"It's a symbiotic relationship."

April 29, 2017 8:41 PM

A feisty duck has chosen a pretty unusual best friend - a loving golden retriever. Proud duck owner Pam Ishiguro has a flock of seven ducks but her four-year-old Pekin duck Rudy and golden retriever Barclay have formed the strongest bond. The Orange County-based mum said: “The animals are much like my two boys - they have a love-hate relationship. When they are together, somebody is always chasing or jumping on someone else, but when they are apart, they’re always calling for each other.”

posted by Johnny Wallflower (9 comments total)

ducks and dogs should not be having symbiotic relationships in the clinical sense of the term, something has gone seriously wrong
posted by clockzero at 9:18 PM on April 29, 2017 [4 favorites]

Mass hysteria! Human sacrifice!
posted by saulgoodman at 10:38 PM on April 29, 2017

This is very cute, but as a family member of a golden, I can't help but feel that duck is going to be retrieved one day.
posted by vanar sena at 1:06 AM on April 30, 2017 [11 favorites]

It appears from the video that Barclay the dog is tolerating the duck in the "good dog" sense the same as if he were balancing a treat on his nose.
posted by chasles at 6:28 AM on April 30, 2017

Geez, cynical crowd. People like to joke that even a good dog would eat its dead master like there's some kind of deep wisdom in unflinchingly recognizing the ruthless brutality of nature, but the evidence doesn't fully support that. There's ample evidence even animals have rudimentary expectations of altruistic reciprocity and are capable of overcoming their older, more survival oriented instinctual drives to form deeper bonds of affection that can cross even species boundaries. For every horror story about a cat lady who's beloved pets couldn't resist taking a nibble from their corpse when they died in isolation, there's dozens more of pets whose devotion and loyalty to their human companions went so far they lost the will to live after their human companions died. It's no more valid to focus only on those more grotesque examples that reinforce the conventional wisdom about nature's cruelty and indifference than it is to observe that gentler, more mutually beneficial and cooperative modes of behavior are perfectly "natural" outside the sphere of human society, too. The law of tooth and claw isn't law at all, it's just one set of possibilities with all kinds of other possibilities being just as easily found in evidence if you're not intent on precluding them to support a particular preferred way of seeing and thinking about nature, rather than more humbly accepting that it's really all still a mystery.
posted by saulgoodman at 8:21 AM on April 30, 2017 [14 favorites]

MetaFilter: rudimentary expectations of altruistic reciprocity
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:44 AM on April 30, 2017 [4 favorites]

I just want to know how her floors are so immaculate with two dogs and seven ducks!
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 9:16 AM on April 30, 2017 [6 favorites]

The law of tooth and claw isn't law at all, it's just one set of possibilities with all kinds of other possibilities being just as easily found in evidence

See also: pandas.
posted by fatehunter at 11:12 AM on April 30, 2017

Geez, cynical crowd. People like to joke that even a good dog would eat its dead master like there's some kind of deep wisdom in unflinchingly recognizing the ruthless brutality of nature, but the evidence doesn't fully support that.

Not fully, no. But enough that we are amused by the outlier exceptions such as this one, or that lion who made friends with a puppy.

I'm not trying to harsh anyone's mellow. It's just that to our golden, retrieving things that look approximately like birds is a primary activity that ranks alongside eating and sleeping in importance. Thankfully she hasn't managed an actual bird so far but she's a year old, she still has time.
posted by vanar sena at 11:25 PM on April 30, 2017