Had a person attempted to taste me so soon after we met, I would have been alarmed; but since Athena was an octopus, I was thrilled. Although we couldn’t have been more different — I, a terrestrial ve...
Always somewhere there is fire or smoke, insistent reminders of the greed consuming the world
I am still learning how to be a good creature. Though I try earnestly, I often fail. But I am having a great life trying...
Knowing someone who belongs to another species can enlarge your soul in surprising ways.
Water temperatures in this range do, in fact, cause physiological changes—one of which is known as the cold-shock response, a series of reflexes that begin immediately upon sudden cooling of the skin...
I often wish I could go back in time and tell my young, anxious self that my dreams weren't in vain and my sorrows weren't permanent. I can't do that, but I can do something better. I can tell you tha...
The emperor Caesar Augustus had a parakeet who greeted him daily, and after his victory over Mark Antony in Egypt in 29 B.C., he purchased a raven whose trainer had taught him to say Ave, Caesar Victo...
Unlike the supply of dogs, the supply of good names isn't limitless.
Volumes of history written in the ancient alphabet of G and C, A and T.
In his classic The Outermost House, American naturalist Henry Beston writes that animals are not brethren, they are not underlings but beings gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never...
Humans have always exalted dreams. Pindar of Thebes, the Greek lyric poet, suggested that the soul is more active while dreaming than while awake. He believed that during a dream, the awakened soul ma...
The relationship that Jane Goodall has with the chimpanzees of Gombe—and that Dian Fossey had with the mountain gorillas she studied, and Biruté Galdikas has with the wild orangutans of Tanjung Puting...
But I am also aware that in animals, as well as people, there is an inborn temperament, a way of seeing the world, that interacts with the environment, and that shapes personality. There’s nobody else...
Hormones and neurotransmitters, the chemicals associated with human desire, fear, love, joy, and sadness, are highly conserved across taxa, Jennifer said. This means that whether you’re a person or a...
There are some scientists who frown upon such practices, believing that nature should run its course, Jane wrote in an early chapter of The Chimpanzees of Gombe, a scholarly compilation of her first t...
The ocean, for me, is what LSD was to Timothy Leary. He claimed the hallucinogen is to reality what a microscope is to biology, affording a perception of reality that was not before accessible. Shaman...
But what is the soul? Some say it is the self, the I that inhabits the body; without the soul, the body is like a lightbulb with no electricity. But it is more than the engine of life, say others; it...
A lion is a mammal like us; an octopus is put together completely differently, with three hearts, a brain that wraps around its throat, and a covering of slime instead of hair. Even their blood is a d...
The word compassion means with suffering. To have compassion is to willingly join in suffering—to show those you love that you will not let them suffer
And that was part of the tragedy: I had just started to know her. I was mourning the relationship that could have blossomed but didn’t have a chance to grow.
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