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The best unlikely animal friends stories are the ones where predators and their prey ignore the call of nature and become buddies instead. I could fill this blog with such stories, or even just animal friendship stories, but I try to space it out. I couldn’t ignore this 2006 tale from Japan, however, that garnered international attention. BBC News has the details.
Aochan is a two-year-old rat snake residing at the Mutsugoro Okoku zoo in Tokyo. He’s a bit of a picky eater; he rejected the frozen rats presented to him by the zookeepers. So instead, in the fall of 2005, they offered him a live hamster as a meal. But Aochan, in defiance of his natural inclinations, refused to eat the hamster as well.
Aochan and his little friend began cohabitating in the snake’s cage in the zoo. While they might not demonstrate the clear friendship and dedication that some other famous unlikely pairs might (I’m thinking of still my favorite animal friendship story, the dog and elephant), the pair successfully cohabitated for months until the story made international news in the winter of 2006. There has been no indication in the intervening years that one day Aochan changed his mind and ate his friend.
The most stunning part of the friendship between Aochan and hamster Gohan (the Japanese word for “meal,” a joke by the zookeepers) is to watch the ease they have around each other. Gohan could clamber over Aochan like the snake was furniture, even sleeping while reclined on top of Aochan’s coiled body. You can see footage of Aochan and Gohan going about their daily business on YouTube here.
For some reason pictures from this story started making the rounds on animal blogs again this spring, despite the fact that there hasn’t been any new information (at least that I can find) about the pair. It’s a good thing, otherwise I never would have heard about the surprising friendship between a hamster and a snake.
What’s most fascinating to me about this story is just how unusual it is, even among other reports of relationships between predators and prey. Usually you have two animals that, though you don’t really expect them to get along, aren’t necessarily obvious “eater” and “food” (like the dog and capybara).
Or, when you see a tiger take care of baby pigs, for example (another recent friendship story) there’s a maternal aspect in play. It’s a female predator that finds abandoned baby prey and takes them on as her own – either because she recently lost or finished raising young of her own, or just because her maternal instinct is that strong. The predator actually begins raising the prey, although it’s a situation that may get hairy once the babies start growing.
Neither of these instances apply to Gohan and Aochan. They’re definitely natural predator and prey (Gohan was actually given to Aochan as a meal, for goodness sake), but Aochan (although I don’t actually know its sex) wasn’t obviously trying to raise a baby hamster either. It just makes their friendship that much more special.
I haven’t seen any updates on Gohan and Aochan’s story since 2006. I like to believe that means that it didn’t end in tragedy, or at least not the kind of tragedy that involved Aochan finally changing its mind about having that hamster for dinner. Even if they’re no longer together, I like to think that they lived as friends until the end.
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*(This image by Carolyn Coles is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.)
