Baboon adopts bush baby

A seven-months-old yellow baboon (Papio cynocephalus) drinks milk as it plays with a Galagos (L) also known as a bushbaby at the Animal Orphanage in the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) headquarters in Nairobi, June 10, 2011. PHOTO: REUTERS

NAIROBI: Clinging to the under-belly of a baboon, Gakii, a 3-month-old orphaned bush baby has plumped for an unlikely surrogate-mother.

In the grounds of the Nairobi Animal Orphanage, the duo cavort around in each others’ arms, drink milk out of the same bowl and poke mischievously at a Reuters television camera.

“This is not normal. It has not happened here and I guess it has not happened anywhere else,” said Edward Kariuki, a warden at the animal home in the Kenyan capital.

Kenya, however, has a history of unlikely cases of fostering among orphaned animals.

In 2004, a giant tortoise adopted and became an inseparable friend to a baby hippo washed out to sea off the coast of Kenya in the aftermath of the southeast Asia Tsunami. The pair became an Internet sensation.

Two years earlier, a full-grown lioness baffled experts in the east African country when she adopted a baby oryx — a kind of antelope normally deemed a tasty morsel by the predators