As for the animals’ personalities, Alvin was a hyper little guy, happy to chase a ball and play for hours. Sabrina was more laid back. “She was a licker—she loved licking your face, and a lion’s tongue is much rougher than a house cat’s, so it was like getting a facial every time!” Though never vicious, Sabrina did not like to be bothered while eating. (She was, after all, a lion.) But the cat’s best friend Alvin was an exception. “He would crawl right between her legs and eat her food, no problem.”
Big Cats
According to the nonprofit Big Cat Rescue, big cats such as lions are pound for pound twelve times as strong as a human, grow very fast, and retain their natural instinct to kill—all of which make them very dangerous pets. For more information about the laws on big cat ownership throughout the United States, take a peek at bigcatrescue .org/state-laws-exotic-cats.
Finally, Wayne came back for Sabrina. He had found her a home with Lion Country Safari in Florida, where she could be with other lions and have space to be a big cat. But before she was sent off, Marcy and Mickey wanted to see her one last time. “We paid a visit and she was so happy to see all of us. She gave Mickey a big hug. At this point, she had to weigh well over 125 pounds,” so Marcy declined such an embrace. Most important, “she was still loving toward Alvin,” Marcy says, “although he was running circles around her. But clearly their time apart hadn’t changed anything between them.”
Those were unusual times, Marcy says. “As much as we loved our experience with Sabrina, and were thrilled at her friendship with Alvin, looking back I think it was terrible that people could just buy a wild cat like that.” Not everyone who keeps such animals takes good care of them, and there has been much abuse and neglect by owners. Marcy isn’t a fan of caging animals at all—she doesn’t even like fish tanks, she admits. So though it was a true adventure for the people involved, and a true love story for the animals, “I’m very glad the laws have changed.”
Section Three
Modern Family Love
“There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand different versions.”
—François de La Rochefoucauld
Back in the old days, “family” meant a very particular thing. These days, the word’s definition is being stretched every which way, and it’s a wonderful evolution. Today’s family may include a mix of lineages, may be multiethnic and multicolored, may have a brother who was once a sister (or vice versa), two moms and no dad (or vice versa), and so on.
These next stories might be said to represent modern families among nonhuman animals. We have a bit of unconventional mating but mostly you’ll find creatures that have found family-like ties in some unexpected combinations. It’s not a neat and tidy category of love, just as family life and relationships are never neat and tidy. This book, after all, is about mixing things up and shattering expectations.
{Broederstroom, South Africa, 2009 & 2011}
Tales from Glen Afric Wildlife Sanctuary
There’s something about an African wilderness that gets the human heart pounding. And the mammals that roam these faraway places are what wild is. Elusive. Enduring. Vulnerable. Utterly beautiful.
So stories that include African animals, especially when those animals are showing affection and emotion in ways that remind us of ourselves, seem to tug at our hearts extra powerfully. In these next two tales, creatures with roots in such a landscape, normally so out of reach for most of us, are caught up close doing just that.
The Kudu and the Giraffe
First, let’s take a peek at a giraffe and a kudu in South Africa that broke species rules for love.
A few years ago, a calf named Camilla fell 6 feet to her birth. That is, a giraffe named Lucy had a baby, Camilla, and, as giraffe calves begin life dropping to the ground from their standing mothers, she endured the trip down. “Baby giraffes are adorable as newborns,” says Jenny Brooker, co-owner of the Glen Afric Wildlife Sanctuary. “They look like they come straight out of a toy shop!”
Camilla grew strong and as tall as, well, a giraffe (females top out at around 16 feet). It was a good life at the sanctuary, where many species roam freely—from wildebeest and hartebeest to warthog, waterbuck, zebra, and impala. There’s a hippo, some leopards, and a pack of spotted hyenas. There are also some lions in large enclosures and some tame elephants, but “most of these animals remain wild,” Jenny explains. “We don’t touch them but we have a wonderful relationship with them, a great trust, and they will come close to us.” In that environment, wandering in a natural setting but watched over by animal-loving people, the young giraffe was at home.
And then one day, an unlikely suitor came calling on lovely Camilla. “About two years ago, a young male kudu came from the wild herd that lives in our back mountains,” Jenny says. “He took one look at Camilla and fell in love!”
A kudu is a type of antelope (there are “lesser” and “greater” species, having to do mostly with size). They usually have a badge of white between the eyes and thin white stripes drizzled down their sides from a crest of hair along the back. Males get giant curly horns—those of the greater species can grow beyond 70 inches, with a graceful two-and-a-half twist. Some also have little white beards.
This kudu was of the greater species and he was a persistent bugger. His affection led to “a most unusual love affair,” Jenny says. “Whenever we saw Camilla and Lucy, there was the kudu. He followed his girlfriend everywhere!” It became obvious to the staff that the kudu was Charles to the giraffe Camilla, so the name stuck.
Jenny says the couple would be spotted nuzzling each other from time to time, and if the kudu wandered too far from the giraffes, “Camilla got quite agitated and looked for him. Clearly the affection went both ways from early on.”
Greater Kudu
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Artiodactyla
Family: Bovidae
Genus: Tragelaphus
Species: Tragelaphus strepsiceros
Two years after Charles showed up in Camilla’s life, the two are all grown up and still roaming the bush together, trailed by chaperone (and mother-in-law)Lucy. The mixed-species couple seems content in their strange union. Jenny points out that these animals were not hand raised or interfered with by humans at all. “They were born in our sanctuary but are free and wild like the other animals here,” she says, which makes this relationship all the more unexpected. Male kudu sometimes stay in bachelor groups but are mostly solitary. Who knows why this one latched onto a companion, particularly one of a different species? Whether the affair with Charles will end if Camilla finds a giraffe mate is also up for speculation. No doubt rumors will run wild.
The Leopard and the Dog
Meanwhile . . .
In this tale, there’s a spotted feline leaning on a canine for affection. Selati came to the Glen Afric rehab center at about three weeks old, the only survivor of a litter of four leopards.
“We are often called upon to hand raise young orphans of all kinds,” says Jenny Brooker. “From baby elephants and zebras to giraffes, donkeys, and kids [baby goats], we have done it all here.” Well, almost all. At that time, for the rehab team, “a leopard was a new challenge!”
Fortunately, the cat proved an easy baby: “She took very well to the special milk formula we gave her, and soon began to suckle contently on her bottle,” Jenny recalls of the first week of Selati’s care. Jenny has a nursery at home, so she can monitor young animals through the night, getting up to feed them over and over in those early weeks. So Selati was immediately exposed to her four dogs, her cat, and her children, all of whom took a liking to the new resident. The leopard quickly settled on a favorite: Tommy.
“Selati bonded with Tommy immediately. He is such a gentle dog. He even lets baby chicks climb all over him.”
Leopard
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Carnivora
Family: Felidae
Genus: Panthera
Species: Panthera pardus
Subspecies: Panthera pardus pardus
As Selati grew, she only became more agile and rambunctious. Jenny recalls: “She would climb on top of everything, jumping off cupboards onto our backs as we walked past. Yet she was ever gentle—she never had her claws out.” Jenny’s children would take all four dogs plus the leopard for long walks on the farm, down to the dam, where the dogs loved to swim and the kids had mud fights. And though most of us tend to think cats and water don’t mix, Selati was happy to plunge in with the rest of them and paddle around, playing games by rules only the animals understood.
Of course, big cats need big space. Also, Selati really required a secure environment—less for her own safety than for that of new arrivals to the nursery. (The leopard, now adolescent, could be a bit too physical with the babies.) So the Glen Afric team built her a large enclosure with lots of trees for her to climb. This was vital for the leopard’s continued good health, though removing her from her “family” was hard for everyone, Tommy in particular.
Still, to combat any potential loneliness, “every weekend, we put Tommy in the car, collected Selati, and drove to the back mountains to take long walks together. And the bond between Selati and Tommy has only grown more incredible.” The two animals play hide-and-go-seek in the tall grass, one pouncing on the other, or stroll side by side like a long-married couple.
Soon, Selati may take a mate and move on with her leopard life. But even if Tommy becomes a less prominent figure in the leopard’s life, “I am quite sure she will never forget him,” Jenny says. And Tommy, Jenny believes, will always hold Selati tucked away in his heart.
{Azores, Portugal, 2011}
The Dolphin and the Sperm Whales
Nine miles off the island of Pico in the Azores, a playful relationship between a dolphin and a pod of sperm whales has animal behaviorists intrigued. The area, an archipelago in the North Atlantic, is a food-rich crossroads of ocean currents, which brings a host of marine creatures together, including plenty of marine mammals.
Alexander Wilson and Jens Krause, of the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin, Germany, were in the Azores looking for sperm whales with hopes of beginning a behavioral study of the animals. “Serendipity shined,” says Wilson, “when we came upon this interesting encounter.” They witnessed a bottlenose dolphin—one that appeared to have a spinal birth defect—hanging around with sperm whales as if it were meant to be there, one of the family. “We initially assumed it was a short-term thing. But over the course of eight days, we saw them together over and over again. Clearly they were associated in a friendly way.”
Sperm Whale
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Cetacea
Family: Physeteridae
Genus: Physeter
Species: Physeter macrocephalus
Dolphins are very touchy-feely animals with their own kind, often rubbing their rostrums (the “nose” part) against each other or sidling up to one another. “It’s how they maintain their strong social bonds,” Wilson explains. But to see a dolphin nuzzling and rubbing a flipper over the blowhole of a large sperm whale, as Wilson recalls, “was quite something. Sperm whales are physical with each other in different ways. They tend to roll around at the surface, making contact with tails or rubbing lateral flanks together.” So here was a dolphin doing dolphin things to whales—and whales seemingly okay with it. And the dolphin was also copying whale behavior, rolling around and playing the way the other mammals do. “It’s certainly rare to see so much physical contact between two different species,” he says. Especially when their ways of touching are normally so unalike.
Now, as mentioned, this dolphin was a bit unusual to begin with, having a spinal birth defect. “We wondered if that was part of the reason it had taken up with this other species.” Perhaps it had trouble keeping up with other dolphins—which may zip along at 25 miles per hour—and so joined a slower-moving group. (Sperm whales can rival dolphins in speed when in a real hurry, but typically the behemoths ease along at 10 miles per hour or less.)
Or maybe, Wilson says, it had to do with the dolphin social structure. “They form a hierarchy, and it’s possible this one that looked different wasn’t accepted, was harassed and couldn’t compete, so it initiated contact with these other animals that appeared friendlier.” Which is quite interesting, he says, since typically, sperm whales are seen acting either aggressively or defensively toward other marine mammals. Yet here, the sperm whales may have adopted the dolphin into their family because it had been tossed out by its own.
Or, could joining a group have simply been a way for the dolphin to thwart predators? Perhaps, but there aren’t many animals in the Azores that would prey on a dolphin. So, while this might be a bonus benefit, more likely the partnership for all the animals was about companionship and play.
Wilson chuckles at the idea that the single dolphin and its adopted whale family were emotionally bonded through something like love, but he agrees that marine mammals, and especially dolphins and whales, are capable of complex relationships. “They’re intelligent and social, so we shouldn’t underestimate what might be going on,” he says. “Certainly, the interaction fulfilled some need for both species.”
{Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2012}
The Boa Constrictor and the Pit Bull
Uily Oliveria lives in Rio de Janeiro, the second- largest city in Brazil, known for crowds and Carnival, for samba, beaches, and Bossa Nova. This thirty-year-old veterinary college student loves Rio’s wildness, but maybe not the kind you’d expect. Aside from his wife (also a vet student and big fan of creatures great and small), Uily shares a home with seven dogs, six boa constrictors, an albino python, five tegus (really big lizards), four iguanas, and two turtles. He also keeps a barn owl, two guinea pigs, and, rounding out the zoo, there’s a very vocal cockatiel (his partridge in a pear tree, if I may). It isn’t uncommon to see Uily out strolling with a dog or three by his side, the owl gripping his forearm, and a snake coiled like a thick scarf around his neck.
Wild life, indeed.
Among that mess of dogs is Laika the pit bull, a stray that friends of Uily’s found on the street. Uily adopted her . . . when you already have six, what’s one more? And one day, this very loving dog took an unexpected interest in Jack the snake.
“I’d already had Jack for two years when we adopted Laika,” Uily says. But once the dog was around, “whenever I was handling Jack, Laika came by and was curious about him, wanting to get close to him.” Knowing his snake was gentle (and well fed), and that the dog, too, was sweet of heart, Uily decided it was safe to put the two together. And they got along splendidly.
Boa Constrictor
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Reptilia
Order: Squamata
Family: Boidae
Genus: Boa
Species: Boa constrictor
Uily has come to know when Laika wants a snake embrace. “She loves to lie down on her back and let Jack wind around all over her. She’ll even go out walking with Jack around her neck, showing how close they really are.” Imagine coming across such a pair strolling down the block. Only in Rio! Or . . . maybe New York. Okay, L.A., too. But that’s about it.
Laika is very delicate with Jack. “It seems she knows that if she makes sudden movements, she can hurt him. And she actually seems to relax when Jack is ‘walking’ over her, like he’s giving her a massage.” It all appears to be quite affectionate, he says. “Sometimes I leave them together for hours.”
Strange
rs are often skeptical that the dog and boa are intertwined by choice. “I posted a picture of Jack and Laika together on Facebook and people found it unbelievable,” Uily says. “Some were sure I sedated Laika to take the pictures, but one person made me laugh by commenting: ‘Look how absurd, a snake killing a dog!’ I laughed a lot when I read that, then tried to explain it was a friendship, and that neither posed any risk to the other.”
Perhaps part of that reaction is because both of these animals have bad reputations, usually undeserved. Snakes in particular are one of the most feared animals (up there with sharks). Many are killed out of fear, when in truth most snakes want nothing to do with humans and certainly aren’t looking to harm us. And of all dog breeds, pit bulls tend to be regarded as the most ferocious, though so many of them are honey-sweet, gentle with kids, and utterly loyal.
Yet, the reputations live on. “The issue is really with the owners, not the animals,” Uily says. “The secret to interacting with these animals in a harmonious way is to respect them.”
And that seems to be an attitude his animals take to heart, since Laika and Jack do their gentle dance with the utmost kindness, even tenderness. Now, who can say what’s going on in that boa brain? But clearly it isn’t fear or the desire or instinct to squeeze the life out of Laika. And it’s fun, and perhaps somewhat accurate, to put thoughts into Laika’s mind as Jack curls and slides along her back: “Hey, pal, can you move a little to the left? Ahhhhhhhh.”
Unlikely Loves Page 9