Unlikely Friendships : 47 Remarkable Stories From the Animal Kingdom (8 page)

{T
ENNESSEE
, U.S.A., 2009}

At the Elephant Santuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee, elephants brought together from different parts of the world tend to find a friend among the masses—not surprising for social animals used to life in a herd. Stray dogs, common on sanctuary property, typically ignore the elephants, remaining solo or pairing off with their own kind. Then came a female elephant named Tarra and a male dog named Bella to break the mold.

Stepping over social traditions, these two intelligent mammals found each other, then rarely parted. The gentle giant and the chubby mutt ate, drank, and slept in tandem. Tarra's tree-trunk legs towered over her canine friend's head, but the two were content as long as they were side by side.

Then Bella the dog grew ill, and the staff of the sanctuary took him inside to care for him. Tarra seemed distressed and stayed near the house where Bella lay as if holding vigil for him. For many days, as Bella slowly recovered, Tarra waited. Finally, the two were reunited. Tarra caressed Bella with her trunk and trumpeted, stamping her feet. Bella, all dog, wiggled his whole body in excitement, tongue and tail in a nonstop wag as he rolled on the ground.

And, in a most remarkable moment, Tarra lifted one immense foot into the air and carefully rubbed the belly of her friend.

Renowned biologist Joyce Poole, who may have logged more hours watching elephants be elephants than anyone on Earth, recalls meeting the pair on a visit to the facility. “I was fortunate to get up close and personal, to see Tarra with both Bella and another dog she'd befriended. She kept trying to cradle the dogs with her trunk. It was delightful to see.” But to Poole, such a friendship isn't all that surprising. “We know from our work with elephants, and from our own relationships with dogs, that both animals are very emotional and form close bonds,” she says. In the wild, elephants are loyal to tight-knit groups under the influence of a matriarch. They not only adopt one another's young, they even mourn their dead. An elephant like Tarra, Poole says, who grew up with a mix of role models and was exposed to other species, “has simply shifted that attachment to another kind of animal.”

Like Dr. Seuss's famously committed cartoon elephant Horton, who sat in for a wayward mother bird to hatch her egg, it appears that Tarra was “faithful, 100 percent!”

{I
LLINOIS
, U.S.A., 2010}

Laurie Maxwell is a consummate dog lover. And she isn't afraid to take on some big ones. Not long ago, two powerful pit bulls and a roll of muscle disguised as a bulldog shared her home. But being of “the more mayhem the merrier” camp when it comes to animals, Laurie decided, why not bring her boyfriend's pair of ferrets into the mix? The rodents added two bolts of lightning to the household. Fortunately, theirs was a positive energy: Moose and Pita quickly became dog lovers, too.

“They were really rambunctious, flying nonstop around the room,” Laurie says. And while the two pit bulls were relatively calm, the old English bulldog, Brando, “was rough and rowdy himself. Moose would wrestle with the big beast, biting his jowls and
muzzle,” she says. “In reply, Moose would steal Bran-do's toys, sometimes right out of the dog's mouth, and hide them under the bed. That ferret was a fearless little creature.” The two would play tug-of-war with the dog toys, Brando actually lifting Moose off the ground and swinging him around, the ferret gripping the toy in his jaws. “He loved it; he'd go right back for more,” Laurie says of the flying Moose, whose neck grew thick with muscle from holding on so tightly.

In all the chaos, Winston, one of the pit bulls, was at first terrified of the ferrets. “If he was on the bed and they scrambled up, he would fall off trying to back away from them,” recalls Laurie. But with positive reinforcement, Winston overcame his fear and became the ferrets' favorite pillow at the end of the day. And Nala, pit bull number two, would follow the smaller animals around trying to lick them, like a coach giving his athletes a wipe-down between their bouts of wrestling.

When Moose became ill and lost the use of his back legs, Laurie's boyfriend, Jonathan, made him a tiny wheelchair from a shin guard, a piece of wood, and the wheels from a clothesline pulley. Soon the ferret was back to racing around the house and “off road” in the grass outside with Pita, the two chasing
and being chased by a trio of dogs ten times their size.

But then, a few months later, it was Pita whose health began to fail, and she turned into a tiny sack of bones, Laurie says. When she began having seizures, Laurie decided to put her “little winsome ball of fluff” to sleep. Before burying the animal, she let Moose see her. “He nosed her, trying to get her up to play. He laid down next to her and rested his head on her neck.” The dogs, too, sniffed at the lifeless creature, uncertain. But their special interest in Moose is what really impressed their owner.

As Laurie later wrote on the website for the Humane Society, where she manages the End Dogfighting campaign, after Pita was gone, the drop in Moose's once-buoyant spirits was obvious to the canines, who tried to help lift them again. “Our spunky dog Nala licked and nuzzled him relentlessly until he warmed up and playfully clawed and bit her giant muzzle,” she wrote. “The stoic bulldog Brando followed Moose around the house with a watchful eye. And cuddle-loving Winston curled up and napped with the ferret at night.” There was no question in her mind that the dogs, sensing Moose's distress over Pita, were consoling their friend when he needed them most.