Unlikely Friendships : 47 Remarkable Stories From the Animal Kingdom (17 page)

A ginger feline that became known as T. K., or Tonda's Kitty, got a slow, safe introduction to the primate's world. “At first, we let them see each other but without contact, to watch how they'd react,” recalls the zoo's director of education, Stephanie Willard. Then, contact was allowed for short stints to keep Tonda from getting too excited. With time, “she'd get angrier and angrier when we'd take him away,” Willard says. “That was her kitty!” So eventually, “we went for the gusto and put them together for real. And once their relationship had time to build, they were inseparable.”

T. K. became Tonda's everything. When they weren't in physical contact, she always had an eye on him. She'd tuck him under a blanket at naptime and shake a cornhusk for him to chase at playtime. And she'd scoop him up and carry him off to bed at night. T. K., meanwhile, “loved to love the primate” by rubbing against Tonda's legs, licking and chewing her hands and feet, and reveling in her endless attentiveness.

“You have to remember, this was not a docile orangutan that was easily handled,” Willard says. Orangutans can be extremely dangerous, and Tonda had a lot of wildness in her. But her rough nature toward people and others didn't keep her from finding a friend in T. K. “Their kinship was 100 percent real, worked out on their own terms. Animals don't get enough credit for all they're capable of emotionally,” Willard says. Most important, “this bond really meant something. It did something for Tonda both mentally and physically. It saved her life.”

{I
NDONESIA
, 2007}

A matchup of captive-born babies was the talk of the Taman Safari Zoo in Cisarua, Indonesia. One-month-old Sumatran tiger twins and a pair of little orangutans just a few months older shared a room in the zoo's nursery. The parents of both primates and cats had proven unfit or uninterested in their young, so zoo staff decided to mother the whole bunch as one litter.

The orangutans, Nia and Irma, and the tigers, Dema and Manis, formed something like a nursery school romper room when they were brought together during the day. “As is common with baby animals, they'd run and play together,” says animal curator Sharamy Prastiti. “Sometimes an orangutan would pounce on
the belly of a tiger. Other times a cub would bite an orangutan's ear. They loved to tease each other, like kids do.” Naptime turned boisterous individuals into a furry pile of snoring babies. Cuddling, nuzzling—orangutans and kittens were content to be physically close as much as possible.

The zoo staff began giving the animals more time apart in their own exhibits as they grew, and planned to separate them completely when the cubs were five months old. “At that point, the tigers are much bigger than the orangutans, and can be very active and sometimes naughty and rough,” says Sharamy.

When the youngsters were first parted, “they didn't want to be independent—they looked as if they were all missing something. They'd make unusual sounds, as if crying without tears,” Sharamy says. But after a week or so, “they became adjusted to being on their own and the new situation.” The former pals now have no contact at all, a separation that's appropriate and necessary to keep them safe. Though the orangutans are fruit-eaters, the tigers' natural instinct, of course, is to hunt and eat meat. Nursery school is over.

The shared childhood appears to have benefited all concerned, but these animals also share something that can't be celebrated: In the wild, both species are critically endangered. Sumatran tigers, a subspecies living naturally only on a single Indonesian island, may be down to about 500 animals. And orangutan populations are also declining. Both big cats and big apes compete with humans for habitat, a conservation problem without a simple solution.

{E
NGLAND
, 2009}