Unlikely Friendships : 47 Remarkable Stories From the Animal Kingdom by Jennifer S. Holland

bear lying on his back and the dog jumping on his belly. The bear would take the dog’s head between his paws as they wrestled around. It was an incredible sight.”
    The animals roughhoused for about twenty minutes before the bear left. But for several days afterward he returned and the pair resumed their game. Similar interactions have since been reported in Churchill, sometimes with multiple bearsplaying with multiple dogs at once. Bears have even been seen protecting the dog pack by running off less affable relatives.
    Unfortunately for all concerned, these kinds of interactions with polar bears—rare as they are—may one day be a thing of the past, remembered only through stories like this one and photographs. Climate change is melting the Arctic ice at an alarming rate. Many scientists warn that polar bears, which live largely within the Arctic Circle, are declining in numbers so great that they are vulnerable to extinction in the near future. The bears rely on vast expanses of ice and big floes to use as platforms from which to hunt seals. As that ice becomes scarcer, the carnivores will suffer—and will no doubt be more likely to lumber into towns like Churchill looking for food, not friendship, from sled dogs.

{J APAN , 2006}

The
Snake
and the
Hamster

    HAMSTER

KINGDOM: Animalia
PHYLUM: Chordata
CLASS: Mammalia
ORDER: Rodentia
FAMILY: Cricetidae
GENUS:
Mesocricetus

SPECIES:
Mesocricetus raddei

    RAT SNAKE

KINGDOM: Animalla
PHYLUM: Chordata
CLASS: Reptilia
ORDER: Squamata
FAMILY: Colubridae
GENUS:
Elaphe

SPECIES:
E. climacophora
    Dear snake owners and friends of small rodents: Please don’t try this at home. In what is arguably one of the stranger cases of interspecies relations, a four-foot rat snake at the Mutsugoro Okoku Zoo in Tokyo, Japan, seemed content to cradle a dwarf hamster within its muscular coils instead of clutching it in a death grip and swallowing it whole.
    A keeper at the zoo, who was interviewed about the animals by a videographer, said that when he first captured the snake, it fasted for about two weeks, uninterested in frogs or other small animals that were offered as meals. The keeper finally placed a hamster in the tank, assuming a warm and frisky mammal would be just the thing to pique the snake’s appetite.
    At first the interaction seemed normal enough. The hamster, jokingly called Gohan—“meal” in Japanese—roamed the tank and sniffed the snake all over. The snake, Aochan, sensed the heat of the animal and “tasted” the air around it with its flicking tongue, as it would do before any meal. But not only did the snake not attack and eat the hamster, it appeared to the keeper that the two natural enemies began showing affection for one another. Soon Gohan was climbing up and over the snake’s body and fidgeting among the coils as if making a bed there. Then it settled in the snake’s embrace, and Aochan even adjusted its body to accommodate the little creature. “I sensed that the relationship wasn’t about eating, but was about friendship,” the keeper said in the interview. The animals remained together without incident.
    It’s a lovely idea, that a snake known for its quick strike and power to suffocate warm-blooded animals could be a comfort to a nervous rodent. Of course, there are more likely explanations. Rat snakes will hibernate during cold weather, with a drop in metabolism to conserve energy, and the hamster–snake incident took place in autumn. So it’s likely that Aochan simply wasn’t hungry, his predatory drive in low gear. A summertime introduction to Gohan might have ended very differently indeed.
    Regardless of the reason for the animals’ peaceful interaction, the behaviors were intriguing, and drew many visitors to the zoo to see a snake and a rodent in an unexpected embrace.

{K ENYA , 2005}

The
Tortoise
and the
Hippo

    GIANT TORTOISE

KINGDOM: Animalia
PHYLUM: