BENGALURU: In the movie A Dog’s Purpose, Bailey the dog loves what he calls the ‘horse-dog’ which is really a donkey. The ‘horse-dog’ trots away from Bailey’s display of affection but animals can make friends across species. We talk to a few families who live with odd pairs of pets; they say the secret is to invest time and patience.
That famous idiom ‘fight like cats and dogs’ has it wrong, says Debadrita Jadhav, a resident of Kanakpura. They don’t always fight. Often they let each other be or they have hours of play.
She has been running a shelter Precious Paws Foundation for rescued and orphaned cats and dogs for the past five years. She brought home her first dog, a three-legged India, about five and a half years back. Later, she brought home an abandoned dog from Cubbon Park. All her cats are rescued too. You would think that animals who once had to fight for their every meal would be wary of making friends. But Debadrita disagrees.
“From the beginning I never faced any trouble introducing the cats to the dogs,” she says. “Owners should simply be careful and patient while handling them. You need to invest time in them. Pets quickly pick up the energy of people around them, so staying positive and calm helps.”
She makes it a point to keep only strays, to change people’s opinion about them. Her pets have even won awards — her Indie dog got the ‘Show Stopper’ title at the Great Indian Dog Show and her two-year-old Indian cat Pari won the ‘Best Cat’ title at an International Cat show. “It was a proud and special moment for me,” says Debadrita.
At a centre run by CUPA (Campus Unlimited Plus Action) in the Government Veterinary College campus in Hebbal, a dog and goat are great friends. Their minders say that they have very different personalities, so maybe opposites attract.
“There’s this goat which is about two years old and a dog which is four months old,” says a caretaker at the shelter. “The goat isn’t very fussy about food, it eats anything from leaves to fruit peels. The dog (an Indie) too is very playful but is a fussy eater. Surprisingly, they’re very good friends. They play together during the evenings and spend a lot of their time with each other everyday.”
This is a particularly heartwarming sight for the caretakers because the goat was brought in after it was wounded by a dog bite.
In the same shelter, there is another unlikely pair of friends — a cow and a German Shepherd called Julie. The cow was rescued when it was pregnant and it has a bad temper. “It hates people,” says the caretaker. “It is, however, very friendly with other animals and has a soft spot for the dog Julie.”
Does it matter than one of the pets lives in a waterbowl? Not according to Dr Savitha, a resident of Yelahanka. “My daughter takes care of our dog, Brownie, and my son cares for a pair of goldfishes,” she says. “Initially Brownie (a golden retriever) was curious about the fishes and would tap at their bowl, scaring them away... Now he leaves them be.” Savitha had a pair of Black Mollies before the goldfishes came in, and Brownie was used them. “When we got this pair of golden fish, the dog reacted differently... It could be the change in colour,” she says.