Columnists
Do some animals celebrate Mothers’ Day?
By Henry H. Bucher, Jr., Faculty Emeritus in Humanities, Austin College
Apr 21, 2024
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Henry H. Bucher, Jr.
In one area of rural India, elephants and the local people were like family. But one day, a man noticed one elephant rushing toward him raising immediate concern. She quickly stopped in front of him and used her trunk to gently grab him under his arms and lift him. She hastened back to where she had come and lowered the man next to a pit where her infant elephant was trapped. The man easily got into the pit and rescued the enfant cub.

 

Recently, a wolf entered a hospital with her cub in her mouth. Hospital personnel panicked, but one nurse noticed that the cub needed care, called a veterinarian., and noticed that the wolf left her cub and seemed to be asking the nurse to follow her to a wooded area behind the hospital where she went to a dry well where five other cubs were trapped and soon cured by the veterinarian and the nurse. The wolf was of both wolf and canine descent. She and her six cubs still recognize and admire the nurse.

 

We seldom hear about this kind of kindness between humans and animals. Recently, I noticed a photo of a man being hugged by a large bear in a river with water up to their waists. The man had rescued her calf from drowning and the mother was embracing the man with a literal “bear-hug” thank you.

 

Many more examples exist showing how humans and animals can help each other and live in harmony. One example which I observed in Gabon* showed that the opposite can be true in some situations. Some US men who worked in our embassy in Libreville(the capitol) went on a hunting trip in the nearby rainforest. They shot and killed a large elephant but were shocked and sorry to discover that she was the mother of a helpless calf. They brought the calf back to Libreville and desperately tried to find the proper nourishment. They found others in our embassy who helped find a recipe that matched a mother elephant’s milk. As hard as they tied to keep the elephant calf alive, it died after a few days.

 

What the baby calf needed the most was not synthetic milk—it needed its mother!

 

Our relationship to animals is not fully understood. Some domesticated animals need humans to survive; but humans need some wild animals for our survival: in medicine, science, and much more. This mutual need for survival is being understood more than ever as we approach the predicted ecological disasters ahead.

 

Texoma Annual Earth Say is April 20.

 

*I was doing research (historical) in 1973. Gabon is in Equatorial West Africa.

Thanks to Wikipedia for some of the data used for this op-ed.