![]() ![]() But his neighbor raised the same kind of chickens, and felt the same way about his chickens.” So they switched, and ate each other’s birds without guilt. “I have a friend who raised chickens, and he thought of them like family,” Burghardt said. (To hedge their bets-or maybe to spare Timur the trauma-the zookeepers have switched Amur to an all-rabbit diet.) ![]() But there’s also a chance, Burghardt explained, that the tiger has come to permanently think of Timur as something other than food, and that once a bond has been established, it can often preclude a predator from reverting back to its natural state. Depending on the context, a playmate-even an unorthodox one-can be more satisfying than a meal: “In this particular situation, the animal’s motivation to engage socially and playfully maybe was higher in its need hierarchy than eating.”Ī zookeeper from a different Siberian wildlife park recently told The Siberian Times that there’s “an 80-85 percent chance” that Amur will end up eating his new friend. “All those activities take time and energy, and if those needs are removed, the animals get bored,” Burghardt said. ![]() Animals in captivity have their food presented to them they don’t need to worry about marking their territory or looking for mates the way an animal in the wild would. One possible explanation: At the moment that Timur entered his enclosure, Amur was lonelier than he was hungry. ![]() Amur, who had never before been aggressive with park staff, has begun hissing at anyone who gets too close to Timur. “They are inseparable,” Dmitry Mezentsev, the director of the park, told The Siberian Times. Here’s a video of the two animals at play: Amur had attacked and eaten all his previous goats this one, though, spends his days romping through the tiger enclosure with his would-be killer. Over the past few weeks, for example, a tiger at the Siberian Zoo named Amur has been palling around with a goat, Timur, which handlers originally left in his enclosure as a meal. “I think if you’re careful, it’s pretty reasonable to extend behavioral similarities across species.”Īnd in recent years, the case for animal friendship has solidified: Chimpanzees choose their companions based on personality, elephants offer one another emotional support in times of stress, bats form cliques within their larger colonies-all elements of the bond that we call friendship when it’s shared between two humans.īut researchers aren’t as sure what’s going on with the star-crossed lovers of the animal kingdom-especially when these interspecies pairings are a predator and its prey. “Mother-infant bonding, no one has a problem extending that from a human to a chimpanzee,” he says. Gordon Burghardt, a psychologist and ecologist at the University of Tenessee, dismisses the argument that animal friendships are just humans anthropomorphizing other behaviors. Is it fair to call these pairings friendships, or is there something else that’s drawing them to one another? There’s a reason that interspecies friendships are the subject of so many books and calendars and even television shows: They seem like such a pure, against-the-odds type of love.įor about as long as humans have been studying animal behavior, though, they’ve been considering the question of whether such a love is really possible. I held back squeals on the phone, because they say squealing during an interview is unprofessional. When Bekoff crated the fox during the day, the dog would “sit in front of it and whine so he could see his fox friend.” Once, when he tried to separate them at night, “the fox basically gnawed through one of those baby fences” to get closer to his pal.īekoff, in other words, had become a third wheel in his own home. They played together they slept side by side. The attraction between this new animal and his dog was instantaneous: “They became the best of friends,” he said. When Bekoff, now a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, was a graduate student, he brought home a fox for a temporary stay in his apartment. And so when a better offer came along, he took it. Not “man’s best friend unless maybe a better offer comes along, in which case, well, it’s been fun.” But Marc Bekoffs’s dog, being a dog, was unfamiliar with this particular saying. The phrase is “man’s best friend,” full stop. ![]()
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