Unlikely Loves

by Jennifer S. Holland

  {Hampshire, England, 2008}

  The Pekin Duck and the Pit Bull

  On a farm outside Southampton, Hampshire, on the southern coast of England, a woman named Steph Tufft gazed across a sea of white ducks, some 3,000 in all. Each was destined for a dinner plate (these were Pekin ducks, after all). One little quacker with a yellow Mohawk caught her eye. “That’s the one,” she said, sealing the animal’s fate. But in this case it was a happy fate. Steph didn’t want duck for dinner; she wanted a duck as a pet. And Essy, as Steph named her, would soon be stroked, babied, and loved by her owner, her family, and an unlikely love.

  The first glimpse most people get of Essy nowadays is a white blur on a leash sandwiched between two dogs. It may require a second look to sort out the strange tableau, a bill among pup snouts, webbed feet dancing between canine paws, the leashes in Steph’s hand as she maneuvers the pack (flock?) down the sidewalk on any given Sunday afternoon.

  The two dogs, a pit bull Raksha and a Staffordshire bull terrier mix Double D (for “deaf dog”), belonged to Steph’s husband when she met him. So the next thing to do after purchasing her duck was to introduce duck to dogs. “The plan was to let the dogs sniff her and then put her in a separate area, not to rush things,” she says. “But as soon as she met Raksha, she latched on.”

  Pit Bull

  Once referred to as “nanny dogs” for their friendly, gentle demeanor with children, pit bulls are now saddled with an unfair reputation of viciousness.

  Early on, Steph would try to keep the animals separate, dividing up a hallway with a gate, and later a tall bit of fence. “We thought it was best to give different animals their own spaces. But no matter how high the barrier, they’d scale it and would be happily sleeping together when we got home.” (She’s still not sure how they did it.)

  The group will go to the beach and when the dogs run off to swim, Essy follows along, quacking crazily, though she can’t really keep up. And after all her time around dogs, the duck now likes dog biscuits better than bread.

  Pekin Duck

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Chordata

  Class: Mammalia

  Order: Anseriformes

  Family: Anatidae

  Genus: Anas

  Species: Anas platyrhynchos

  Subspecies: Anas platyrhynchos domestica

  Then there was the incident that really illustrates the bond between Essy and Raksha. One night, Essy was attacked by a wild dog. “It was horrible,” Steph recalls. “Her chest was ripped open; we were out in the sticks and it was late—I had to stitch her up myself and hope for the best. It was touch-and-go all night; we weren’t sure she’d survive.” Steph and her husband put Essy next to their bed so they could keep an eye on her, “but she wouldn’t settle. My husband suggested we bring Raksha in to keep her company. And as soon as we did, Essy nestled right in and calmed down.”

  For twelve nights, Raksha stayed with Essy, licking her, mothering her, and helping her heal. “Raksha kept checking and licking the chest area where she’d been injured—it was really amazing. She seemed to know that part of Essy needed tending,” says Steph. “Essy might not be with us now, might have given up, if she didn’t have Raksha. The dog gave her something to live for.”

  Steph, who was a vet nurse for years and has seen lots of animal connections, says she genuinely thinks there is something like love between Essy and Raksha, it’s such a close bond. “They’re so affectionate; they seem to have a need to be with the other one. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The duck and dog literally latch on to each other; if we’re sitting watching TV, the two will curl up on the bed and you won’t hear from them for the rest of the night.

  “They’re quite happy to be together,” Steph says, “just the two of them.”

  {Poniatowa, Poland, 2011}

  The Blind Boxer and the Goose

  In a tiny town in Poland called Poniatowa, a woman named Renata Krause makes her home. She has an old house and barn in an old neighborhood filled with old houses and barns, on a narrow street where everyone knows everyone else but people tend to keep to themselves. Her home has all the typical things homes have, but then there are a couple of oddities. Bak (pronounced Baks) is a boxer, and he’s completely blind. And Guzik is a goose who is happiest when chasing everyone away. Except for Bak. Bak can stay.

  So, Bak and Guzik: What’s their story?

  Renata got Bak as a puppy, adopting him from a friend. Bak was a roamer from the start. He’d jump the fence in the yard and go into the village looking for a playmate.

  He also grew quite big. Renata’s neighbors, unfortunately, weren’t happy to see this hulking, unchained animal when he’d show up on their property. But Bak was persistent; when Renata raised the fence, he simply dug under it to escape. And off he’d go.

  One day, when Bak came home from his adventures as usual, the dog had gone blind! Someone, most likely, had purposefully blinded him to send an angry message to Renata that the dog’s wandering was no longer tolerable. She felt horrible about his injury. The vet checked him out, suggesting maybe Renata should put him to sleep. “But he was still a young dog,” Renata says. She was a nurse herself, with a nurturing heart. “I just didn’t want to do that!”

  African Goose

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Chordata

  Class: Aves

  Order: Anseriformes

  Family: Anatidae

  Genus: Anser

  Species: Anser cygnoides

  Subpecies: Anser cygnoides domesticus

  Meanwhile, Renata had to go to Italy for a time, so her mother came to stay at the house in the village. When Renata got home, there in the yard stood Guzik. Guzik the goose was just a little thing; he had been rejected by his mother. So Renata’s mom had agreed to take him. (His name, Guzik, means “Buttons,” given for his penchant for trying to bite buttons off people’s clothes.)

  Before Guzik came, Bak had been trying to adapt to his blindness, with limited success. “He’d bump into everything, and seemed unhappy and helpless,” she recalls.

  But the goose that didn’t seem to like anyone decided to take the blind dog under his wing. Guzik now “tells” Bak when there’s food to be had and leads him to his bone and his water bowl. He wakes up the dog in the morning and even helps the pup fulfill his “watchdog” duties. “The goose actually runs to the gate when the mailman comes or the bread is delivered and makes a lot of noise, runs back to Bak, and then Bak follows and barks, too.”

  “They do bicker a lot,” Renata admits. “The goose is dominant and sometimes steals Bak’s food. They also play roughly together, but they are really attached to each other—in love, in a way.” And they are often very affectionate, she says. When they sleep, the goose stretches out his neck across Bak’s body, cuddling the best way a goose knows how. And once, when Bak was sick, Renata says the goose acted lethargic and down. “I don’t think it’s usual for a goose to show emotion, but he seemed to show it then.”

  Renata herself was recently quite ill, and she says during her recovery the relationship of Bak and Guzik brought her great joy, as did her other pets (cats, dogs, chickens). “They help me to cope, bring me solace,” she says. “In Poland, in most villages, animals are treated like animals,” she says. “So the way I treat them, like family, is a little strange. But I feel love for them, and I think they do for each other, too.”

  {Alaska, U.S.A., 2008}

  The Girl and the Moose

  For any animal lovers among us, interacting with something wild, even just glimpsing a deer or drawing finches to the feeder, can send the heart skipping along happily. It’s a true thrill. So imagine what happens to the heart (hint: really fast, happy skipping) when the animal you’re meeting face-to-face is a moose. A moose! This is no supersize dog; a moose is really big, really powerful, and truly w
ild. The males can grow massive antlers to boot. With one wrong turn of the animal’s head, an innocent bystander might get knocked flat.

  But as a young creature, the moose is like many other young creatures—endearing, vulnerable, and potentially even cuddly. That’s what Vanessa Gibson found out during her time as an intern at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center in Portage. It was there that she met, and fell in love with, Jack the Moose.

  “I was a little homesick at the time,” Vanessa remembers. So when her boss at the center told her that an injured moose calf had been brought to them for care, she was hopeful that a glimpse of the animal, maybe an opportunity to feed it, would ease her melancholy.

  Moose

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Chordata

  Class: Mammalia

  Order: Artiodactyla

  Family: Cervidae

  Genus: Alces

  Species: Alces alces

  With her boss’s encouragement, Vanessa ran to the center’s barn and peeked around the corner. There lay a leggy little animal curled up in a pile of hay. Jack was about three days old and maybe 25 pounds. His right front leg was broken above the knee and he had a bite mark above his hip—maybe from a bear, or a dog. “He looked at me, his eyes got wide, and he cried!” Vanessa says. “And the sounds he made were heartbreaking. Moose calves make a high-pitched wail that sounds a lot like Ma! Ma!” Even in his sad state, “it was the cutest thing I’d ever seen . . . or heard.”

  The boss told Vanessa she was moose mom for the day, and she happily joined the baby in the hay with a bottle to feed him. And there she stayed. All day. All night. “After a while, Jack wouldn’t relax and sleep unless he had his head somewhere on me. Someone had to bring me dinner because once I sat down with Jack I wouldn’t leave.”

  It was to be a long haul. Jack was in rough shape, and Vanessa was worried he wouldn’t make it.

  But Jack seemed to improve a bit after about a week of Vanessa’s near-constant care. He even earned the nickname Captain Jack as he learned to hobble around with his leg in a homemade splint (his very own peg leg). As Jack recovered and grew through the summer, Vanessa says she didn’t leave him for more than a few hours at a time. “I wanted to be there all the time. He was my moose at that point. I slept out in a tent so I could be near him. He got used to me being there rain or shine.”

  So imagine what it did to Vanessa’s heart to say good-bye to Jack and return to school at summer’s end. “When I was packing up my tent, he came out to see what I was doing. He put his ears back and ran away, like he knew I was leaving. I think he did know. They had to pull me from the enclosure so I wouldn’t miss my plane.”

  She couldn’t return until nine months later. That amount of time blows by at tornado speed for a college girl, but that’s a lifetime for a young moose—especially in terms of its growth. Jack tripled in size during those months. That was the first surprise for Vanessa when she finally saw him again.

  The second surprise was that he remembered her so well and treated her gently. “On the way there I was nervous,” Vanessa says. “I’d done a lot of research on moose by then and knew that while they can bond very strongly early on, they can also, as yearlings, suddenly turn aggressive.” Jack had his back to Vanessa when she pulled up to the wildlife center, and she thought, Oh! He’s not going to know who I am! Or he’s going to be scared or aggressive. But she was wrong, wrong, and wrong.

  “When I stepped out of the car, his ears turned toward me. And before I even said anything he ran over to the fence, ears flying back, and started rubbing against my hand. He knew me immediately and was elated to see me. I was so happy!”

  The two returned to some old routines. “I brushed him and he tucked his head into my shoulder and fell asleep. I lay down next to him, and he picked up his head and looked into my eyes. I tucked my head into his shoulder this time, and he then laid his head over mine. It was so special, so relaxed.” Other rituals included a moose form of “fetch” (though Jack wasn’t much for retrieving a stick), running around side by side, and playing chase. “I could always feel him come up behind me. I’d spin around and chase, and he’d run—he loved it.”

  Wild animals, even those that are raised with people, can be unpredictable—and Vanessa was aware of this each time she was with Jack. Even as a giant, however, the moose was gentle with Vanessa, never made her feel nervous or showed any sign of aggression toward her. “I knew how to act around him and when to give him space,” she says. “So there was no reason for him to be afraid or to threaten me.” In fact, if anything, Jack was overly protective of Vanessa, putting his six-foot-tall, 1,000-pound self between her and other people, other animals, even her boyfriend, staring them down. “When groups would visit and want to hear about him,” she laughs, “he’d block me from them, moving up and back as I did along the fence. I’d have to sit underneath him in order to talk and be seen.”

  And then, the sad day came again when Vanessa had to pack up and get back to her other life. This time, Jack seemed to want to cheer Vanessa up rather than run off in a huff as he’d done before, and he made her laugh with his silly antics.

  Clearly, Vanessa says, “I’m in love. And I think Jack feels something similar; he certainly has something like human emotions. There’s sadness, excitement. He misses me when I leave. I’d call days later and interns would say he stopped eating, not even his favorite, bananas, after I was gone. He moped around, knowing I wasn’t coming back for a while.”

  Still, Jack continues to thrive, Vanessa reports. “He’s four now, and very healthy.”

  Vanessa will always know that her tender bond with the moose is what gave him the strength to overcome his difficult first weeks of life. “When I think about it, the whole thing blows my mind,” she says. “I loved every minute we had together when he was growing up. It changed me.” And it gave her a new career goal: moose research!

  Human Being

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Chordata

  Class: Mammalia

  Order: Primates

  Family: Hominidae

  Genus: Homo

  Species: Homo sapiens

  {Norfolk, England, 2011}

  The Piglet and the Boxer

  Knowing her history, you might expect that Puggy, a female boxer, would have taken one look at a young animal needing mothering and run for the hills. After all, the dog had previously lived at a Welsh puppy mill under horrible conditions—and was used as a breeder. “She basically lived in a dungeon,” says her current owner, Wendy Valentine, explaining that the dog (formally named Susie) likely had multiple litters that her owners then sold. (The place was later shut down and the owner prosecuted for her crime against the animals.) So if the boxer had associated a “pup” with that kind of difficult life, no one would have blamed her.

  But that’s not how Puggy rolls. Instead, she gives her love freely, holding no grudge against the scent of newborn that was once mingled with smells of waste and filth. In fact, perhaps her old life is why she is such a generous being. She’s known hardship and doesn’t want any other animal to suffer.

  So when a tiny piglet entered her world at the Hillside Wildlife Sanctuary in Norfolk, England, Puggy was quick to go into mother mode, as if a switch had been flipped inside her. The pig, parentless for perhaps a day or two, was an orphan no more.

  Tabitha is the pig’s name. She had been discovered as a wee thing alongside a road where she’d likely fallen from a truck bound for a processing plant. “It’s possible her mother gave birth to her right there in the lorry,” Wendy says, “and the baby fell through the slats.” She was hardly much of anything; without a quick rescue she surely would have died.

  Domestic Pig

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Chordata

  Class: Mammalia

  Order: Artiodactyla


  Family: Suidae

  Genus: Sus

  Species: Sus scrofa

  Subspecies: Sus scrofa domesticus

  But rescued she was, taken to Wendy at Hillside for care. Hillside is no slouch of a sanctuary. It opened on just 20 acres but has expanded to include 450 acres and houses some 2,000 animals—and the really young ones get special treatment in Wendy’s warm, dry kitchen. “There are always lambs and pigs in and out of there that I’m helping along, and my dogs come and go, too, so there are many interactions,” she says.

  But this one was really special, she says. Puggy was immediately drawn to Tabitha, and was soon nuzzling and kissing the pig constantly. She was also very protective of Tabitha—one time biting a visitor who had smacked the pig playfully. “I couldn’t believe it!” Wendy says. “I guess she was saying, Get back! Leave my pig alone!”

  Pig and pooch would roll around in the dog bed together, or play-wrestle in the field. As the pig grew bigger, it was much like two dogs chasing and tumbling over one another; neither seemed to know Tabitha wasn’t canine. There was truly a loving bond there, Wendy says. “I saw it whenever they were together. And if Tabitha was behind the fence in my garden and Puggy not, the dog would be nosing through the fence, licking and making little noises—I knew they just wanted to be on the same side!”