Hi, all, I just caught most of a story on CNN (some of you may have seen it too). For some reason (it was the beginning of the story that I missed), a lioness "adopted" a baby ibex, something it would more normally have had for lunch. But rather than eating it, the lioness groomed it, licked it -- basically treating it like a lion cub. (I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that the lioness had just lost its own cub, hence the unusual behavior). She even allowed the little buck to nurse from its real mother, whom the lioness also left in peace. This went on for two weeks, and the game preserve got lots of attention from the locals and various news organization because of the phenomenon. Some people, perhaps looking for a deeper meaning, thought the "miracle" was a message from God about peace.
The sad ending was that after two weeks, when the ibex and both its "mothers" were not close enough to protect it, *another* lioness attacked the baby ibex and, or course, ate it. There have been other stories, of course, about mothers taking on other species as their progeny, nursing them and such (there was a particularly amusing one shown on American Public television but originating from Great Britain, in which a man found an orphaned squirrel pup [kit? -- not sure] and gave it to his cat, who had a ltter of three or four kittens, and she accepted the baby squirrel as her own -- and it lived to survive and be released into the wild, with some help from the man, who was a naturalist, and had to teach it how to be a squirrel; the fun parts were the kittens and baby squirrel's play, since the baby squirrel had climbing abilities that left its "sibling" kittens clearly puzzled...), but I thought this one was particularly unusual. peace, Walt
