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Remember Mougli from Jungle Book
and Tarzan, your favourite TV shows which you would have never
missed as kids? I am sure these names bring a smile to many of our
faces. Apart from Mougli’s boomerang skills and Tarzan’s amazing
swings and leaps from treetops and branches, there does lay a
remarkable unusual quality of animals that were exhibited in these
productions. They were the unusual motherly instincts by ‘Raksha’,
the wolf, toward Mougli in Jungle Book and ‘Kala’, the chimpanzee in
Tarzan.
This motherly instinct, though not certified
‘common’ by some veterinarians, has become quite natural for certain
animals to breed and nurse a cub or a calf of another species. It
has been in the history of certain birds to hatch another bird’s
eggs (like our good old crow and koel story) and tend the little one
only to realise that it was not its offspring! But the recent years
witnessed a lot of mammals with unusual motherly instinct. This news
is no longer received with awe or shock these days.
Recently, a Thai zoo observed an incident of a lion cub being fed by
a trained dog. When asked about these instincts, Dr Suresh, a
veterinary doctor with the Government Veterinary Hospital, said
these instincts were more influenced by the environment in which the
animals grow. “If the animals are brought up in an environment of
mutual sharing and understanding, they tend to have such instincts
toward an offspring of other species,” he says.
Another factor might be brought by the humans itself. “In certain
cases, a dog which has lost its pup is made to feed an orphaned
kitten. It’s done by taking the mucous of the dog from its personal
part and smearing it on the kittens face so that the kitten feels
secure about the dog as is its mother and the dog that the kitten is
its pup,” he adds.
In either case, both the animals are not aware of the fact that they
do not belong to each other’s species. In case the mother animal is
made to feed the pup or cub, then it’s taken away from the cub after
some time as it starts fitting into its original diet and the cub
also tends to forget the feeder.
The big cat, tigress, cannot identify its own cubs to differentiate
it from the other cubs of the cat family. This usually leaves the
tigress feeding other cubs apart from its own. But in a secured
setting, like a home or a sanctuary, the ‘motherly instincts are
attributed to the environment in which they grow up and also to some
extent human compulsion.
“It is very rare that the mammals breed the cub of another species
without sharing a common breeder (the owner) or under manmade
conditions,” says Dr Suresh. Many researchers are still researching
upon these mannerisms of certain mammals. A tiger cub being brought
up by a bear, or a kitten by a dog, in which the animals are
actually sensitive to each other’s presence, is believed to be a
distinctive instinct to certain animals.
Animal lover V Siddharth says, “I have witnessed animals being
friendly with each other, especially if they belong to the same
class. They might become friendly if one of them rescues the other
from a difficult situation.”
There was an incident in the city where a deer helped another
herbivore out of danger and they both are believed to share a unique
friendship even now. So, maybe there is a ‘mother instinct’ in every
living being.
Aishwarya Srinivasan
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