Mzee to the rescue
January 24, 2005 Edition 1
Jon Penn
Which tsunami survival story is most vivid in your memory? There was the man who was adrift on a tree for eight days and lived on coconuts and rainwater before he was picked up by a ship in the Indian Ocean.
There was a 4-month-old baby girl who was held aloft by her dad as the floodwaters devastated a fishing village called Nam Kaem.
Miraculously, both lived. And in Sri Lanka, another dad saved his
12-year-old son by pushing him into a tree... seconds before the father was swept away to his death.
But, perhaps, none of those quite matches the drama of another survival story on our doorstep. I had forgotten about it until I saw it revisited this week in an overseas paper.
Remember the Mozambique flash floods five years ago? One woman who lived through them was Sophia Pedro, who clung to a tree for four days, and then gave birth to a baby girl. An hour later she, baby Rositha and three other family members were rescued by a South African helicopter.
That takes some beating for human drama.
But a few animal survival stories have been filtering through in the wake of the tsunami disaster, and several readers have sent me one that it is quite touching.
Reader Lyrica Beavan writes: "The story and pictures are just so special, I felt I simply had to forward them." The report says:
A baby hippopotamus, swept into the Indian Ocean by the tsunami, is finally coming out of his shell thanks to the love of a 120-year-old tortoise.
Owen, a 300kg, 1-year-old hippo, was swept down the Sabaki River into the ocean and then back to shore when the giant waves struck the Kenyan coast.
The dehydrated hippo was found by wildlife rangers and taken to the Haller Park animal facility in the port city of Mombasa.
Pining for his lost mother, Owen quickly befriended a giant male Aldabran tortoise named Mzee - Swahili for "old man".
"When we released Owen into the enclosure, he lumbered to the tortoise, which has a dark grey colour similar to grown-up hippos," Sabine Baer, Rehabilitation and Ecosystems Manager at the park, said. Haller Park ecologist Paula Kahumbu said the pair were now inseparable.
"They swim, eat and sleep together," the ecologist said.
"The hippo follows the tortoise exactly the way it follows its mother. If somebody approaches the tortoise, the hippo becomes aggressive, as if protecting its biological mother."
"The hippo was left at a very tender age. Hippos are social animals that like to stay with their mothers for four years."
She said the hippo's chances of survival in another herd were very slim, predicting that a dominant male would have killed him.
Officials are hopeful Owen will befriend a female hippo called Cleo, also a resident at the park.
Figure it out
Statistical sceptic Stan Thompson read the report in last Thursday's Mercury about deadly medical mistakes and says there are some other figures that we should all know: "The number of physicians in America is 700 000. Accidental deaths caused by physicians are 120 000 a year, which is 0.171 a physician.
"The number of gun owners in America is 80 million. The number of accidental gun deaths a year, all age groups, is 1 500, which is .000188 a gun owner.
"Statistically, doctors are approximately 9 000 times more dangerous than gun owners. And not everyone has a gun, but almost everyone has at least one doctor.
"Please alert your friends to this alarming threat. We must ban doctors before this gets completely out of hand!
"Out of concern for the public at large, I have withheld the statistics on lawyers for fear the shock would cause people to panic and seek medical attention."
Tailpiece
Wife: "I had such a strange dream. I was in this big shop where they sold husbands, and there were some beautiful ones there - tall, dark, handsome, intelligent, all on different counters."
Husband: "Did you see one like me?"
Wife: "Yip, it was on a counter marked Oddments, Mis-shaped, Sub-standard, Second-hand, Imperfect and Shop-soiled."
The bottom line
Every child should have a dog, and every child who has a dog should have a mother, so that the dog can be fed regularly.
