Unlikely Friendships - Jennifer S. Holland [22]
There’s also a bit of dog–deer mischief to report. Despite Dillie’s impaired vision, at Lady’s bidding she’ll grab bags of snacks from high shelves for the two to gobble down. Lady will try to steal food from Dillie, who boasts a surprisingly sophisticated palate that includes an appreciation for spaghetti, ice cream, coffee with a lot of milk, and, as a special treat, roses (which she crunches through like candy). And of course, as deer are wont to do, she happily destroys every plant in the Buteras’ yard as Lady lazes about nearby.
For a time both Dillie and Lady tried to share their owner’s bed at night. “I am a night owl,” says Melanie, “and would come to bed after everyone else was already positioned, and sometimes couldn’t even find a spot.” She also suffered the deer’s hooves digging into her back. Luckily, the animals resolved the issue on their own. Feeling the squeeze, Lady found a spot on an extra bed in the room, and Dillie took over a guest room elsewhere in the house. Now, Lady often joins the deer in “her” room for a nap, even when all beds are open.
Interestingly, Dillie is afraid of other dogs, even tiny puppies. “She’ll fluff up her tail and stomp her feet” if any canine but Lady gets too close, Melanie says. But that’s never been the case with Lady. “Dillie grew up with Lady and sees her as family.”
{FLORIDA, U.S.A., 2008}
The Orangutan and the Kitten
ORANGUTAN
KINGDOM: Animalia
PHYLUM: Chordata
CLASS: Mammalia
ORDER: Primates
FAMILY: Hominidae
GENUS: Pongo
SPECIES: Pongo borneo
Koko got all the press, but the famous gorilla isn’t the only big ape to find solace in a cat. Consider Tonda, an orangutan who lived at ZooWorld in Panama City, Florida, for eleven years. She was never known for her sweet nature; beyond the occasional hand-holding or furtive smooch, even she and her mate weren’t terribly affectionate. But when the male died, Tonda began to realize her loss and entered a slow decline in appetite and enthusiasm for life. The ZooWorld staff gave her plenty of activities to enrich her days, from playing with toys to painting canvasses, but her interest waned and she became sullen. With no new mate available for the old girl, keepers decided to find her a friend of another kind.
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.