For more than a year and a half, since meeting Athena, since coming to know Octavia and now Kali, each time I’ve reached into the tanks where we have brought these creatures into our world, I’ve longe...
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...
They don’t want to hear how Octavia is different from us. They want to know how we’re the same. They know what it’s like to have an itch. They can imagine what it’s like to be a mother. This brief enc...
The sight of a slender young woman sitting in the anaconda exhibit with a 13-foot-long, predatory reptile snuggling in her lap, the tip of a tail coiled lovingly around one leg, provided dramatic evid...
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
Dian Fossey and Biruté Galdikas modeled their approach on Jane Goodall’s: they began their studies by relinquishing control. In the masculine world of Western science, where achievement is typically m...
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...
Voles make up 85 percent of the diet. (One feature of vole biology that inadvertently helps out hawks is that these rodents mark their territories with urine, which Scandinavian researchers recently d...
Teachers are all around to help you: with four legs or two or eight or even none; some with internal skeletons, some without. All you have to do is recognize them as teachers and be ready to hear thei...
There is another important difference as well. Human eyes have three visual pigments, allowing us to see color. Octopuses have only one—which would make these masters of camouflage, commanding a glitt...
The study of a language . . . allows its students to hear a people's 'interpretation (or misinterpretation) of messages from environment to human.' The spoken word reveals, upon reflection, that to wh...
The self, Blackmore writes, is just a fleeting impression that arises with each experience and fades away again. . . . There is no inner self, she argues, only multiple parallel processes that give ri...
Not to hurt our humble brethren is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission: to be of service to them whenever they require it.
Just about every animal, Scott says—not just mammals and birds—can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy.
Just about every animal, Scott says—not just mammals and birds— can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy. Once you find the right way to work with an animal, be it an octopus or an ana...
In her memoir of living among the Bushmen, The Old Way: A Story of the First People, my friend Liz lovingly invokes an image first coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins: You are standing be...
If the person was out of the room, the octopus would pull off the magnet on the inside of the tank which, with another magnet on the outside of the tank, held a glass-cleaning tool in place. The outsi...
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...
At the Seattle Aquarium, Sammy the giant Pacific octopus enjoyed playing with a baseball-size plastic ball that could be screwed together by twisting the two halves. A staffer put food inside the ball...
She’s looking right at you, Scott says. As I hold her glittering gaze, I instinctively reach to touch her head. As supple as leather, as tough as steel, as cold as night, Hugo wrote of the octopus’s f...