‘Inside Animal Hearts and Minds’ by Belinda Recio Is About Animal Intelligence, Emotion, and Humanity
Just had a nice review of the book on HuffPost!
The Peaceable Kingdom: Interspecies Friendship
About ten years ago—thanks to the viral nature of a good story on the Internet the world learned that animal friendships are not restricted to members of the same species. In captivity, and occasionally in the wild, animals sometimes form interspecies friendships. Here is a compilation of video footage that celebrates the ability of all…
How Whales Change Climate
Watch this to discover another reason to protect these magnificent, thinking, feeling animals.
Finches Use Cigarette Butts as Insect Repellent
If you’ve seen house finches flying around with cigarette butts in their beaks, rest assured that these birds are not smoking. They are using the cigarette butts to line their nests. At the end of June, the Journal of Avian Biology published a paper by Monserrat Suárez-Rodriguez and Constantino Macías Garcia, who presented the results…
Condor Drops By to Hug an Old Friend Who Rescued It
After he fell from a nest as a baby, this condor was nursed back to health by an Argentinian rancher named Edgardo. In this video, the condor returns to say hi and give his old friend a hug.
Learning from Experience: Female Elk Figure Out How to Stay Safe as They Age
Humans aren’t the only animals who acquire wisdom with their years—many other animals appear to learn from their experience, too. In a paper published in PLoS ONE on June 14, 2017, researchers presented evidence that female elk are among those animals that learn a thing or two as they age, particularly when it comes to safety. Scientists Henrik Thurfjell, Simone Ciuti,,…
Can Crows Read Signs?
Can crows read signs? Wild crows were stealing insulation—to use in their nests—from a construction site on the campus of the International Coastal Research Center (ICRC) in Otsuchi, Japan. The staff at the research center asked Tsutomu Takeda, a crow expert at Utsunomiya University, for advice. Takeda suggested they hang paper signs that read “crows…
Contagious Laughter in Keas
According to a study published in New Scientist, wild keas—a type of large parrot—can “catch” a laugh. Just like humans, they experience contagious laughter. When exposed to a recording of the warble-like sound these birds make when playing, their moods changed. They became playful and soared after one another in aerobatic loops, exchanged foot-kicking high fives in…
Changing Our Minds About Animal Testing
A recent article on the statnews.com website reports that the number of Americans who think that it’s unethical to do medical testing on animals has reached a new high. What accounts for the change? People are learning more about animal hearts and minds. . . Read more here.
Imagine Apes Imagining
Like people, animals engage in a wide variety of play activities, but what about imaginary play? One of the hallmarks of human play, especially in childhood, is the creative use of imagination to invent things, characters, and situations, and to attribute to them qualities and conditions that don’t exist. A child might assert that a…