Inter-Species Friendships and Other Touching Tales

Owen the hippo and Mzee the tortoise, sunbathing together.

T HE ORIGINS OF MY passion for inter-species friendships started with my dear friend Kate, who, several years ago, cut out a magazine clipping of the photo to the left and affixed it to our shared-apartment wall. The hippo’s name is Owen; he survived the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami only to find that his family went missing. He was taken to an animal sanctuary at the tender age of 4 months, where he befriended a 130-year-old tortoise named Mzee. They have been inseparable ever since. All accounts reported that such a diverse animal family was never heard of. Oh, but I beg to differ.

This week, Paige shared a video that originally aired on CBS about a dog and an elephant (named Bella and Tarra, respectively) who are some serious sisters despite their difference in stature and physical strength. The two animals are inseparable. There is even a scene in the video where Bella lies on her back and lets Tarra put her enormous hoof (about the size of Bella’s whole body) on her little paw! And just yesterday I heard about some abandoned tiger cubs who have become quite close to a chimpanzee at an animal sanctuary in South Carolina. Inter-species friendships seem to be sprouting up in animal sanctuaries all over the world, with endless photos of unlikely animal pairs gazing into one another’s eyes like they’ve always been meant to be together.

These kinds of stories seem to have a waterworks effect on people. (When I told my mother that I wanted to show her a photo of a chimp bottle-feeding a white tiger cub she burst into tears.) And even Dooce confessed that she shed some tears over the Bella and Tarra story in a blog post a few weeks ago. So clearly, I am not alone in this fascination.

Me and Kate, my sister-by-choice, getting ready for our graduation into the wild.

But perhaps I am so compelled by these stories because sisterless as I am, I’m always searching for someone to fill the empty seat beside me that I have hoped and wished would be for a sister (T is not to be forgotten, he’s in the seat on the other side). The results of this sister-search are muddled, but what I do know is that I’ve found more than one sister-by-choice during my lifetime.

And while I have never found a sister in a different species of animal, these sisters-by-choice are so often quite different from me. I’m thinking in particular of the same friend who introduced me to Owen and Mzee’s friendship, Kate. And when I see an elephant putting a hoof on the paw of a tiny dog, I cannot help but be reminded of how when I give Kate a hug, she disappears into my frame (which happens to be twice the size of hers). We could probably reenact the Tarra/Bella scene with ease, seeing as my size-10.5 clopper would probably look like an elephant hoof on top of her wee size-5 foot.

We found one another at college—a location that has more in common with an animal sanctuary than you might think. And our interests are as different as I would imagine a baby hippo and ancient tortoise’s are (common ground includes: sunbathing, chasing each other, and foraging for food). But somehow, we’ve clicked and now I can’t possibly imagine having a life without her.

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