Unlikely Friendships - Jennifer S. Holland [28]
When Sheryl or Lauren took Timmy out of the room for petting or grooming, Baby would hop around looking for him, poking her nose into spots where the pig might hide. Meanwhile, the rabbits had a cardboard box set up off the floor so they’d be able to get away from Timmy if they chose to. But within a short time, one of the animals chewed a hole in the bottom of the box. “Suddenly, Timmy was in there, too. I guess if Baby had wanted him out, she could have gotten rid of him. But she didn’t seem to mind.”
{OHIO, U.S.A., 2009}
The Rat and the Cat
RAT
KINGDOM: Animalia
PHYLUM: Chordata
CLASS: Mammalia
ORDER: Rodentia
FAMILY: Muridae
GENUS: Rattus
SPECIES: Rattus norvegicus
Rats. They’re filthy, disease-carrying pests that skitter through trash-strewn alleyways with those awful hairless tails trailing out behind them. Right?
Set aside such notions. Rats are actually smart little mammals with an unfair reputation for doing nothing but skulking about. True, the big brown ones peering from city sewers are hard to love. But just consider them as survivors. Cleaned up, their kind can make great pets. They’re also, of all nonrat things to be, ticklish, and they’ve been shown to experience convoluted dreams about recent happenings, just as humans do. And in the case of Peanut—a white rat owned by Maggie Szpot of Ohio—they are capable of becoming smitten with their mortal enemy, the cat.
Ranj the cat came to Maggie as a stray, so she expected that with rodents in the house, his hunting instinct would rear its feisty head. Not so! Ranj showed only curiosity toward the numerous rats Maggie rescued. Peanut and Mocha, a pair that Maggie got at the same time, were no exception. “When I first brought them home, I put them in a fenced-off area, but Ranj just jumped right in and started sniffing them. He was very calm—there was no aggression at all,” she says.
Soon after they met, Maggie says, “Peanut developed a special liking for Ranj and began to follow him everywhere. Ranj liked her back, but would sometimes try to avoid his pesky friend by hopping onto anything off the ground. Peanut would just climb up after him!”
Nowadays, Peanut loves to snuggle with Ranj and will crawl fully under the cat’s haunches when he’s seated. The rat appears soothed by the cat’s presence, and will close her eyes as she snuggles up to his furry warmth. Ranj sometimes gives Peanut a tongue bath or rubs his head against her when she gets close to him, Maggie says. In return, Peanut licks Ranj’s face or scrambles over his stretched-out body. Though Mocha is less friendly to the cat and will chase and bite his feet, he joins Peanut and Ranj at mealtime. It’s an odd scene: two rodents munching kibbles from Ranj’s bowl as the cat stretches his neck down between them for a bite, “each without a care in the world.”
{CHINA, 2009}
The Red Pandas and the Mothering Mutt
RED PANDA
KINGDO:Animalia
PHYLUM: Chordata
CLASS: Mammalia
ORDER: Carnivora
FAMILYM: Ailuridae
GENUS: Ailurus
SPECIES: A. fulgens
They’re extremely precious, these tiny red pandas, and not just because of their high cuteness factor. In the wild, hunting and habitat loss threaten the species with extinction, and Ailurus fulgens is protected by law. So the success story of these two panda cubs in a Chinese zoo is sweet indeed.
Red pandas, also known as lesser pandas, are only distantly related to their big black-and-white namesakes. And they’re more closely related to raccoons than to dogs, but these two took to a canine “mom” as if she were the closest of kin.
The mother panda had recently been moved from the Shaanxi Zoo to the Taiyuan Zoo in northern China’s Shaanxi Province. Beneath her furry plumpness, the bear was pregnant, unbeknownst to zookeepers, and in her new environment she gave birth prematurely. Under the stressful circumstances, the mother abandoned her pups, leaving humans scrambling