Unlikely Friendships : 47 Remarkable Stories From the Animal Kingdom (3 page)

{G
ERMANY
, 2000}

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 comes back to the old bear,” Klös says. Their unusual relationship has lasted a decade, and there are no signs of a parting.

{C
ALIFORNIA
, U.S.A., 2009}

Fire no friend to wildlife. In any given year in California alone, there may be fifty or more big blazes a month that destroy hundreds of acres of habitat, displacing animals by the thousands. Many perish in the flames or after, from stress or dehydration.

But some lucky ones are rescued.

That's what happened to a tiny fawn and a young bobcat during a major fire near Santa Barbara in 2009. It was May, when many animals give birth, so the California forests were filled with wobbly-legged newborns. Other fires had already destroyed vast tracts of wildland that year, so surviving animals were extra vulnerable. The May fire was devastating. When rehabilitators from the
Santa Barbara Animal Rescue team picked up a particular young deer, it was weak and wandering in the area where the fire had started, crying and alone.

Because of the number of orphans being rescued, space at wildlife centers was scarce, so the sheriff's department offered its facility as temporary housing.