Unlikely Friendships - Jennifer S. Holland [3]
Still, the attempt to pair the two species didn’t start out well. When first introduced, Themba chased Albert around the watering hole, flapping his ears and lifting his tail to look as large and threatening as possible. Albert fled, as sheep instinct demands, and hid for hours. Over three days of wary gestures and tentative touches, the pair finally accepted each other, and the result proved well worth the stressful beginning.
“I still remember the day Albert took the first leaves off a tree where Themba was feeding,” says Dr. Johan Joubert, the center’s wildlife director. “We knew they truly bonded when they started to sleep cuddled up together. I must admit, we were concerned that Themba would lie down on top of Albert and crush him by mistake!”
Once the bond took hold, elephant and sheep were inseparable. They’d nap in tandem, horse around together, and Themba would rest his trunk on Albert’s woolly back as they explored their enclosure or went in search of snacks. Though keepers expected Themba to imitate the elder Albert, instead the sheep became the copycat, even learning to feed on Themba’s favorite leaves—from a thorny acacia plant not typically part of a sheep’s diet.
Johan Joubert and his staff had always planned to reintroduce Themba to his family in the reserve where he was born. But during preparations for his release, Themba became ill from a twisted intestine and veterinarians were unable to save him. He was just two and a half years into what might have been a seventy-year lifespan.
The staff at the wildlife center were heartbroken, though Albert, fortunately, was able to forge new interspecies friendships among the reserve’s zebra foals and wildebeest.
{GERMANY, 2000}
The Asiatic Black Bear and the Black Cat
DOMESTIC CAT
KINGDOM: Animalia
PHYLUM: chordata
CLASS: Mammalia
ORDER: Carnivora
FAMILY: Felidae
GENUS: Felis
SPECIES: Feliscatus
ASIATIC BLACK BEAR
KINGDOM: Animalia
PHYLUM: Chordata
CLASS: Mammalia
ORDER: Carnivora
FAMILY: Ursidae
GENUS: Ursis
SPECIES: Ursus thibetanus
From the look of things, there’s something about these two glossy black mammals with matching perked-up ears and mellow attitudes that just says family. But the smooth-haired domestic cat and the shaggy Asiatic bear share little DNA. Dogs are more closely related to bears than cats are. So in the case of Muschi the cat and Mausschen the bear, blood ties don’t bind them. Something else keeps them together.
No one at the Berlin Zoo, where Mausschen has been housed for over forty years, knows where Muschi came from. “We observed her back in 2000 suddenly living in the black bears’ enclosure, and she’d struck up a friendship with the old lady bear,” says curator Heiner Klös. “It’s unusual to see this kind of relationship between two unrelated carnivores, and visitors love to observe them together.”
Mausschen is the oldest known female Asiatic bear. She is a member of a medium-sized forest species whose wild habitat includes parts of Afghanistan, the Himalayas, mainland Southeast Asia, the Russian Far East, and Japan. She has spent her life well cared for in captivity. On any given day, she might be seen sprawled out in a bed of hay with Muschi by her side or lying with the cat in the sun, the two absorbing the day’s warmth together. They go halves on meals of raw meat, dead mice, and fruit. And during a period of separation, while the bear exhibit was renovated, the cat seemed troubled and waited around until she could be reunited with Mausschen. Zoo staff encouraged the reunion after seeing how content the animals were in concert.
Muschi can come and go from the enclosure as much as she likes, “but she always