Isn’t this what we want to know about those whom we care about? What is it like, we wonder at each meeting, in shared meals and secrets and silences, with each touch and glance, to be you?
I was warmly amused at the way each one tried to outdo the others in showing how her ape was the most human—trying to win the audience over to favor her animal. Orangutans, Biruté said, seemed the mos...
His coming to you, and your loving him, was a counterbalance, in a way, to the world’s mistreatment of pigs,
Bear-time seems slow to us, perhaps, because we do not have the patience for such a life.
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.
A far worse mistake than misreading an animal's emotions is to assume the animal hasn't any emotions at all.
One of the most heartbreaking conditions of life on Earth is that most of the animals we love... die so long before we do.
At California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium found a banana peel on the floor in front of the Shale Reef exhibit at 3 a.m. On closer inspection, the banana peel turned out to be a healthy, fist-size red octo...
Watching a pig eat is the ultimate vicarious thrill. Seldom can you take such pleasure in another’s joy. Here is someone following his bliss. Pigs are quite literally made for eating—they were bred to...
Volumes of history written in the ancient alphabet of G and C, A and T.
There was a tank of special flounder about fifteen feet away from the octopus tank, he said. The fish were part of a study. But to the researchers’ dismay, the flounder started disappearing, one by on...
Laos is saddled with the distinction of one superlative: it is the most heavily bombed country on earth. During the nine-year secret war against the Communists, during the Vietnam War, the U. S. dropp...
I’ve always harbored a fondness for monsters. Even as a child, I had rooted for Godzilla and King Kong instead of for the people trying to kill them. It had seemed to me that these monsters’ irritatio...
Here is an animal with venom like a snake, a beak like a parrot, and ink like an old-fashioned pen. It can weigh as much as a man and stretch as long as a car, yet it can pour its baggy, boneless body...
A voltmeter picks up the fish’s electric pulse. A light, actually powered by the eel’s electricity, flashes across a panel built on top of the tank to show when the eel is hunting or stunning prey, an...
A giant Pacific octopus—the largest of the world’s 250 or so octopus species—can easily overpower a person. Just one of a big male’s three-inch-diameter suckers can lift 30 pounds, and a giant Pacific...
Species from elephants to monkeys purposely eat fermented fruit to get drunk; dolphins were recently discovered sharing a certain toxic puffer fish, gently passing it from one cetacean snout to anothe...
Reverie. To share such a moment of deep tranquility with another being, especially one as different from us as the octopus, is a humbling privilege.
The ability to ascribe thoughts to others, thoughts that might differ from our own, is a sophisticated cognitive skill, known as theory of mind.
Hospice. If she is going to take it, she must move today. The doctors still don’t understand what is wrong with her, only that her self and her strength are ebbing away, and there seems no stopping it...