Unlikely Friendships : 47 Remarkable Stories From the Animal Kingdom (27 page)

{T
EXAS
, U.S.A., 2008}

Here's a quick tale about a gazelle that found an unlikely protector in a striped horse.

First, picture a young gazelle in the wild. It's a fragile and vulnerable thing that browses the open grasslands, steppe, and mountain deserts of Africa, Arabia, and India. The petite ungulate's best defense against aggressive types—usually predatory cats—is to run for its life … and to be just a bit swifter than the gazelle running beside it.

The Houston Zoo's gazelle will never need to flee an enemy of any kind, it appears.

According to curator Daryl Hoffman, the zoo has a large multispecies exhibit with warthog, zebra, giant eland, nyala (a
South African antelope), and a lone male Dorcas gazelle—the littlest variety. “When we put these animals together a few years ago, we were concerned for the safety of the gazelle,” he says. “Zebra are known to be aggressive toward young or small antelope, and have been known to kill newborns.” So they kept a close eye on the situation. (In the wild, a gazelle, fearful of a potential aggressor, might be seen “pronking” away on all fours, as if on pogo sticks.)

To everyone's surprise and delight, one of the female zebras in the mixed-up herd formed a strong relationship with the gazelle. She began to hang out with him all the time, watching over him when he rested, following him around as he wandered, and nudging the smaller mammal to join her when she was ready to move from one spot to another in their enclosure—as a mother zebra might do to her foal.

In a wilder setting, of course, these two hooved animals would have to part ways. Dorcas gazelles typically migrate fairly locally, being well adapted to their arid home and sometimes even surviving without a major water source—getting their liquid from the plants they eat. But zebras' hunger, thirst, and desire to mate send them traveling great distances as the seasons change, joining epic migrations of wildebeest and other nomadic herds in search of greener, wetter lands. But in the safe haven of a zoo, those natural instincts are sometimes supplanted by other instincts. In the case of the zebra and the gazelle, it would seem maternal instincts simply won out.

When the zoo staff introduced a new warthog to the group, for instance, the zebra became extremely protective of the gazelle, as if knowing the big pig could be temperamental. “Whenever the warthog approached, she would step between them, making sure the hog couldn't get too close,” says Hoffman.

Especially notable was an incident when the gazelle injured himself and the zebra stepped up her guard. As the staff came in to treat the injured animal, the zebra became frantic and pushed against him, trying to persuade him to get up and out of human reach. “When he wouldn't budge, the zebra tried to block us from approaching,” Hoffman recalls. The gazelle was eventually removed and treated in the zoo's clinic. On his return to the exhibit, Hoffman says, the animals were at first tentative around each other. But after a few days, zebra and gazelle had a reunion, ungulate style. They're now clopping through life side by side once again.

I
SN'T IT SO TEMPTING, SO HUMAN, TO LOOK INTO YOUR
dog's eyes and see love, or to believe upturned lips on any animal's face mean happiness? Consider the dolphin, with that most infamous, enduring smile. It's almost disappointing to learn that the expression has to do with the animal's feeding strategy, not its mood. As author Eugene Linden points out in
The Parrot's Lament,
“If dolphins had evolved to attack their prey fish from above instead of below, they might have been cursed with a permanent frown.”

Still, as this book has hopefully convinced a few skeptics, emotion and empathy, pleasure and disappointment aren't only in the human domain. The task of collecting these stories opened my eyes to just how often animals can surprise us with their depth of caring. As word got around that I was gathering interspecies stories, the photos and narratives flowed in daily—many more than I could use. I was introduced to a special place in England called
Twycross Zoo with a decadeslong history of primates befriending dogs, and to households of mixed pets that played and ate and slept in tandem like human brothers and sisters. I was told about a pup that cuddled with an orphaned porcupine, and I read of a chimp that found a bird in his cage and gently set it free. I considered images of a chick riding atop a turtle, an orangutan walking a dog on a leash, and a mouse balancing beside a lovebird on its perch. I had to cut myself off lest I fill hundreds more pages with funny, sweet, and inspiring tales.

Still, there is one more story that I just cannot leave behind, my own story, so I'd like to close with it here. It depicts an odd combination of fish that I witnessed together on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia in 2009. It doesn't quite fit the “friendship” bill, perhaps, but it's a wonderful account of an interspecies interaction just the same.

Of course, countless types of fish bump fins in the coral reef environment, but this species pairing not only made me laugh (not easy with a scuba regulator in your mouth), but it made me wonder just what might be going on in those little fish brains. The scene was ripe for anthropomorphizing. Please, allow me.

A different baby gibbon embraces a buddy.

A lab and baby gibbon cuddle at twycross Zoo.

{AUSTRALIA, 2009}