The Dog and the Orangutan

I had to make an entry into the blog regarding this amazing story. There have been a few like it I've noticed where bonds between individuals of two different non-human species have formed. It's interesting in this video that it's an orangutan and a dog: the orangutan being human-like and the dog of course being one of our closest non-human companions. And so, it kind of makes sense.

At any rate, I was very moved by this story. There's another story that got me about an elephant and the dog who became great friends in the elephant sanctuary. Have you seen that one? Perhaps this is anthropomorphising in that it looks like these animals are "best friends", but it appears that they have truly chosen to spend time together in trust and play. What's also amazing to notice is these animals don't "speak" the way we do. They communicate without words. At the risk of sounding arrogant, this is remarkable. They don't have or need verbal language to communicate with each other.

We are noticing this with the horses. In my personal journey, I am learning to trust my intuition and my non-verbal abilities - which we all have - to receive and send messages, in other words, to communicate with the horses. It's going reasonably well but it has been a challenge to deal with the mental chatter and to trust what I'm "hearing".

Dogs are probably the masters of reading our non-verbal communication which is maybe what makes them good at these unusual interspecies friendships. Hard to say. In the book, Edgar Sawtelle, the author is truly gifted at describing in rich detail the dogs' experiences with humans, especially the dog named Almondine. Her main human is a young boy, Edgar, who is unable to speak. He can only sign and they get each other in ways that most of us only dream about. I'll write more about this later and perhaps include an exerpt as an example.

At any rate, enjoy the video!

http://www.wimp.com/orangutandog/