Virginia Morell Quotes

Elephants also have the necessary neural anatomy for long-term memories - their brains have especially large and complex frontal lobes, which are important for storing and retrieving memories of scent, touch, smell, and sound. There's little doubt that elephants have prodigious memories.

animals with more mental flexibility typically possess more complex sensory and nervous systems, suggesting that they are the most likely to have the neural hardware that underlies suffering.

had also hoped to visit scientists investigating cats' mental talents, but unfortunately very few researchers have looked into the feline mind.

Panksepp is emphatic on this point, arguing that his neural studies as well as those of his colleagues show that the prime, fundamental emotions of humans and all mammals do not emerge from the cerebral cortex, as was commonly believed in the twentieth century and as some leading neuroscientists still claim, but come from deep, ancient brain structures, including the hypothalamus and amygdala. It is why, he notes, that "drugs used to treat emotional and psychiatric disorders in humans were first developed and found effective in animals - rats and mice. This kind of research would obviously have no value if animals were incapable of experiencing these emotional states, or if we did not share them.

Scientists at the University of Georgia recently discovered that rats are self-aware and capable of something like introspection - complex

Researches still don't have an explanation for the differnece between the sizes of dogs' and wolves' brains - or for why every species of domesticated animal, from ducks and geese to horses and pigs, also has a smaller brain than its wild ancestor. The reason or reasons domestication always leads to smaller brains are hotly debated; but the effects are universal. Anthropologists have documented the same change in Homo sapiens: the brains of modern humans have shrunk about 10 percent over the last ten thousand years.

I stepped to the tank's edge, leaned in, and concentrated on keeping my eyes open. Which fish would be the shooter? The fish were all facing me, but one in particular seemed to be staring directly at my left eye, like a hunter targeting his prey. Wham! The water hit my pupil with such force that I jerked back …. Laughing, I wiped my left eye but stayed by the tank, my left hand resting on its edge. Another fish quickly seized the opportunity to blast the diamond in my engagement ring, while a third targeted the red carnelian stone in my earring, and yet another shot my right eye.

In the very earliest times, when both people and animals lived on earth, a person could become an animal if he wanted to, and an animal could become a human being. Sometimes they were people and sometimes animals and there was no difference. All spoke the same language. That was the time when words were like magic. NALUNGLAQ, A NETSILIK ESKIMO

Fish are unable, of course, to speak for themselves about how we treat them. They have ways of communicating with each other and, in some cases, even with other species of fish, as the groupers and eels do. As with most animals, their inability to communicate directly with us puts them at a disadvantage. They cannot argue for their rights or how they might best be treated or farmed or managed in the wild. Most animals have no voice that we can hear, unless we speak up for them. And even if an animal could talk, would we listen?

Dolphins have one of the highest ratios of brain size to body mass in the animal kingdom. Measured in this way, a dolphin's brain is second in size only to that of a human's, and well above that of our closest genetic relative, the chimpanzee. A large brain-to-body size ratio is often considered a hallmark of intelligence, although it's not the only factor. But it is something we humans celebrate in ourselves and regard as key to the flowering of human intelligence.

didn't talk soothingly to the rat, or stroke her, but firmly grabbed her behind the neck, mimicking a playful nip, and then ran his fingers up and down her rib cage, tickling her. She squirmed briefly, but stopped when he turned her over and tickled her belly. (Like humans, rats have "tickle-skin.") That was when she began to laugh, calls that we heard through the bat detector as quick, high-pitched chirps, and saw on the computer monitor in a sonogram rendition as a vertical series of wavy lines. Compared to a sonogram of various kinds of human laughs, a rat's chirps may be closest to a giggle. "There, she's laughing already," Panksepp said, tickling her some more. "Chup, chup, chup," I wrote in my notebook, trying to approximate the bat-detector's translation of her rat laughter. When Panksepp stopped tickling, she jumped up and bunny-hopped around the bin, while making more of her laughing play-chirps.

Often, when an elephant has just died, other elephants will back up to touch its carcass gently with their hind feet, then cover the body with dirt and sticks, and stand guard. (Intriguingly, elephants have done the same to the bodies of people that they either find dead or have killed. One young orphaned elephant in a South African sanctuary shrieked and moaned when it discovered the buried remains of its daily companion, a rhinoceros, that poachers had killed for its horn.) Chimpanzees, gorillas, some corvids, and dolphins also spend time with their dead, but overall, most species do not.*