Читать книгу Random Acts of Kindness by Animals - Stephanie LaLand - Страница 9

“Not to hurt our humble brethren is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission—to be of service to them wherever they require it.”

—Saint Francis of Assisi

Brownie and Spotty were neighbor dogs who met every day to play together. Like pairs of dogs you can find in most any neighborhood, these two loved each other and played together so often that they had worn a path through the grass of the field between their respective houses.

One evening, Brownie's family noticed that Brownie hadn't returned home. At first, they weren't too concerned because he had disappeared before. Assuming he was just out roaming, they didn't look for him. But Brownie didn't show up the next day and by the next week he was still missing.

Curiously, Spotty showed up at Brownie's house alone, barking, whining, and generally pestering Brownie's human family. Busy with their own lives, they just ignored the nervous little neighbor dog. Finally, one morning Spotty refused to take “no” for an answer. Ted, the father of the family with whom Brownie lived, was steadily harassed by the furious, adamant little dog. Spotty followed him about, barking insistently, then darting toward the empty lot and back as if to say, “Follow me! It's urgent!”

Ted followed the frantic Spotty across the empty lot as Spotty paused to race back and bark encouragingly. The little dog led the man under a fence, past clumps of trees, to a desolate spot a half mile from the house. There Ted found his beloved Brownie alive, one of his hind legs crushed in a steel leghold trap. Horrified, Ted now wished he'd taken Spotty's earlier appeals seriously.

Then Ted noticed something quite remarkable.

Spotty had done more than simply lead Brownie's human to his trapped friend. In a circle around the injured dog, Ted found an array of bones and table scraps—which were later identified as the remains of every meal Spotty had been fed that week!

Spotty had been visiting Brownie regularly, in a single-minded quest to keep his friend alive by sacrificing his own comfort. Spotty had evidently stayed with Brownie to protect him from predators, snuggling with him at night to keep him warm and nuzzling him to keep his spirits up.

Brownie's leg was treated by a veterinarian and he recovered. For many years thereafter the two families watched the faithful friends frolicking and chasing each other down that well-worn path between their houses.

Scarlett, an ordinary-looking shorthaired cat, was not really noticed at first in the confusion that surrounded the burning building where she had been living with her small kittens. But Scarlett proved to be a devoted mother and a hero.

Overcoming every animal's innate fear of fire, she forced herself to go back into the roaring flames and billowing poisonous smoke of the building and retrieve each of her precious kittens. Five times Scarlett returned to the ferocious heart of the blaze to get each of her babies out. Scarlett's fur was singed off and her eyes seared shut by the flames, and yet she somehow managed to carry each tiny kitten to safety across the street. There she was observed taking a head count by touch because she could no longer see them.

Firemen finally found her and realized what had happened. Much of her body had been burned in the course of getting her kittens out. She was taken to the local animal shelter and separated from her kittens because she could not feed them due to her burns. After a local TV station featured her tale of heroism, the shelter received over 10,000 calls from people wanting to adopt her. A week later, she was reintroduced to her kittens and the joyful reunion was broadcast across the nation. Scarlett had her kittens back at last and she licked each youngster in turn, purring happily. One of her fireman rescuers who had dropped by to visit said, “Just to see her do that same head count almost made me cry.”

Because mother dolphins nurse their young for so long—eighteen months or about as long as human mothers nurse—the mother-child bond is very strong. Many times a dolphin will not desert another dolphin who is in trouble even if it costs them their own life. When infant dolphins are trapped in tuna nets, their mothers will try desperately to join them. Then the mothers will cuddle close to their babies and sing to them as they both drown. The tuna industry's official acknowledgment of this remarkable phenomenon is that most of the dolphins killed are mothers and infants. Although they are an improvement, even the “dolphin-safe” nets used to catch tuna continue to kill dolphins.

Aman raised a pet deer that, when young, was so tame it even liked to ride in the car with him like a dog. During the hunting season they would pass other cars full of hunters whose startled gazes the deer would placidly return.

The same deer, when it was a bit older, once came upon a lost deer hunter in the woods. The hunter, completely disoriented, was startled by the deer's friendliness—it trotted right up to him, obviously tame. Figuring he had nothing to lose, the hunter decided to follow the deer. Sure enough, the deer led the man back to his house where someone opened the door. The deer casually walked into the house.

The deer's human guardian gave directions to the now thoroughly abashed hunter, while the deer that had guided him to safety fell asleep on the couch.

“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between dog and man.”

—Mark Twain

Atwelve-year-old boy, Rheal Guindon, had gone on a fishing trip with his parents to Ontario, Canada, where they enjoyed camping out. The lake was in a remote area and there was no one else around. The nearest town was miles away.

One day, Rheal stayed on shore while his parents took a boat out on the lake to catch some fish. As he watched from the shore, his parents' boat suddenly overturned. They struggled in the water and before their son's eyes began to drown. He had no idea how to help them and could only watch helplessly, shouting desperately from the shore. Then their frantic cries ceased and all was silent.

Grieving, the boy numbly tried to walk to the safety of a distant town but the sun was setting. Terrified, he realized he had to face a night alone in the woods. As night fell, he lay down on the freezing earth, weeping and shivering.

Suddenly, as if an angel had heard his cries, he felt a furry body press against him. Rheal couldn't tell what it was, perhaps a dog, but just being next to something warm and breathing helped to ease his pain. He put his arm around the animal and, consoling himself in its warmth and closeness, fell asleep.

In the morning, he woke up to find three wild beavers huddled against him and across his body. They had kept him from freezing to death during the night when the temperature had fallen below zero.

Saint Bernards have been performing rescue work for at least three centuries and have saved thousands of lives. They have wide, almost weblike toes that enable them to walk on snowdrifts up to sixty feet deep. Saint Bernard dogs often travel in packs when doing their rescue work. When they find a fallen traveler, two dogs will lie down, one on either side of the traveler's body to warm him while a third licks his face to awaken him. A fourth dog goes for help to guide a rescue party to the location.

One day a half-starved puppy wandered through the gates of the maximum security prison Sing Sing. He was so undernourished that the fur hung off his body; he looked as if he were wearing poor and ill-fitting clothing. Named “Rags” because of his appearance, he was an instant hit with the inmates, who saved food from their meager meals for him. The men of Sing Sing often had no friends or family who cared to write to them, and they felt abandoned and alone. Rags became a true friend to many, and he loved all of the prisoners. And yet, Rags was aloof to the warden and his family, and he growled at all the guards. He would exercise with the prisoners, and when they had softball games, Rags would bark madly and run around the field with glee.

Every night Rags would leave the prison and return in the morning. Every night but one. This time Rags followed a prisoner to his cell and kept vigil there all night. The next morning, the prisoner confessed to his fellow inmates; “That dog just saved my life.” For when his parole had been denied, the man had decided to end his life. Yet every time he's move to wind the bedsheets to hang himself, Rags would softly growl outside his cell. Knowing that if he continued, Rags would bark and alert the guards, the prisoner was unable to act on his plan. At last he realized that there was someone who really cared if he lived or died—Rags. Secure in this knowledge, he had gratefully chosen to live.

“I refuse to eat animals because I cannot nourish myself by the sufferings and by the death of other creatures. I refuse to do so, because I suffered so painfully myself that I can feel the pains of others by recalling my own sufferings.”

—German pacifist Edgar Kupfer, imprisoned by the Nazis for his beliefs, writing secretly from his hospital bed in Dachau

Toto was a tame chimpanzee and longtime companion of Mr. Cherry Kearton. When Cherry fell desperately ill with malaria, Toto sat up with him day and night. As Cherry grew weaker, Toto learned to bring a 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 have also been observed coming to the aid of a comrade shot by a hunter, despite their fear of gunshots. The other elephants work in concert to raise their wounded companion to walk again. They do this by pressing on either side of the injured elephant and walking, trying to carry their friend between their gigantic bodies. Elephants have also been seen sticking grass in the mouths of their injured friends in an attempt to feed them, to give them strength.

Even a duck can be a hero. On November 27, 1944, the Allies launched an air attack against Freiburg, Germany. Unfortunately, the town's air-raid sirens weren't working.

The local inhabitants would not have had a chance for survival were it not for a vocal duck who lived in Freiburg's main park. The residents had noticed that just before an air raid, animals would sometimes begin vocalizing hysterically, as if they somehow sensed the distant bombers long before the warning system. On this occasion, although the sirens failed, the duck's frenzied squawking drove many hundreds of people into the air-raid shelters.

Unfortunately, the duck was killed in the bombing, but after the war, when Freiburg was rebuilt, the survivors commemorated their web-footed savior with a monument in the new park.

Many animals—from robins and thrushes to vervet monkeys—utter a piercing warning cry when a predator approaches. The shriek enables others of its kind to hide or flee, even though it also attracts the predator's attention, sometimes resulting in the sentinel's death.

While researching animal behavior for her book Mongoose Watch, British ethologist Anne Rasa was surprised to discover that when a dwarf mongoose became ill with chronic kidney disease, he was treated differently by his peers.

The other mongooses permitted the ill animal to eat much earlier than he normally would have, considering his rank in the mongoose social order. To Rasa's astonishment, the sick mongoose was even allowed to nibble on the same piece of food that the dominant male was eating—something that would never occur normally.

When the ill mongoose lost his ability to climb, the entire group of mongooses gave up their decided preference for sleeping on elevated objects such as boxes. Instead, they all opted to sleep on the floor with their sick friend.

A mongoose had injured its front paw so that it could no longer capture food. While they did not overtly bring food to her, the other mongooses, upon seeing her plight, started to forage for food near her. They did not offer her food, as this was against mongoose etiquette, but made sure they were close to her so when she asked they could share.

During the Civil War, an eagle, stolen from his nest while still a baby, was sold to a man who joined the Union army and went to fight against the Confederates. Growing up with the army, the young eagle soon became their mascot. Possibly because of his beaky profile, the troops named him “Old Abe” after their hero Abraham Lincoln.

Old Abe soon proved his loyalty. Once, as his platoon was about to enter a wood, the eagle began swooping over their heads so crazily that their commander called a halt. When they tried to resume their advance, he began flying into the faces of the men on the front line. Spooked, the soldiers decided to fire a few rounds into the woods. Instantly, Rebel troops, lying in wait, fired back and the Union troops took cover. Were it not for Old Abe's warning, the Union soldiers would have walked into a trap and been massacred.

Thereafter, whenever his regiment fought, Old Abe appeared and his troops were always victorious. The eagle became such a symbol that Confederate General Major Sterling Price once remarked that he would “rather kill or capture the eagle than take a whole brigade.”

Finally old Abe was wounded and the “Yankee Buzzard,” as the Confederates called him, became part of the North's public relations campaign. Old Abe traveled around the United States and was a featured attraction at parades and patriotic events. When his local regiment returned home to Wisconsin after the war, a banquet was held in the State Capitol building with Old Abe as the guest of honor.

For the last fifteen years of his life, Old Abe lived in a cage in the Capitol Building of Madison, Wisconsin. One day, a fire broke out in the building and he roused the watchman by banging his tin cup against his cage. Again Abe had been a hero. Although his warning was enough to save the building, the watchman forgot the bird in the excitement of the fire and Old Abe died of smoke inhalation.

“I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of the whole human being.”

—Abraham Lincoln

“I wish people would realize that animals are totally dependent on us, helpless, like children; a trust that is put upon us.”

—James Herriot

The dogs of the neighborhood were apparently not on guard duty this particular day. Indeed, the one animal that was making a fuss about whatever was going on across the street was a cat named Emily.

She paced back and forth in the front room window, growling ominously to signal that something, in her opinion, was very wrong. Drawn by her vocalizations, Emily's family looked across the city street just in time to see a burglar climbing in a neighbor's window. Emily's family alerted the police, the man was apprehended, and all was well.

When he dined, Winston Churchill would have his servants bring his cat Jock to the table to share dinner. Churchill considered Jock one of his more agreeable dining companions.

While collecting specimens of birds, a naturalist named George Romanes shot a tern, which fell into the sea. At once, other terns gathered around the fallen bird, “manifesting much apparent solicitude, as terns and gulls always do under such circumstances.”

The wounded bird began drifting toward the shore accompanied by his companions. Edward walked towards the downed bird to collect it. To his utter shock, two of the attendant terns grasped the wounded bird, one tern holding each wing, and lifted him out of the water. The two terns began to carry the injured bird towards the sea. They carried him about seven yards and carefully set him down again, where he was then taken up again by a fresh pair of birds and carried a little farther. In this way, the terns continued to carry the injured bird alternately, until they had brought him to a sea rock at some distance from the human attacker.

Shaking his head, the man started toward the bird again with the intention of capturing it. To his surprise, a great swarm of birds descended in front of him, obstructing his path. As he pushed through the birds, getting closer to the rock, he watched as two birds again took hold of the wounded bird's wings and carried him out to sea, far beyond the man's reach.

“This, had I been so inclined,” Romanes wrote, “I could no doubt have prevented. Under the circumstances, however, my feelings would not permit me; and I willingly allowed them to perform an act of mercy which man himself need not be ashamed to imitate.”

“The animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”

—Henry Beston