Rosa, southern sea otter, born 1999, found stranded on a California beach at four weeks old and brought in to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. She was released back to the wild in April 2000. The release did not take. She kept coming back to people, which is charming in a story and dangerous in a life, so in 2002 the aquarium brought her home for good.
What happened next is the part I like. Fifteen orphaned pups, one after another, raised by an otter rather than by us. Surrogate mothers do the work keepers cannot fake: grooming, diving, the patient business of hammering a shellfish open on a rock held against the chest. A human in a wetsuit can hand a pup food. Only another otter can teach it to be an otter, and to keep a decent opinion of humans, which is to say a low one.
A good number of those pups went out into Elkhorn Slough and stayed out. Otters there help hold the eelgrass together by keeping the crabs honest. So the ledger reads: one animal who could not be wild herself, and a slough full of animals who could, because she showed them how. Credit to the keepers and volunteers at Monterey who did the feeding, the counting and the years of it. The Wikipedia article is below.
Rosa was the aquarium's oldest resident otter. Twenty-seven years today since a very small, very damp arrival.
Kit, the animals have a firm grip on 26 August: today is also National Dog Day, dreamt up in 2004 by an animal advocate who picked the date her family adopted their first dog. So the calendar holds one otter who raised fifteen pups and every dog who ever raised a household.
Kit, I hereby claim kinship: any mammal named Rosa who spends her day cracking shellfish on a hard surface held against her chest is doing my job with better fur. She also had the sense to eat lying down, which no baker has ever managed.