Cat Ballyhoo

From the This Does Not Happen Often file: In Gir National Park, in India, there was an abandoned baby leopard running around with no family, no nothin'. 

The animal kingdom often has admirable ways of dealing with sadness like this.  Stotra Chakrabarti, an animal behaviorist, has spent the last seven years keeping an eye on the lions at the park, but this was a new one on him:  One of the park’s mama lionesses took in the baby leopard to raise as her own.

The ecology journal Ecosphere, in this month's issue, carried Chakrabarti's account of the relationship between mama lion and baby leopard. It's called cross-species adoption.

Researchers have been able to see the lioness nurture and protect the little leopard while at the same time caring for her own two cubs. She hunts, brings back meat, and distributes it to her kids, much as we pick up a pizza for dinner. That's nurturing. And she protects the leopard from other lions in the area. That's protection. Just as good mothers do everywhere.

And I know this doesn't happen all the time among the two-legged population, but the mama's own two cubs are getting along with the leopard, who cannot change his spots, after all. And did you know that expression didn't just start a couple of years ago? It goes back to the Old Testament, where the prophet Jeremiah said, "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard its spots?”

I really do go off on tangents.  Anyhow, Chakrabarti said all three cubs played very nicely and, “It looked like two big cubs and one tiny runt of the litter.”

This is considered an anomaly in the animal world, because normally the species are too busy fighting over land and food to get along like this. 

And from that example, all of mankind can learn something and try to follow it. If you want to get along with certain people, give them a baby leopard.