“It doesn’t surprise me at all that Koda was trying to make a new friend.”
When Rachel Howatt’s beloved husky Koda went missing in late December, she spent hours searching the woods near her home to no avail. But, a few days later, the dependable pup appeared back at home in Manitoba, Ontario, Canada, as if nothing had happened.
“We definitely looked for her, but she just returned,” Howatt told us. “She’s very smart, so I had no doubt she’d find her way home.”
It wasn’t until a few days later that Howatt remembered to ask her neighbor, who has a trail camera in the woods near their house, if Koda had been spotted at all. Koda had indeed been captured on camera — and she wasn’t alone.
A male deer was huddled up next to her, eating and napping with her.
Koda spends the entire evening playing with and sitting next to the buck, who doesn’t seem bothered by the presence of a dog.
“It was quite something,” Howatt said. “Based on the time they spent on frame, it looked like they spent over 12 hours together. There’s also another photo where there’s two bucks in the picture with her.”
This isn’t the first time wild deer have come to befriend a wayward animal. Deer have been known to take in runaway cows and even cats as their own when they meet in the woods.
While Howatt will do her best to keep Koda from running off in the future, she has a feeling that the dog will want to go back out to the woods to reunite with her wild friend.
“Huskies have such a free spirit,” Howatt said. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that Koda was trying to make a new friend.”
Leave a Reply