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...
A far worse mistake than misreading an animal's emotions is to assume the animal hasn't any emotions at all.
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...
One of the most heartbreaking conditions of life on Earth is that most of the animals we love... die so long before we do.
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...
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...
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?
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...
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...
In all religions, as in all legal systems. people find ways to skirt the rules. We obey the letter of the law without honoring its spirit, and then reassure ourselves of our righteousness.
If you took the monsters' point of view, everything they did made perfect sense. The trick was learning to think like a monster.
Karma is choice.
I wonder: Can a brainless animal feel curiosity? Does it want to play? Or does it only want toys or food the way a plant wants the sun? Does a sea star experience consciousness? If it does, what does...
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...
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...
I never met a pig I didn't like. pigs are intelligent, emotional, and sensitive souls. They love company. They crave contact and comfort. Pigs have a delightful sense of mischief; most of them seem...
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...
His coming to you, and your loving him, was a counterbalance, in a way, to the world’s mistreatment of pigs,
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...
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...
Showing 61 to 80 of 80 results