Unlikely Loves

by Jennifer S. Holland

  Zedonks and similar critters are happy rarities, reported now and then at zoos around the world. A British zoo announced recently the birth of Zulu, their first “zorse.” (Dad, obviously, was a horse.) There are also “zonkies,” when the dad is the donkey and the mom, the zebra. Whatever the name, zebra blood flows through all of their veins.

  So with Tippy trotting about, C. W. figured it was back to business as usual. But then, another cross-breeding surprise. “It happened again!” C. W. says. “We didn’t plan it! In fact, we were going to send Zeke away to breed him with other zebras, but people who visited the preserve wanted to see Tippy with both parents. So we delayed the loan.” And that bit of extra time together was all they needed. Zeke and Sarah, in the hush of a barnyard night, mated for a second time. And soon, there was Pippa. Striped stockings, long face. Sister to Tippy.

  Zedonk zedonk.

  So, two zedonks now steal the show at the Chestatee Wildlife Preserve. “They’re so personable. They always go right up to the fence when people come to see them,” C. W. says. They have the alertness of a zebra—ears perked, listening for danger, yet they are calm like their donkey mom, he says. And the wacky sound they make: It’s not quite a donkey bray and not quite a zebra holler, he says. “Something half and half. My wife and I wonder if the mom even understands them, but she must because she’s always right there when they cry.” Though Zeke has since been shipped elsewhere—he’s on breeding loan at an Alabama zoo to make more zebras, of all things—his legacy at Chestatee is perfectly sweet, if not perfectly customary.

  “There are people who put lions and tigers together, to make ligers,” C. W. says. “There are wallabies and kangaroos—walleroos? I didn’t plan to mix things up here, but this is real life and things happen.” And he’s not unhappy with the result, of course, including the herds of visitors coming to peer at the baby ungulates in brown coats and striped socks. Says C. W., “Some people just have to see for themselves that they’re real.”

  {Münster, Germany, 2006}

  The Swan and the Swan Boat

  Love comes in all colors, shapes, and sizes. And materials, apparently. If your heart is truly open, even plastic is worthy of deep affection.

  The lovable plastic in this tale was a boat. The one who fancied that plastic was a bird. This is their story.

  Petra, a black swan, showed up in a lake called Aasee in Münster, Germany, some years back. On that lake, it so happened, sat a white paddleboat, the type visitors use to enjoy a sunny afternoon on the water, propelling themselves this way and that. For Petra, one look at the boat was all it took. She was a swan’s version of smitten.

  Before we all smirk at Petra’s battiness, we should appreciate the bird’s-eye view. The boat, after all, was shaped like a swan and floated in a very swanlike fashion. It wasn’t the most responsive partner one could ask for, and was a giant compared to live swans. But maybe Petra wasn’t one for idle bird chatter, and felt safe in the shadow of an extra-large mate. Whatever her thoughts, she was clearly drawn to the towering, featherless figure stuck in swan-on-a-lake position. She began to follow it around, and for a time the couple seemed perfectly content.

  This floating love affair got a lot of

  Black Swan

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Chordata

  Class: Aves

  Order: Anseriformes

  Family: Anatidae

  Genus: Cygnus

  Species: Cygnus atratus

  attention, of course. Everyone wanted a glimpse of the lovebirds swimming side by side, as mated swans will do. Interest in the pair reached its peak when it came time to put the boat away in storage for the winter. “The question was, how would Petra deal with the loss of her plastic lover?” says Ilona Zühlke, of the nearby Allwetterzoo Münster animal park, who shared this story with me.

  With all the happy hubbub over the pair, the zoo’s officials agreed to take both swans in for the cold season. It took a week of careful traveling to get both bird and lover into their new home, but the trip was a success and Petra and her boat spent a relaxed winter together.

  When spring came, the animal caretakers thought it best to introduce Petra to other real swans. A plastic mate might be good company, but there was little chance of their building a family. So Petra and the boat were moved to a pond where six other black swans lived. Briefly, there was scandal: One of the unmated females in the flock fancied the white paddleboat (who seemed unmoved by her advances), while the other swans fancied attacking Petra. Quickly, realizing their experiment had failed, the zoo staff took action to protect Petra from injury. She and her boat would be moved one last time—back to the Aasee where they’d first met.

  Like a man being groomed for his wedding, the swan boat was cleaned, repaired, and oiled before the big day when it would be towed by motorboat down the canal that leads to the lake at the city center. Petra, like a bride escorted by her father, rode in the front boat in the arms of the director of the zoo, Jörg Adler. Countless spectators on foot, on bikes, and in other paddleboats brought up the rear, anxious to see the reunion.

  And when Jörg finally placed Petra in the water with her big plastic mate bobbing beside her, the crowd cheered. Petra then stretched her wings and preened her feathers, recalls Ilona. “We could tell she was happy to be home again.”

  {Texas, U.S.A., 2012}

  The Rat and the Kitten

  Who doesn’t love to nuzzle with a kitten? I can’t say the same thing about a rat. More people are likely to shriek at the sight than open their arms to a rodent.

  Let’s clear our minds of such judgments and give rats a fresh start. They’re smart, playful, even ticklish. They’ll cuddle with you if you let them. I’m not suggesting you trap one from the back alley and tuck it into your bed. (By no fault of their own, city rats can spread disease.) But the “fancy” types are bred to be pets.

  Maybe Aiden can help make my point. Aiden the rat belongs to Texan Lance Clifton, a website developer and a repeat rat owner. Before buying Aiden, Lance had Lemmi and Spencer living as a pair, but sadly, Lemmi passed away after a stroke. “I wasn’t actually planning to get a new rat the day I saw Aiden,” Lance says. “I had gone to the pet store to get food and bedding for Spencer, and walking by the rodents I saw a nicely colored ‘dumbo rat,’ a special type that’s bred to have big ears.” He asked the shopkeeper if he could hold the animal (which, deep down, he knew would likely clinch the deal). The rat reacted just right—not squirming and trying to escape but curiously sniffing and inspecting him.

  Sold.

  Brown Rat

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Chordata

  Class: Mammalia

  Order: Rodentia

  Family: Muridae

  Genus: Rattus

  Species: Rattus norvegicus

  Lance isn’t fond only of nontraditional pets; he’s easily won over by the typical ones, too. Shortly after getting Aiden, a friend of Lance’s mother announced that she knew of some stray kittens—beautiful Siamese mixes—needing homes. So, home came Tessie.

  “Tessie was very docile and I didn’t think she’d be much of a threat to the rat,” Lance says. “So I decided to place them on my bed together and see what would happen.”

  What happened, he recalls, is that Aiden ran for the rather confused kitten without hesitation. “He wasn’t being aggressive. It was unlike the initial introduction to his cage-mate [Spencer], when he raised up his fur and slapped his tail. Instead he was immediately interested and happy to interact.”

  When the kitten walked away, the rat followed. And when she lay down, Aiden sidled up next to her and started grooming her. Apparently, that felt good: “Tessie didn’t walk away after that,” Lance says. “She accepted the gesture, hugged him, and fell asleep.”

  “Grooming for rats is a very important social gesture—a ‘w
e’re family’ statement.” Each gets a turn, and they’ll nudge each other for help getting at those hard-to-reach spots behind the ears. During the rat–cat encounters, each animal “purred” in its own way. For a few weeks, Lance put the animals together regularly, letting their affection for each other grow. He would stay nearby to supervise, but mostly he trusted they wouldn’t harm each other.

  Sometimes family members change and go their own ways, and that eventually happened with these two. Tessie got bigger and her teeth and claws sharper, and her play behavior went from gentle to, well, tooth and claw. “So for now I keep them separated,” Lance says. There’s nothing malicious about it, but he wants to protect Aiden from the cat’s overzealous affection while she’s in this adolescent stage.

  But even without direct contact, Aiden and Tessie have kept up their affiliation. “Often Tessie will lie on top of the rat’s cage, and Aiden will run over and put his nose up to her, like he’s saying hello,” says Lance. He’s hopeful that eventually Tessie will mellow out. “Then I can reunite them without the bars.”

  {Eastern Cape, South Africa, 2011}

  The Lioness and the Lioness

  Jealousy isn’t pretty. We’ve all seen it or felt it ourselves, often over silly things. But it’s a complex emotion. And it’s not one you’d expect would infect nonhuman animals.

  Yet here we have a lioness who, it certainly seems, is so possessive of her best friend that she refuses to share, and gets jealous if that friend shows affection to others.

  The deep affection between lionesses Achee and Ma Juah arose at a sanctuary of the Born Free Foundation within Shamwari Game Reserve in Eastern Cape, South Africa. Born Free has taken in many homeless big cats, making sure to prevent breeding so as not to add to the captive cat population when there are so many animals in need.

  And anyway, in the case of these two felines, offering mates wasn’t an option: Both were suffering the effects of nutritional osteodystrophy—abnormal skeletal formation and nerve damage resulting from a poor early diet. The condition had produced a bizarre gait and a head-shaking behavior in the females that to a male could signal weakness and might prompt him to attack rather than mate.

  “Fortunately, and coincidentally,” says Ann Tudor of Born Free, “we were called on to rescue Ma Juah and Achee within weeks of each other.” Ma Juah came from Liberia, where she’d belonged to a former dictator, and Achee from Romania, the pampered pet of a European consul. Because companionship is so vital for lions, “we decided to attempt to bring the two together. Otherwise, each would be destined to a life of solitude.”

  It’s important to mention that introducing two unrelated lionesses is tricky. In the wild, only cats that are true family would get along.

  At first, Ma Juah hated Achee and would snarl at her and attempt to swipe her. Such stress brought on little fits in the irritable cat, probably also a result of the poor nutrition during her upbringing, and Ma Juah would fall over from her own aggressive efforts.

  Achee accepted this strange behavior in her friend. According to Glen Vena, Shamwari’s animal care manager, “Another lion might recognize this as unnatural and so might instinctively attack. Instead, on some occasions, Achee would groom Ma Juah and sometimes even give Ma Juah a push with her head, as if to say ‘get up, girl.’” He adds that if this happens during feeding, “Achee will never run off with Ma Juah’s food, which is quite amazing. Ma Juah must sense she is at a disadvantage at this time, so this nonaggressive response from Achee must be a comfort to her.”

  That comfort may have helped Ma Juah to change her opinion of Achee, and as the weeks went by, her cold demeanor began to thaw. In fact, soon Ma Juah wanted Achee all to herself!

  As a result, now Ma Juah and Achee act like loving sisters or a couple you probably know: They are rarely seen more than a few feet from each other; they bump hips as they walk; they nose each other, share food, and lie in tandem—sometimes with tails intertwined “as if they just want to be touching each other,” says Glen. And if they’ve been apart, when they meet again they rub heads and make affectionate meowing sounds.

  Achee remains friendly with people and with a little male lion, Sinbad, living next door, but if she pays attention to anyone else for more than a moment, Ma Juah shows her green side, snarling and growling in the background until her Achee returns to her.

  Accepting the possessive love from her former aggressor, Achee always rejoins Ma Juah directly, and the two walk off together, shoulder to shoulder, solo no more.

  {Montana, U.S.A., 2012}

  The Alpaca and the Horses

  Have you stood beneath the Big Sky out in the western United States? If not, make the trip. Even if you don’t experience any cute interspecies interactions against that backdrop, you’ll be invigorated by a landscape that lets you see for miles and breathe deeply of its vast, airy beauty.

  That sense of freshness, of openness, is what drew a New Jersey woman to Montana a few years back. Living in Bigfork, at the base of the Rockies, Lauren Grabelle took a turn at the rural life and, to her good fortune, watched a sweet interspecies fondness grow right outside her door.

  “The first time, it was a gorgeous day, that glowing time of the afternoon, and the sun was about to do awesome things on the mountains,” Lauren recalls. “It’s like that in Montana: suddenly perfect.” She was staying in the upstairs of a barn on a beautiful property at the time, making her living as a wedding photographer. “Which means I’m always on the lookout for love,” she says. But here, with the Swan Range in the distance, the land and its resident animals—horses, dogs, alpacas—inspired her as much as the couples who hired her to record their special day.

  Alpaca

  Kingdom: Animalia

  Phylum: Chordata

  Class: Mammalia

  Order: Artiodactyla

  Family: Camelidae

  Genus: Vicugna

  Species: Vicugna pacos

  Now, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows for Lauren. While her location inspired her, she felt no love for the woman next door, who owned the apartment Lauren rented and the animals in the barn below. “She thought she was an animal person, but she wasn’t,” Lauren recalls. “The animals didn’t like her, either.”

  And so Lauren sought refuge in the nonhuman living things within her view. And on that sun-kissed afternoon, as she returned to the barn from a walk with her dog, she observed a charming moment that completely surprised her.

  “The alpacas had just been moved there, to join the horses, a week or so before,” she recalls, “so I hadn’t had much time to watch them yet. There were two females, Mango and Whispy, plus a male named Rocket Man. As I went up the stairs to my apartment, I noticed that Rocket Man was nuzzling two of the horses. He didn’t seem to just be scratching an itch—it really looked affectionate. It seemed to me they were getting to know each other through touch and smell.”

  Alpacas, originally from South America, are social animals, hanging with the herd, and can be territorial toward animals unlike themselves. That can mean short, loud inhalations of warning or even spitting, kicking attacks.

  But there was none of that aggression toward the horses in the yard. Just the opposite, in fact. These different animals were interested in each other, and their behavior suggested a connection building across species lines.

  The relationship between the animals seemed to grow over time, and on another day Lauren caught alpaca Rocket Man “in a love fest” with horse Luis. The photographer went to work, thrilled at the scene before her and at the kindness the animals seemed capable of sharing.

  “This was the reason I was here in the first place,” Lauren says of these encounters. “The reprieve from everything negative that these animals offered me was enormous. Whenever I got up from my desk, this is what I saw, these beautiful animals getting along, nuzzling as if in love. I was feeling very apart from nature when I
was back in New Jersey, and I had lost my fascination with people. Being so close to the horses and alpacas was really special.”

  No doubt many of us have been soothed by animal kindness when our hearts are feeling hardened. Lauren was just lucky to find her remedy right outside her door.

  {Victoria, Australia, 2003}

  The Pig and the Farm Pals

  When I was a kid, my favorite book was Charlotte’s Web. In that classic tale, the spider weaves in her web the words “Some Pig,” a silk billboard to let everyone know how special her porcine friend Wilbur is. Well, here’s another mud wallower that could pose under those words with pride. Meet Edgar.

  “If it weren’t for Edgar, none of this would be. I’m just so grateful he found me.”

  Those words of appreciation come from Pam Ahern, who founded Edgar’s Mission Farm Sanctuary in Willowmavin, a tiny town in central Victoria, Australia. And she did so to honor her relationship with a dirt-loving, curly-tailed, snorting beast. Edgar Alan Pig, as he was formally known, turned out to be the lovable muse that changed her life for the better.

  Pam had been working on a media campaign about the plight of factory-farmed pigs, horrified by the conditions under which they lived. To show her solidarity with the animals, and because she needed a pig for a campaign photo shoot, she decided to bring one home—to save its bacon, as it were. “We had the land and I knew about pigs, so I figured, why not,” she says.

  Pam recalls the day she rescued Edgar and took him home to pose for the camera. From his time on the factory farm, “he was covered in excrement. He really stank.” Pam and her mother, Sylvia, wrestled the smelly swine into a tub for a bath as compassionately as they could. “He didn’t want anything to do with me, not surprisingly. But fortunately, he fell in love with my dog, E. T. That’s how things started.”