It reminds me of the scripture about the lion laying with the lamb. This was so very sweet. I checked it out with snoopes and it is true.
Here is the story.....
A hippo separated from his family has adopted a 120-year-old male tortoise as his mother.
For a baby hippopotamus, lost and far from home, the sight of a wrinkly, rotund old male tortoise appears to have posed the question: are you my mother?
Owen the hippo sought refuge behind the tortoise just after Christmas, and weeks later they are inseparable.
In the wild, hippos are sociable creatures who live in close-knit groups. But this bonding of mammal and reptile has surprised the experts.
The details of Owen's adventure are not entirely clear, but it seems to have begun when a group of hippos was swept into the open sea from the river where they lived.
The hippos made their way back home despite heavy seas caused by the earthquake and tsunami that hit the opposite side of the Indian Ocean near Indonesia on December 26. But Owen got separated.
Alone, he spent several days wallowing helplessly in the salt water before the Kenyan wildlife service and local fishermen wrapped him in a fishing net, tied him up and took him to the Haller wildlife park.
The capture and the noisy crowd that watched must have unnerved Owen. When he was set loose in the park outside Mombasa in an enclosure with two giant tortoises and some bushbucks, he bolted to the giant tortoise named Mzee, or Old Man, and hid.
"When he arrived, he was completely exhausted and stressed. He got up and started staggering around a bit and then he went straight for the tortoise. We never expected something like this," said Sabine Baer, rehabilitation and ecosystems manager at Lafarge Eco Systems, which runs the park. "After all that being chased around by humans and all the noise and hassle, he must have been looking for protection.
"A mammal with a mammal, yes it happens. But reptiles and mammals, we haven't seen this," she said. "We were all quite amazed to see how fast it happened."
Owen, thought to be about a year old, was only partially weaned and living on milk and grass when he was separated from his mother.
In the wild, hippo calves stay with their mothers until about 18 months of age, or until the next calf is born. Then they join a group of older calves.
Hippos often lie around in groups and rest their heads on one another.
Now Owen likes to rest his head on the giant tortoise instead. He licks Mzee, and has been seen to put his mouth gently around the tortoise's head in what Ms Baer said looks like a form of play. He spends most of the day in the mud pond with the tortoise.
"He walks behind the tortoise. He goes to sleep next to the tortoise," Ms Baer said. "And when you go too close to the tortoise, he chases you away and defends it as his mother," she said.
Hippos can live to about 60 years in captivity, and at 165 kilograms, Owen is capable of inflicting significant damage. But he can't go back to a group of wild hippos. The males are very territorial and would kill him, Ms Baer said.
He almost certainly would have died, too - from dehydration, exposure and hunger - had he remained in the sea, said Dr Zahoor Kashmiri, a Kenyan wildlife veterinarian who attended the calf after his capture. "Hippos are freshwater animals and their whole physiology is adapted to freshwater," he said.
As it was, the staff worried about Owen when he got to the wildlife park. He refused to eat for the first two days.
But the connection to Mzee the tortoise helped him adjust. Watching the tortoises eat, the calf realised that the strange, dry brown stuff was edible, even if it was very different from what he was used to.
"Now he's nice and round. You can see the change in colour. He's more of a brown-pink colour, you know, hippo colour," Ms Baer said.
While Owen is clearly attached to the tortoise, it's difficult to tell how much of the affection is reciprocated. Still, Mzee tolerates the hippo. But the time comes for all young hippos to leave their mothers - real or imagined.
Park staff are planning to separate Owen from Mzee. At some point, they will move him in with a lonely 12-year-old female named Cleo and hope that the two will breed.
Owen probably will have to be lured into a crate and hoisted by crane into his new enclosure. At first, Mzee will be moved with him, but the hope is that soon he'll forget his maternal figure.
"Then we hope that he will focus on Cleo," Ms Baer said.
