So, you may have heard one or more of these interesting (and uplifting) stories about animals who come to humans for help. I don’t mean pets because that’s completely normal and expected. I mean wild animals.
For example, here’s this fascinating story from Intisar Khanani:
And you should click through and read that, because it starts off with, well, someone rescued a baby crow, that’s nice, but it gets a lot more interesting (and uplifting) from there.
But there are lots of stories like this, featuring lots of different wild animals, and plenty of those stories are believable. For example:
Raven asks for help with porcupine quills.
In Nova Scotia in Canada, a common raven displays a truly impressive amount of intelligence. Perching on a residential fence, it squawked for over an hour to acquire the nearby humans’ attention. When the residents finally took notice, they went outside to investigate and discovered the raven had three porcupine quills embedded in the side of its face and one embedded in its wing. The woman went forward to touch the raven and surprisingly the bird stayed put on the fence post. It patiently sits on the fence while the women removes three quills from its face, squawking in pain each time a quill is removed.
Tangled swans ask a human for help.
Footage from the remarkable rescue shows the hapless pair of birds swimming in circles, evidently unable to extricate themselves from one another on their own. As two passersby approach, the swans shift direction, awkwardly paddling toward them on the riverbank. … And the guy untangled them and they swam away.
Here’s a story about elephants wounded by poisoned arrows who walked quite a distance to a wildlife rehab center. Apparently, this is pretty routine for elephants in the area.
“We are sure that Mwende’s father knew that if they returned to the stockades they would get the help and treatment they needed because this continuously happens with the injured bulls in the north; they all come to Ithumba when in need, understanding that there they can be helped,” DWSTÂ wrote.
Here’s a dolphin that needed help with fishing line. This is a video.
And so on. This phenomenon gave rise to a brief Tumblr thread that I think you will enjoy:
To wild animals, humans are fae.
[D]oes it ever strike you how weird it is that we’ve got a whole collection of prey species whose basic problem-solving script ends with the step “if all else fails, go bother one of the local apex predators and maybe they’ll fix the problem for no reason”?
Like yeah, technically [humans are] predators, and they get pretty screamy, especially if you try to take any of their stuff… but given the chance it seems like they’d rather help us out and sometimes they’ll just randomly give you food, so???
I mean, I guess in fairytales and myths we’ve got our fair share of stories about dangerous people/creatures who might well kill you or otherwise ruin your life, but to whom people nonetheless turn for help in desperate circumstances. So it’s not like the perspective is exactly a foreign thing to our own mindset, really… It’s just that, y’know, we can’t actually go make a deal with the faeries when there’s something we can’t figure out.
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