The young bird blinked and peeped. The cat had obviously stolen the fledgling from its nest. The cat looked hopefully up at Joan to see if the new bird would ease her sorrow. The cat's look seemed to say, “Can we be friends again now? I've brought you another bird.”
Long ocean voyages were once very difficult and one reason was because mice and rats would eat or foul all the stored food supplies. Ships had to travel from port to port to restock, clinging close to land. Then, as cats occasionally crept aboard, sailors discovered that not only did they make good mates (because their lithe bodies could roll with the ship's motions) but the mice and rat population was greatly decreased. It became known bad luck to chase a cat off a ship that it chose to board. Thus, the tradition of “ship's cat” was born.
An English trapper came to America long ago and fell in love with the country and with a lovely Iroquois woman named Anahareo. One day he found a mother beaver in one of his traps and nearby two tiny beaver kits. At his wife's urging, he took the two tiny beaver babies home with him. During the course of raising them he realized he would never hunt animals again. At the time of this decision he wrote: “Their almost childlike intimacies and murmurings of affection, their rollicking good fellowship not only with each other but ourselves, their keen awareness, their air of knowing what it was all about. They seemed like little folk from some other planet, whose language we could not quite understand. To kill such creatures seemed monstrous. I would do no more of it.”
“Thus godlike sympathy grows and thrives and spreads far beyond the teachings of churches and schools, where too often the mean, blinding, loveless doctrine is taught that animals have no rights that we are bound to respect, and were made only for man, to be petted, spoiled, slaughtered or enslaved.”
—John Muir
“Go away King,” Pearl Carlson said sleepily as her German shepherd dog pulled at her bedding and attempted to rouse her. “Not now, I'm trying to get some rest.” Pearl vaguely wondered what King was doing in her bedroom at three o'clock in the morning, since he was usually locked in another part of the house at night. It was Christmas night and the sixteen-year-old girl had been looking forward to a good night's sleep after an exciting day.
Pearl sat up in bed to give the barking dog a good push and realized that smoke was filling her room—the house was on fire. Bolting out of bed, she ran in panic to her parents' bedroom and awoke them both.
Her mother, Fern, got up at once and told Pearl to escape through her own bedroom window while she helped her husband, Howard, out of their window. But Howard Carlson had a lung condition and could not move quickly. Pearl headed back to her own bedroom but somehow wound up in the living room where the fire was at its worst.
“I'm going after her,” Howard said, but his wife, knowing his lung ailment made this impossible, told him to escape through the window while she went for Pearl. Fern ran blindly toward the smoke-blackened room. Pearl was standing there, frozen in confusion. Fern led her to safety but then realized that neither Howard nor King had gotten out of the house. Fern ran back into their bedroom and found Howard collapsed on the floor with King by his side. Fern and King struggled to lift Howard and finally the two of them managed to get the nearly unconscious man to safety. Fern later said she could not have moved Howard without King's help.
King and his family were saved. King had badly burned paws and a gash on his back, but seemed otherwise healthy. Yet the day after the fire, King would not eat his dog food.
The neighbors had come by with sandwiches and refreshments and were helping to rebuild what they could of the house. Then King did something he had never done before: He stole one of the soft sandwiches. Something was wrong. The Carlsons looked in King's mouth and saw that his gums were pierced with painful, sharp wooden splinters. That terrible night, King had, with sheer desperate force, chewed and clawed his way through the closed plywood door that separated him from his family. A door had been left open for King to the outdoors so he could easily have just saved himself. Instead, he chose not to flee but to gnaw and smash through the door to face the blinding fire and choking smoke to rescue his friends. Now the family knew how King had gotten into the house.
The splinters were removed and King recovered fully, although his pads had been so burned that even a year later it was painful for him to walk on a hot sidewalk. I asked Fern Carlson later, as she recounted the incredible tale of King's bravery, if there were any changes in the way King was treated after the fire. “Oh yes,” she said. “The neighbors all fed King steak and roasts until he got really fat!”
“Where is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone man would die from a great loneliness of spirit.”
—Chief Seattle
Observers have repeatedly noticed that animals in the wild do not live solely by “tooth and claw” but regularly show compassion for their fellows. For example, a newborn elephant is raised by both its mother and a special “auntie.” This second mother acts as helper, baby-sitter, and guardian. This relationship occurs naturally in the wild and helps to protect the helpless youngster from tigers.
Once, when an old bull elephant lay dying, human observers noted that his entire family tried everything to help him to his feet again. First, they tried to work their trunks and tusks underneath him. Then they pulled the old fellow up so strenuously that some broke their tusks in the process. Their concern for their old friend was greater than their concern for themselves.
Elephants have also been observed coming to the aid of a comrade shot by a hunter, despite their fear of gunshots. The other elephants work in concert to raise their wounded companion to walk again. They do this by pressing on either side of the injured elephant and walking, trying to carry their friend between their gigantic bodies. Elephants have also been seen sticking grass in the mouths of their injured friends in an attempt to feed them, to give them strength.
Even a duck can be a hero. On November 27, 1944, the Allies launched an air attack against Freiburg, Germany. Unfortunately, the town's air-raid sirens weren't working.
The local inhabitants would not have had a chance for survival were it not for a vocal duck who lived in Freiburg's main park. The residents had noticed that just before an air raid, animals would sometimes begin vocalizing hysterically, as if they somehow sensed the distant bombers long before the warning system. On this occasion, although the sirens failed, the duck's frenzied squawking drove many hundreds of people into the air-raid shelters.
Unfortunately, the duck was killed in the bombing, but after the war, when Freiburg was rebuilt, the survivors commemorated their web-footed savior with a monument in the new park.
Many animals—from robins and thrushes to vervet monkeys—utter a piercing warning cry when a predator approaches. The shriek enables others of its kind to hide or flee, even though it also attracts the predator's attention, sometimes resulting in the sentinel's death.
While researching animal behavior for her book Mongoose Watch, British ethologist Anne Rasa was surprised to discover that when a dwarf mongoose became ill with chronic kidney disease, he was treated differently by his peers.
The other mongooses permitted the ill animal to eat much earlier than he normally would have, considering his rank in the mongoose social order. To Rasa's astonishment, the sick mongoose was even allowed to nibble on the same piece of food that the dominant male was eating—something that would never occur normally.
When the ill mongoose lost his ability to climb, the entire group of mongooses gave up their decided preference for sleeping on elevated objects such as boxes. Instead, they all opted to sleep on the floor with their sick friend.
A mongoose had injured its front paw so that it could no longer capture food. While they did not overtly bring food to her, the other mongooses, upon seeing her plight, started to forage for food near her. They did not offer her food, as this was against mongoose etiquette, but made sure they were close to her so when she asked they