I love you, Im an Otter. THE POWER OF ANIMAL LOVE


 The Power of Animal Love

Fri, Apr 2, 2010 by Andrew
The world can be a tough place. It’s full of social minefields, stranger danger and political discrimination. Considering the saturation of bad news, sometimes it’s easy to get bogged down in all the shit and forget the power of love, like the love between two otters, Daz and Chip.
Daz and Chip, who had been friends for 15 years, longer than an average otter is expected to live, died within one hour of one another earlier this week. Cause of death: heart attack. First one, then the other. Remarked handler Gail Sutton, “The bottom line is that when one of them had a heart attack, it just set the other one off and he followed through.” She went on, “The only consolation from this is that they both went together because if one had gone without the other, the remaining one would have been really lost.”  It’s a sweet story, and one that’s open to interpretation. Perhaps Daz and Chip, aged 19 and 16, respectively, were lovers. Perhaps they were simply best friends. Their details of their relationship really don’t matter, because Daz and Chip’s love transcends human description.
Daz and Chip remind me of another cute, cuddly duo: Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. In the years between 1966 and 1998, the men made 11 movies together, including The Odd Couple, Buddy Buddy, and the Grumpy Old Men movies. The men died almost exactly a year apart: first Matthau, on July 1, 2000, and then Lemmon, on June 27, 2001. They’re buried next to one another. Like Daz and Chip, many have commented that Lemmon couldn’t live without Matthau. They were best friends. So too were British married couple Ted and Mary Williams, who were “inseparable” for 74-years and died within three days of one another last month.
So, what does this all mean? No, it’s not about whether animals are gay. It’s about the tangible connection of love. Without one conductor, the other loses its charge. Little Daz and Chip couldn’t live apart, and, being about 100 in human years, died more or less together. That story, and the Matthau/Lemmon love, provides at least a glimpse at the gravity, the realness of love. Sure, sometimes love’s for the birds, but it’s also for the otters. No matter however lost or fleeting it may be, believing love actually exists, like a force, makes the world seem not so shitty.

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