline felt, Torrent would surely survive.
He didn’t just survive. He thrived! The badgers did, too. Spirited by nature, they spent hours chasing each other around the kitchen table and over the chairs, and wrestling over fir cones in the old fireplace. Pauline had to feed them separately once Torrent graduated to a fish diet—“once he started sticking his nose in the dog’s water bowl, we knew it was time”—but their rough-and-tumble friendship continued to grow apace.
> As Torrent began swimming lessons and doing more otterlike things, Pauline felt the relationship with the badgers had served its prime purpose—to get Torrent eating and to socialize him—and it was time to give him a companion like himself. This would help prepare him for his eventual release back to the wild.
Luckily, just as Torrent was weaning, someone dropped off a young female otter, called Rain, that had been found alone in a parking lot near a river. An easy friendship was born between the two animals—shall we even suggest a love affair? They lived for a time in the grassy otter pen outside, where they could swim in a big pond and race around at the water’s edge. And one year later, Pauline released them together by a lake in the countryside. Whether they went on to mate is anyone’s guess, but we can hope!
Meanwhile, the badgers eventually became a family of six when Pauline added more orphans to the mix. (When young animals are brought in, she puts them together according to size and age and lets them scent each other, in a sense creating families out of unrelated animals.) The whole clan was released in the autumn of the same year, Pauline says, “at a lovely woodland site. Hopefully by now they are having cubs of their own.”
Otter
Otters spend 80 percent of their time on land but are very proficient swimmers. They mostly employ their whiskers to sense their prey (for example, fish), but they also have the ability to smell underwater!
{Devon, England, 2008}
The Golden Eagle and the Flying Man
On any given day, if the weather is fine, and you happen to be hanging out in South West England, turn your gaze to the sky. If you’re very lucky, you might just catch sight of a marvelous thing.
Two things, actually. A man in his flying machine. And a glorious bird soaring beside him. No coincidence: This pair, man and bird, share a bond that rivals many human relationships. This is Jonathon the falconer and Sampson, his prized golden eagle.
Sampson had a sad beginning. Stolen from a zoo as a very young bird, he was kept locked in a cupboard by the thief, in Yorkshire. He was “pretty smashed up” and aggressive when Jonathon rescued him. But once the bird came to Devon and got proper care, he thrived. And within a year of their partnership, Jonathon, who flies a cherry-red microlite aircraft, had Sampson gliding next to him 2,000 feet up, on long, luxurious trips across the English countryside and along the coast. “I tell him my secrets,” Jonathon told me. “He really listens, and I think on some level he understands.”
Golden Eagle
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Aves
Order: Accipitriformes
Family: Accipitridae
Genus: Aquila
Species: Aquila chrysaetos
Jonathon has been working with raptors and horses most of his life, and he and his animals put on shows all over England to show off their grace and intelligence, to teach audiences, and to entertain them. The crowds love to see the raptors up close and to watch how beautifully the man and his animals respond to one another.
At one of those shows—a wedding at a castle in Gloucester some 200 miles from their home in Devon—Jonathon and Sampson were unable to perform because of torrential rains. He and the bird got soaked through, so when the weather cleared, “I took the birds out to fly them, so they could dry off,” he says. “Sampson flew up over the castle into the clouds, and disappeared.”
At first Jonathon wasn’t concerned; he’d always given his birds freedom and Sampson wore a radio tracker so his movements could be monitored. “But after an hour, we went looking for him, and we found the tracker on the ground, chewed off. At that point I was frantic. I knew we’d truly lost him.”
Jonathon had to take his other birds home. “But every day, I drove three hours back to Gloucester to look for him,” he says. Jonathon couldn’t sleep, and couldn’t eat. “I was just so worried about him. My life is all about horses and birds, they’re my family, so this was for me like having one of my kids run off.” But wandering the hills of Gloucester looking for a bird “was like finding a needle in a haystack, as they say. So I asked a friend with a radio station to tell listeners to report if they sighted the eagle—not a bird you see around here normally, especially one with a seven-foot wingspan.” And soon enough, the emails started coming in. Someone had seen an eagle in Bristol, then another spied him down along the Somerset coast, and later someone reported him flying inland.
And then, on the seventh day after he disappeared, Sampson returned. Not to Gloucester, but all the way home to Devon, some 250 miles from where his freedom flight began.
Whether the bird got lost for a time or just wanted a solo adventure, no one knows, but his return “was a huge relief,” Jonathon says. It was during a performance with some of his other animals that, suddenly, the eagle swooped into the arena—as if he’d been waiting for his cue. “I got all choked up when I saw him,” Jonathon says. His tears spoke of relief, and of love.
It’s hard to know what Sampson felt about seeing Jonathon, but the fact that he traveled so far to get home says a lot. Also, “since Sampson doesn’t have a female mate, he is pair bonded with me—he sees me as his partner,” Jonathon says. And golden eagles pair for life.
Obviously Jonathon’s relationship to Sampson is a little different, but the bond is just as tight. And when the two are separated for an extended time, the bird is clearly unhappy. “I had a friend take care of him over the winter while I was in Spain, and my friend said he seemed sulky, despondent.” When Jonathon went to retrieve the bird after three months, “he clearly brightened up. He was calling to me; I have no doubt he recognized me and was happy to see me. My friend said the change in him was unbelievable.”
After his experience losing Sampson for a time, will Jonathon keep him tethered or caged so he can’t do another flyabout? Absolutely not, he says. “Freedom is only a big deal if you don’t have it. I trust him. If I were to restrict him now, it would be counterproductive.” And it would be unfair to Sampson, he says. “He’s an eagle. He needs to fly.”
{Virginia, U.S.A., 1978}
The Puppy and the Lion Cub
Some people talk about running off to join the circus. Other people actually do such things. In this case, it was the carnival rather than the circus, but let’s not split hairs. We’re talking hot summer days, the smell of fried food and wet straw, the tinkling of music from the carousel, questionably safe rides that whip kids into a screaming frenzy, and exposure to some odd folks and mighty cool animals. That’s the life Marcy and Mickey Berra were leading back in the late 1970s when they became parents to a lion.
Mickey was son to a carnival man, and he and his brothers continued traveling and working the games in the summer for years after their father died. Mickey eventually changed careers, but a year after he and Marcy married, they decided it would be a fun adventure to return to Mickey’s roots.
“We took a dime pitch and a couple of kiddy rides and joined Gooding’s Million Dollar Midway show, where [Mickey’s] brother Wayne still worked,” Marcy recalls. “I was twenty-five and had an adventurous streak.”
Lion
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Carnivora
Family: Felidae
Genus: Panthera
Species: Panthera leo
It was a wild ride. While immersed in this strange world, the couple bought a puppy called Alvin from a man named Wrong Way Terry. “He cost a six-pack of beer,” Marcy says, and was smaller than one. “You could hold him in one hand!”
Next stop for the carnival was Chicago’s Navy Pier. While there, Wayne put in an order to buy Sabrina, a nine-week-old lion cub, to keep as a pet.
Times have changed since then. Nowadays, such exotic animals are illegal to own in many states—both for the good of the animals and the safety of the peop
le. But back then, having the lion was perfectly legal. When she was delivered, the family was excited to see how their respective pets would get along. “We put Alvin and Sabrina down on the ground together, and they immediately started to play,” says Marcy. “Sabrina wanted to lick Alvin clean, and though he was a little friskier than she was, they bonded right off the bat. They played all the time.”
When the carnival season ended, Marcy, Mickey, and Alvin went home to their high-rise in Crystal City, Virginia. It was a no-pets building, but Alvin didn’t cause a scene. “However, shortly after we came back, Wayne came to visit with Sabrina,” says Marcy. “He asked if we could watch her while he went to Pittsburgh to visit their mom.” They snuck the now 75-pound lion up to the apartment in the service elevator, where Alvin and Sabrina were happily reunited. “They hadn’t seen each other for a couple of weeks and were so happy to be back together. They chased each other around the apartment and slept together just like old times.”
Wayne’s brief trip turned into a five-month absence. Each day Marcy took the animals to the park, “and most people would do a double take when they saw us.” She says it was great fun to ride the elevator with other people with the two animals in tow. “They were never sure what to think. You know how people in an elevator look straight ahead, avoiding eye contact, but then you catch them glancing? There was a lot of that. Sometimes they would ask incredulously, ‘Is that a lion?’”
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