Meet Barclays the golden retriever and his best friend, Rudy, a Pekin duck.
Their one-of-a-kind friendship started off a little rocky when Rudy, the alpha duck of his group, would regularly chase Barclay away from invading his tasty duck chow.
Eventually, after many visits to the duck coop for the chow, the pair clicked. Pam Ishiguro who is Barclay and Rudy’s human explains:
“When they are together, somebody is always chasing or jumping on someone else, but when they are apart, they’re always calling for each other.”
“[Barclay] likes to drink their bath water and, if he happens to be stealthy enough, he loves to sniff a little duck butt.”
“Now Rudy has to ‘claim’ Barclay every once in a while by climbing on top of him. Barclay doesn’t seem to mind terribly because that gives him the opportunity to sniff Rudy’s butt – win-win!”
“Rudy and Barclay need each other – I think that’s why they have such a strong bond, they’re like brothers from another mother.”
“No one else will play with them, so lucky for them, they found each other and formed this unusual friendship.” (h/t)
“Barclay was afraid of the ducks when they were ducklings. We even tried showing the ducklings to him, but he wouldn’t even look in their direction. I think he had always been scared of the ducks until just recently.”
“It’s possible that he learned that behaviour from watching our other dog, Izzy, who actually stalked the ducklings.”
“We were afraid that Izzy might try to eat one of them so we were always correcting Izzy’s behaviour when he would lurk in the corners and Barclay must have picked up on it.”
“That all changed when the ducklings grew up and became larger in size than Izzy. It only took one time for the ducks to chase Izzy to get the message across. Now Izzy is pretty well afraid of the ducks.”
See them hanging together in this video:
We love to see it!
Image credits: Pam Ishiguro, Bancroft Images
