Unlikely Friendships : 47 Remarkable Stories From the Animal Kingdom (6 page)

One bone-chilling night, on a bed of straw in a West Virginia barn, a very lucky pig was born.

Pink was a runt by all measures. When he was born, neither Johanna Kerby, who helped the sow deliver the litter that night, nor her husband and daughter, who were watching, thought the tiny piglet would survive outside his mother's womb. Luckily, Pink was given a chance at life by an unlikely benefactor.

Of a litter of eleven, Pink was the last to emerge, and it was immediately clear he wasn't like his brothers and sisters. Pigs are normally born with their eyes open, and it takes just a minute before they are walking and nursing. They're also about three to four pounds. Pink was less than a pound, with his eyes sealed shut
against the world. He was frail, virtually hairless, his tiny voice barely a squeak. “He just lay in the box and quacked,” Johanna recalls. “He didn't even try to walk. He was just too weak.” When she held the baby to his mother's teat to nurse, he wouldn't suck. And soon enough, his stronger siblings were pushing him around, trying to get Pink out of the bed, to rid themselves of their weakest competitor.

Johanna had an idea. The family dog, a small red dachshund named Tink, had always been loving to people and maternal to other animals. And she had a thing for pigs.

The first time Tink was introduced to piglets, years before in the Kerbys' hog barn, “she rounded them all up into a corner and starting licking them,” Johanna recalls. “They were twenty-five pounds, much bigger than she was, but Tink didn't care. She was so happy and wiggly—she had a great big grin on her face.” Another time she nearly drowned in the soupy, thick mud of the hog pen when she ventured in, just to get near the animals.

Tink had given birth to two pups herself recently, but one had been stillborn, and she was clearly distressed by the loss. Johanna decided to put Tink and Pink together and see if the pup would accept the pig as just another offspring. The same trick had worked recently with another dog's puppies;
Tink had happily tucked them in among her own.

Piglet fostering went as smoothly as the puppy placement had. Once Pink was let into the dog's crate, “Tink went crazy. She licked him thoroughly and even chewed off the rest of his umbilical cord,” says Johanna. Then she tucked him under her chin to keep him warm. And when the other puppies were ready to nurse, she used her nose to encourage Pink to join them at her belly.

To the Kerbys' relief, Pink latched on to Tink and began to feed. “Tink treated him like royalty; I think he was actually her favorite,” Johanna says. With such special care, Pink soon caught up in size and weight to his siblings, though he was never interested in rejoining the pigs. His family now was strictly canine, and he'd romp and wrestle with the puppies as if nothing were amiss.

{F
LORIDA
, U.S.A., 2009}

Sean Payne has clocked thousands of hours scuba diving in the sea, happily meeting countless animals eye to eye, from minuscule reef shrimp to colossal whale sharks. But when this dreadlocked boat captain talks about a particular encounter with a manta ray, it's as though he's describing his first love.

He wasn't out looking for rays. Sean was assisting underwater photographers with a project on goliath grouper, a sometimes 800-pound fish that shares the ray's environment off the Florida coast. He was diving at twilight on a shipwreck ninety feet down where the big fish congregate, shaking a rattle used to get the other divers' attention. “Suddenly, I saw this little black ray coming
toward me,” he recalls. (Size is relative, of course. Adult mantas, the largest rays, can grow to more than 20 feet across and weigh some 3,000 pounds.) Rays are often curious about divers, but usually the fish will sweep by and land on the sandy bottom out of reach. This one, an adolescent, apparently wanted a massage from human hands.

“She slipped right up underneath me—I actually had to hold her off to keep her from pushing against me from beneath,” says Sean. “Her skin felt like velvet cloth stretched over ribs and muscle, an incredible texture.” The ray literally danced with the diver, leading him in a bizarre circular tango that forced her body into his hands. As he ran his hands over her skin, her wing tips vibrated like a dog's leg during a particularly good belly scratch. “I was so into the encounter by then, I couldn't tear myself away,” Sean says. “The thing about rays is usually you have to chase them just to get a close look. Here was one that approached me on its own; she zeroed in on me and wanted to be touched. It was as if I were petting and meeting eyes with my German shepherd—I felt a real connection between us. Truly awesome.”

After a few minutes of man–fish bonding, Sean got the signal to get back to work, and reluctantly he
moved away. The young ray—standoffish toward the other divers—stayed nearby. And when Sean headed toward the surface (unlike his ray friend, he needs air from above), she hovered right below him as if making sure he ascended safely.

“I was supposed to be holding underwater lights on the goliath groupers as they spawned, for the photographers, and I missed the whole thing because of the ray,” Sean says. “But it was so worth it to have that experience.” He named the young animal Marina after his daughter, “my other little girl.”

Sean's loving attitude toward the ray might have surprised a seagoer from long ago. In ancient times, manta rays, with their pointy fins, were sometimes associated with the devil, and sailors told tales of the animals leaping from the water and capsizing boats. Although in truth they are peaceful creatures, it's not hard to fathom how these legends were born. With power and grace, mantas will occasionally breach the surface and take to the air, if only for a moment or two, before crashing gloriously back into the sea. Nowadays we see that as beautiful—maybe even playful. But 500 years ago, standing on the deck of a creaky wooden galleon, friendship with one of these winged, “horned” creatures would have been the last thing on your mind.

{W
YOMING
, U.S.A., 1993}