When love and hate collide

It was one of those days where the blip was in the bag before 8am. Was it too good to be true? Yes, yes it was. I rather stupidly deleted the wrong image by accident. Never fear! Use a file recovery program... alas image had been corrupted and was virtually useless... sigh ....

Thankfully there's my bears :) And a lovely story to go with this image. This is Vandrew and Sharky in mid play (mouthing is a big part of bear social play). Today is the first time I've ever seen them play together. The bear workers reported them starting to play a couple of weeks ago but none of us had caught them in the act. This was exciting news as things havn't always been so rosy for these two. We tried to integrate them together a year or so ago as they had shown positive interactions, playing through the den bars together. Unfortunately when we opened the joining den slide, Sharky was just too young and dominant and it was all a bit too much for Vandrew - the interactions were extremely aggressive and the friendship was over.

Now the love seems to be back and all past wrongs forgotten :) I'm so glad I was able to witness such a special moment with two of my favourite bears!