Kindness and cruelty aren't unique to the human branch of the animal kingdom. Science has this surreal story:
Sperm whales are fierce squid hunters, but they also have a softer side. In a serendipitous sighting in the North Atlantic, researchers have discovered a group of the cetaceans that seem to have taken in an adult bottlenose dolphin with a spinal malformation [...]
Although the dolphin seemed otherwise healthy, that probable birth defect could be the key to understanding its attachment to the sperm whale group. Very few predators stalk the Azorean waters, so they doubt that it needed the whales for protection. But they speculate that the malformation could have put the animal at a disadvantage among its own kind. Perhaps it couldn't keep up with the other dolphins or had a low social status.
"Sometimes some individuals can be picked on," Wilson says. "It might be that this individual didn't fit in, so to speak, with its original group." The dolphin was able to stay with the whales because they swim more slowly and always leave a "babysitter" near the surface with the calves while the other adults dive deep.
(h/t Marginal Revolution)
