A heartwarming animal saga

 

On a day when everybody's going to be blathering on about elections and voting and partisanship, I figured we could all do with something completely different.  Well, here it is!  From the Telegraph in London, UK:

Wrapped up against the gusting Scottish wind, a man is strolling slowly along the jagged shoreline with his lolloping puppy. Anyone passing on the road above would notice him bending over the water, pushing apart the thick brown fronds of rock weed – and then being taken aback to see the “pup” sinuously dive beneath the surface and emerge with a crab in its jaws.

“At a distance it’s easy to mistake Molly for a dog,” says Billy Mail. “Otters are so shy and elusive it just doesn’t seem plausible that one would be voluntarily going for a walk with a human in broad daylight.”

Implausible but obviously not impossible, which is why the remarkable relationship between Billy and Molly, the orphaned otter he rescued from certain death in the Shetland Islands, is so heartwarming.

. . .

Such is the emotional heft of the story that it caught the eye of an award-winning National Geographic photographer and cinematographer. The resulting documentary, Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story is set against the backdrop of wide skies, glittering sea and the austere, elemental beauty of the land.

. . .

“I was looking out the window and I saw this otter fishing in the sea,” says Billy. “I wondered how close I could get, so I hurried down to the pontoon while she was underwater, phone in hand, in case she came close enough. Then she popped up right in front of me and started to eat the crab she had caught. Then halfway through she turned and looked me straight in the eye.

“I immediately knew something was very badly wrong because there’s no way a healthy otter would remain so close. And then I saw how emaciated she was.”

Bedraggled and skinny, her bones jutting out, Molly was around nine months old and too young to fend for herself. It was clear she was orphaned – later the couple learned that a female otter had been found dead on the road some time earlier

Billy fed her fish, dropping haddock on the ground, which she seized and dragged away to eat. He made her a bed from coiled rope under an upturned boat, so she had somewhere dry to sleep.

There's more at the link.

I won't spoil the article by reproducing more of it here, but it goes into a lot more detail about how the bond was established between Billy and Molly, and how it's grown to where, today, he watches her raise her young, teaching them to play in the tiny house he built for her.  It's a heartwarming story.

I've embedded the documentary below.  If that doesn't work, or stops working, you can find it here on YouTube.

Much more entertaining than non-stop electioneering!

Peter