glass of quinine, the medicine needed to control the disease, to his friend.
While he was recovering but before he could rise from his bed, Cherry would signal Toto that he wanted to read. Toto learned to put a finger on each book on the shelf until the man said “Yes.” Then the chimpanzee would pull the indicated book out of the shelf and carry it over to his patient. Sometimes, when Cherry fell asleep with his boots on, Toto removed them for him.
In 1925, Cherry wrote: “It may be that some who read this book will say that friendship between a man and an ape is absurd, and that Toto being ‘only an animal’ cannot really have felt the feelings that I attribute to him. They would not say it if they had felt his tenderness and seen his care as I felt and saw it at that time. He was entirely lovable.”
Scientists have found that rhesus monkeys refuse to pull the levers that deliver their food pellets when they see that pulling the lever also delivers an electric shock to a fellow monkey.
Acanary and a cat grew up together and became close friends. They would play together and when the cat slept, the canary perched on his belly. None of the typical cat-bird animosity existed between them.
Joan, their owner, came home one day to find her canary dead on the floor. Convinced that her cat had finally succumbed to instinct and killed her canary, Joan screamed furiously at the cat sitting nearby and tried to swat her but the cat dashed out the door.
Later, on examining the bird, Joan realized that it had simply died of old age; there were no teeth marks, no sign of attack whatsoever. Guiltily, she called for her cat but the falsely accused animal would not return.
The cat's habit was to come home every evening by eight o'clock, but this time she did not appear. As the hours passed, the woman grew more and more concerned.
Finally at midnight, to her great relief, she heard a scratching at the door. When she opened the door, there was the cat on the threshold, delicately holding a live fledgling in her mouth. Gently the cat placed the little bird on the floor at the woman's feet, backed away, and sat down to watch her human expectantly.
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
