Jennifer S. Holland - Unlikely Loves: 43 Heartwarming True Stories from the Animal Kingdom

A fawn nuzzles a bunny friend in Montana.

As anyone who knows me well can attest, I love my animals. No doubt Im going to be one of those little old ladies with wild hair and a pickup full of dogs, maybe a cat or duck that follows me around. Perhaps a goat, too. Ive always wanted a goat. My eccentricities (read: no children, animals always underfoot, fur-covered sweat suit worn in public) will be a source of caring concern for my family and friends.

While writing the previous paragraph, I got up out of my chair three times. Once to let a dog out. Once to check on a small gecko with a bum foot. And a third time to let a dog in (not the same dog I just let out). When Im not out gallivanting around in search of stories, I do this all day between interviews, bouts of writing, and baskets of laundry. Its just part of loving the animals I keep.

I say loving because, for me, theres no word that describes it better. Love is no doubt different things to different people. To me, with regard to animals, its the tumbling energy I feel inside as I watch my dogs run around happily in the woods, the comfort I get from cuddling up with a warm cat as she stretches out a paw to touch my face, even the joy of glimpsing the ridiculous poses my geckos strike, hanging by one toe of those strange little feet. I love these critters. Ill always have animals in my life; they make my home a better, warmer, more affectionate place.

But when theres no human in the equation, is there love? I expect the title of this collection will make some animal behaviorists cringe. Of course love is a human term, describing human emotionfrom the frantic pulse of a crush to the warmth and ease of a marriage long-simmered. Maybe even more so than friendship, we cannot know whether other animals experience love the way we do. But I have no doubt that my pets can form deep attachments, can miss a partner when separated, and would grieve in some way if that partner died (heck, even birds like magpies have been shown to mourn).

Still, love is tough to define, even for us. I wouldnt claim to know whether the term applies directly to a cats or dogs or chickens affections, though as discussed with numerous experts in Unlikely Friendships, much of the circuitry that lets us love is present in other species. Less developed, perhaps, but its there. Evolution tends to reuse good bits and pieces, like the emotions that help us thrive and reproduce, rather than starting from scratch with each being. So the overlap between what we do and what other creatures do is considerable.

Time and again we read reports of animals driven to help ease anothers pain or protect another from danger. One story I came across while researching this volume was of a dog pulling his owner off the train tracks where shed collapsed; the dog was hit as a result (but survived, fortunately). Theres a well-watched video on YouTube of an orangutan saving a duckling from drowning. A female gorilla at a U.S. zoo famously grabbed up a child that had fallen into the pen, shielding him from the other apes until keepers could rescue him. And so on.

Intraspecies care (care of your own kind) is of course common, and makes utter sense evolutionarily speaking. Squirrels will attack crows feeding on familial roadkill or a dog threatening their young, and dolphins are reported to bite through harpoon lines to save their own. Primatologist Frans de Waal tells us in his book Good Natured that whales will put themselves between a hunters skiff and an injured whale (or even try to capsize the boat) so predictably that whalers take advantage of it. And theres a YouTube favorite showing a dog weaving in and out of speeding traffic as it drags its injured friend or relative from further dangera seemingly moral, even altruistic act (though as is typically the case with animal behavior, theres no consensus on how to define the deed). Finally, I must mention that my husband, as a child, discovered his pet raccoon whining over a hat made from a raccoon pelt. The animal was clearly distressed to find something so familiar yet so... dead.

I think my dogs would protect me if an intruder entered the house, but I cant deny that they probably love their squeaky toys as much as they love me. What I mean to them on a deeper level is a mystery. But thats okay. In fact, part of whats so amazing about love is how it perplexes us. Indeed, after an article came out in National Geographic back in 2006 examining the science behind lovewhat we can learn from MRI images of the madly in love brain, the chemical pathways of desire, the biological answer to why love fades with timeletters from readers poured in, expressing distress at the attempt to quantify and demystify our sweetest emotion.

All that said, here is a book about animals entitled Unlikely Loves, in which I present a batch of delightful stories of unexpected affection between nonpeople. (As in my earlier book, a few very special people-animal tales snuck into the mix, but the majority are about nonhuman creatures. Also as in the last book, a lot of dog stories made the cut; canines may just be the most empathetic animals out there.) The behaviors we see in these cases certainly resemble key characteristics of love in the human worldnever wanting to be apart, protecting another from insult or harm, watching over another during illness, providing motherly (or fatherly) care, and sometimes not letting go even when love goes unanswered. Im not trying to prove that Fred the dog truly loves Blanche the goose, or even that my dogs tail-wags and messy kisses mean anything more than hes hungry. But its fun to imagineand not an unreasonable notionthat theres more to it than that.