Videos of unlikely animal friendships are popular on social media. Scientists are now considering how to define such relationships and why they are so fascinating to us.
A goat frolics with a baby rhinoceros. A pig nestles up to a house cat. A rat snake makes nice with the dwarf hamster originally intended as its lunch.
Few things seem to capture the public imagination more reliably than friendly interactions between different species — a fact not lost on Anheuser-Busch, which during Sunday’s Super Bowl will offer a sequel to “Puppy Love,” its wildly popular 2014 Budweiser commercial about friendship between a Clydesdale and a yellow Labrador puppy. The earlier Super Bowl spot has drawn more than 55 million views on YouTube.
Videos of unlikely animal pairs romping or snuggling have become so common that they are piquing the interest of some scientists, who say they invite more systematic study. Among other things, researchers say, the alliances could add to an understanding of how species communicate, what propels certain animals to connect across species lines and the degree to which some animals can adopt the behaviors of other species.
“There’s no question that studying these relationships can give you some insight into the factors that go into normal relationships,” said Gordon Burghardt, a professor in the departments of psychology and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee, who added that one video he liked to show students was of a small and persistent tortoise tussling over a ball with a Jack Russell terrier.
“Even one example raises the possibility that there’s something interesting going on here,” Dr. Burghardt said.
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Communing between species, researchers said, can inspire speculation not just about the animals but about the humans that are so fascinated by them.
Dr. Bekoff, for example, said that videos of interspecies interactions offer a way for people to connect with a natural world from which they feel increasingly detached.
“People are really craving to be ‘re-wilded,’ ” he said. “They’re craving to be reconnected to nature, and it’s these odd examples that are really seductive.”
Others see in the meeting of dog and doe, goat and rhino, tiger and bear, an ideal of peaceful connection that humans too often find elusive.
At Haller Park in Kenya — where Mzee, a 130-year-old tortoise, tends to Owen, an orphaned baby hippo — a man visiting the park with his child gazed at the unlikely couple and remarked, during a documentary about the pair, “If two very different creatures get along like this, then why cannot Iraqis and the British, Americans, Palestinians, the Israelis not get on?”
Or as Dr. Haraway, put it: “In a situation in which terrorism is cultivated from every angle and we are taught to fear practically everything, why should anybody be surprised that there’s a profound desire for the pleasures of the peaceable kingdom?”
