Unlikely Friendships : 47 Remarkable Stories From the Animal Kingdom (25 page)

In the far reaches of the icy north, in a Canadian town called Churchill, a photographer witnessed a stunning interspecies interaction.

Churchill is known for its polar bears—a particularly bold population living in unusually close proximity to people. The line between wilderness and civilization is often blurred as the bears venture from their icy feeding grounds into town to pick through trash for an easy meal. And in a place where dogsleds are a common form of transport, the scrounging bears are bound to meet up with canines from time to time.

Rogue bears have been known to kill sled dogs. So one November day, when photographer Norbert Rosing noticed a huge
male approaching an area where several dozen Eskimo dogs were corralled, he worried for their safety. “Most of the dogs started barking, pulling on their chains, as the bear got close,” he recalls. But there was one dog that stayed calm, standing apart from the others. As Norbert watched, the bear moved toward the unruffled pup. And then, most unexpectedly, the bear lay down, rolled over, and reached out his massive paw, as if asking the dog to play while promising no harm.

The dog was initially wary, but as his confidence grew the two began to play. Both were gentle at first—the bear pulled on the dog's leg, then lightly bit its hip, and the dog responded in kind. When the bear tested his playmate with a harder bite, the dog yelped in pain. “The bear released him right away, then came back and started playing again, more carefully,” Rosing says. “By the end, they were scrapping like old buddies, with the bear lying on his back and the dog jumping on his belly. The bear would take the dog's head between his paws as they wrestled around. It was an incredible sight.”

The animals roughhoused for about twenty minutes before the bear left. But for several days afterward he returned and the pair resumed their game. Similar interactions have since been reported in Churchill, sometimes with multiple bears
playing with multiple dogs at once. Bears have even been seen protecting the dog pack by running off less affable relatives.

Unfortunately for all concerned, these kinds of interactions with polar bears—rare as they are—may one day be a thing of the past, remembered only through stories like this one and photographs. Climate change is melting the Arctic ice at an alarming rate. Many scientists warn that polar bears, which live largely within the Arctic Circle, are declining in numbers so great that they are vulnerable to extinction in the near future. The bears rely on vast expanses of ice and big floes to use as platforms from which to hunt seals. As that ice becomes scarcer, the carnivores will suffer—and will no doubt be more likely to lumber into towns like Churchill looking for food, not friendship, from sled dogs.

{J
APAN
, 2006}

Dear snake owners and friends of small rodents: Please don't try this at home. In what is arguably one of the stranger cases of interspecies relations, a four-foot rat snake at the Mutsugoro Okoku Zoo in Tokyo, Japan, seemed content to cradle a dwarf hamster within its muscular coils instead of clutching it in a death grip and swallowing it whole.

A keeper at the zoo, who was interviewed about the animals by a videographer, said that when he first captured the snake, it fasted for about two weeks, uninterested in frogs or other small animals that were offered as meals. The keeper finally placed a hamster in the tank, assuming a warm and frisky mammal would be just the thing to pique the snake's appetite.

At first the interaction seemed normal enough. The hamster, jokingly called Gohan—“meal” in Japanese—roamed the tank and sniffed the snake all over. The snake, Aochan, sensed the heat of the animal and “tasted” the air around it with its flicking tongue, as it would do before any meal. But not only did the snake not attack and eat the hamster, it appeared to the keeper that the two natural enemies began showing affection for one another. Soon Gohan was climbing up and over the snake's body and fidgeting among the coils as if making a bed there. Then it settled in the snake's embrace, and Aochan even adjusted its body to accommodate the little creature. “I sensed that the relationship wasn't about eating, but was about friendship,” the keeper said in the interview. The animals remained together without incident.

It's a lovely idea, that a snake known for its quick strike and power to suffocate warm-blooded animals could be a comfort to a nervous rodent. Of course, there are more likely explanations. Rat snakes will hibernate during cold weather, with a drop in metabolism to conserve energy, and the hamster–snake incident took place in autumn. So it's likely that Aochan simply wasn't hungry, his predatory drive in low gear. A summertime introduction to Gohan might have ended very differently indeed.

Regardless of the reason for the animals' peaceful interaction, the behaviors were intriguing, and drew many visitors to the zoo to see a snake and a rodent in an unexpected embrace.

{K
ENYA
, 2005}