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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 consciousness feel like to a sea star? Clearly, I have entered a world I cannot"
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Sy Montgomery |
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0af3ad8
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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 longed to enter theirs. At last, in the warm embrace of the sea, breathing underwater, surrounded by the octopus's liquid world, my breath rising in silver bubbles like a song of praise, here I am.
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Sy Montgomery |
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4e103c2
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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 doing what I'm doing. It may be weird, but it's unique.
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Sy Montgomery |
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f869715
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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 rise to a benign inner delusion--a useful fiction." She argues that consciousness itself is a fiction. The"
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Sy Montgomery |
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1a18d93
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There are some scientists who frown upon such practices, believing that nature should run its course," Jane wrote in an early chapter of The Chimpanzees of Gombe, a scholarly compilation of her first twenty-six years of work. "It seems to me, however, that humans have already interfered to such a major extent, usually in a very negative way . . . with so many animals in so many places that a certain amount of positive interference is desira..
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Sy Montgomery |
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69cfc9e
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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, and this quickly attracts attention. On this morning, Scott and I had the eel tank to ourselves. Even though Scott had just fed some worms into the Deployer, the three-foot, reddish-brown eel was immobile. I wondered if he was just watchfully wai..
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Sy Montgomery |
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749bdcf
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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 evidence of what Scott and Wilson already knew: "Just about every animal," Scott says--not just mammals and birds--"can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy."
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Sy Montgomery |
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28ea239
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Octopuses and their relatives have what Woods Hole researcher Roger Hanlon calls electric skin. For its color palette, the octopus uses three layers of three different types of cells near the skin's surface--all controlled in different ways. The deepest layer, containing the white leucophores, passively reflects background light. This process appears to involve no muscles or nerves. The middle layer contains the tiny iridophores, each 100 m..
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Sy Montgomery |
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b74b75a
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the relationship that Jane Goodall has with the chimpanzees of Gombe--and that Dian Fossey had with the mountain gorillas she studied, and Birute Galdikas has with the wild orangutans of Tanjung Puting--is different. There is a trust between human and animal, a privileged trust unlike any other. The contract for that trust is not written by the human: the animals are the authors of the agreement. The relationship is on the animals' terms.
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Sy Montgomery |
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509075d
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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.
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Sy Montgomery |
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1ad8a22
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Dian Fossey and Birute 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 measured by mastery, theirs was an unusual approach.
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Sy Montgomery |
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7cfafe6
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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. dropped 6,300,000 tons of bombs on Indochina, about 1/3 of which fell on Laos. It was the heaviest aerial bombardment in the history of warfare. During the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. rained more bombs on Laos than were dropped on Nazi Germany during ..
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Sy Montgomery |
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162eb2e
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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 eat and get fat fast.
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Sy Montgomery |
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422d226
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Normally a prolonged stare from a gorilla is a threat. But Digit's gaze bore no aggression. He seemed to say: I know. Dian would later write that she believed Digit understood she was sick.
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Sy Montgomery |
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3dd9614
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Assessing the mind of a creature this alien demands that we be extraordinary flexible in our own thinking. Marine biologist James Wood suggests our hubris gets in our way.
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Sy Montgomery |
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b99eb92
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Always somewhere there is fire or smoke, insistent reminders of the greed consuming the world
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greed
reminders
smoke
fire
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Sy Montgomery |
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0f94180
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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 attained, living by voices we shall never hear." They are, he writes, "other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."
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Sy Montgomery |
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9aca5d7
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As with a child, to commune with Athena demands a level of openness and intuition greater than that used in the usual discourse between adult humans of a common culture.
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Sy Montgomery |
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0fad267
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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 outside magnet would then crash loudly to the ground, summoning the human much as one might call a butler by ringing a servant's bell. Ceph keeper Nancy King
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Sy Montgomery |
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a8e0fea
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The bliss of stroking an octopus's head is difficult to convey to most people, even to animal lovers.
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Sy Montgomery |
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21820bf
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Karma is choice.
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Sy Montgomery |
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a12244d
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one of the most heartbreaking conditions of life on Earth is that most of the animals we love... die so long before we do.
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Sy Montgomery |
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0875af6
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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. Wilson's afternoon will be spent getting his wife, with whom he's traveled the world, ready for her final journey. He is making plans himself to move from their large, beautiful home, with its huge kitchen with tiles around the stove and many..
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Sy Montgomery |
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18ae106
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But Christopher obeyed a higher calling: the intoxicating call of green grass and sunshine, the sweet scent of the earth on one of the last days of summer.
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Sy Montgomery |
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9c87225
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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.
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relationship
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Sy Montgomery |
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75bee2d
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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 encounter has changed them. Now they can identify with an octopus. They
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Sy Montgomery |
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05e46a0
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humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness" and that "nonhuman animals, including all birds and mammals, and many other creatures, including octopuses [italics added], also possess these neurological substrates."
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Sy Montgomery |
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8c4c4a2
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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, Birute said, seemed the most human because of the whites of their eyes. Dian insisted that her gorillas were most humanlike because of their tight-knit family groupings. And Jane reminded us that chimps are the apes most closely related to man, sharing 99 percent of o..
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Sy Montgomery |
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f766e35
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His coming to you, and your loving him, was a counterbalance, in a way, to the world's mistreatment of pigs,
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Sy Montgomery |
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02f0866
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The emperor Caesar Augustus had a parakeet who greeted him daily, and after his victory over Mark Antony in Egypt in 29 B.C., he purchased a raven whose trainer had taught him to say "Ave, Caesar Victor Imperator." (The trainer had wisely taught another bird to say "Ave, Victor Imperator Antoni" in case the battle went the other way.)"
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Sy Montgomery |
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4a7742f
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Love is the highest and best use of a life.
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Sy Montgomery |
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99bccf6
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A far worse mistake than misreading an animal's emotions is to assume the animal hasn't any emotions at all.
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Sy Montgomery |
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b41c71c
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Preserved pufferfish. Former flounders. Ex-eels.
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lol
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Sy Montgomery |
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3710d73
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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 anaconda, together, you can accomplish what even Saint Francis might have considered a miracle."
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Sy Montgomery |
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f5c93c4
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As he did with the electric eels, Scott is trying to figure out a way to induce the toads to show themselves. How? "You need to get within the mind of the toad," he says."
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Sy Montgomery |
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a9defe6
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Being friends with an octopus-whatever that friendship meant to her-has shown me that our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom
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Sy Montgomery |
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31b58ab
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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 their truths.
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Sy Montgomery |
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8929539
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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 another, as people would pass a joint, after which the dolphins seem to enter a trancelike state.)
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Sy Montgomery |
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99330ee
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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 discovered reflects ultraviolet light. Hawks can see UV light--and may well use the voles' territorial markings as signposts to the nearest restaurant.)
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Sy Montgomery |
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87446b0
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The Buddha denied the existence of persisting selves. At the end of life, the self may dissolve into eternity like salt in the ocean. To some, this might seem distressing. But to lose the lonely self in the ocean of eternity could also be a release, an enlightenment, as the mystics promise.
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Sy Montgomery |