Speaker 1: Pushkin. Imagine there's a place in our world where the
Speaker 1: known things go. A library, a cabinet of curiosities, bookshelves,
Speaker 1: filing cabinets, old rules of film. The problem is my
Speaker 1: dogs have gotten in here, slavered all over my copies
Speaker 1: of Charles Darwin's books, completely chewed the cover off my
Speaker 1: first edition of the Story of Doctor Doolittle. What are
Speaker 1: they thinking, these dogs? Oh well, there they go out
Speaker 1: the door, Get out out. I'm gonna follow them over
Speaker 1: the threshold to the dog park. Good morning, the dog park.
Speaker 1: We're out every day today. It's with my producer Ben
Speaker 1: and of course my two Great Danes, Greta and Daisy.
Speaker 1: At seven am on a cold, icy winter morning at
Speaker 1: a park the size of a soccer field, but white
Speaker 1: with a blanket of snow. If you've ever been to
Speaker 1: a dog park, then you know the drill, the whole scene,
Speaker 1: gossiping with people about their dogs. Who's that dog? That's
Speaker 1: Stevie Stephen didn't like the ice or snow. People are
Speaker 1: doing the usual things, standing around, handing out treats, trying
Speaker 1: to read the minds of dogs. How do you know
Speaker 1: he doesn't like the ice of the snow? Um his
Speaker 1: owner just says like he just won't walk on it,
Speaker 1: like it's been a prop h is Davie, Hi, I
Speaker 1: know I keep this here? You are you? What are
Speaker 1: you thinking of? The smartest dog at the park is
Speaker 1: a little red, brown, foxy looking Retriever named Aila. Aila.
Speaker 1: Can I give her a treat every morning? Rain, snow
Speaker 1: or sleep. My dogs try to steal Isla's tennis ball.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they succeed, but Ila, she's really restrained. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: was very smart. Eilah knows she can't take Daisy's ball
Speaker 1: because Daisy. Daisy would just need assistance with her distress.
Speaker 1: Eila figured out that there's a reason to be worried
Speaker 1: about both of my dogs, Daisy because she's so emotionally
Speaker 1: fragile and Greta because she's so sneaky. She's learning that.
Speaker 1: But but but Greta does not know that she should
Speaker 1: not eat Alla's balls because Greta well maybe Greta knows,
Speaker 1: but she doesn't care. How do I know what Greta knows?
Speaker 1: I don't, but I wish I did. Welcome to the
Speaker 1: Last Archive, the show about how we know things and
Speaker 1: why it's a hard lately to know anything at all.
Speaker 1: I'm Jill Lapour this episode, how to animals know things?
Speaker 1: And why is it so hard for us to know
Speaker 1: how much they know? And why it matters that we try?
Speaker 1: All over the world, for tens of thousands of years,
Speaker 1: people have believed that animals have minds and souls. This
Speaker 1: was a belief once so widely held that it amounted
Speaker 1: to common knowledge, nearly universal knowledge. Only very recently, around
Speaker 1: the beginning of the scientific revolution in the West, did
Speaker 1: animals come to be thought of as essentially machines. Lately, though,
Speaker 1: that's been changing as the study of animal cognition undergoes
Speaker 1: a revolution. Meanwhile, the rest of us, just regular people.
Speaker 1: We all have our theories about animal minds. Do you
Speaker 1: think that you understand allah Ah? Sometimes she has fouds brain,
Speaker 1: and I generally speaking, I think she's she's I went
Speaker 1: pretty clear about what she wants. What is what leads
Speaker 1: to fuzz brain? Fuzz? Right, she just sits there and
Speaker 1: stairs off into the world. He's actually just contemplating very deeply. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that might be the case. Eila is a dog that
Speaker 1: was bred for smarts, So they're like one of the
Speaker 1: smallest retrieving family and they're meant for like duck hunting,
Speaker 1: like a truffle hunting. Things like that. She knows how
Speaker 1: to get things for people, sort of like higher level
Speaker 1: fetch refer to something in the house, so she like, yeah,
Speaker 1: she's learned, like stickball, toybox, like a lot of the
Speaker 1: basics like not whether or not she always listens is
Speaker 1: mostly in her mood. But it is so tempting to
Speaker 1: bring triloquise for dogs. I do it all the time.
Speaker 1: I talk to them and then I fill in their responses,
Speaker 1: Like the other day it was raining and I wanted
Speaker 1: to let Greta out, but Greta was all, I want
Speaker 1: to go out, but not until it stops raining all
Speaker 1: or at least that's what I said on her behalf
Speaker 1: when I was answering my own question, and when I
Speaker 1: listened back to myself doing this, I think of Doctor Doolittle,
Speaker 1: the children's book character who can talk to the animals,
Speaker 1: or more to the point, he can listen to them.
Speaker 1: If people ask me, can you speak rhydoceros, I'd say.
Speaker 1: Rex Harrison played Doctor Doolittle in a musical from nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven. Eddie Murphy's played him Robert Downey Junior, but
Speaker 1: the first Doctor Doolittle book was published more than a
Speaker 1: century ago. To try to understand what people know about
Speaker 1: what animals know, I figured i'd better start with Doctor Doolittle. Sorry,
Speaker 1: Pups book, We've got to leave the dog park and
Speaker 1: go somewhere else, far away and long ago, to Flanders
Speaker 1: Fields on the Western Front. In nineteen fifteen, in the
Speaker 1: middle of unutterable devastation, a million soldiers died or were
Speaker 1: wounded or appeared in Flanders Fields fighting in the Great War,
Speaker 1: in the trenches in the mock. John McCrae, a Canadian doctor,
Speaker 1: soldier and poet, he was there. A year later he
Speaker 1: memorialized all that death in his poem in Flanders Fields.
Speaker 1: In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow between the crosses row
Speaker 1: on row that mark our place, and in the sky
Speaker 1: the larks still bravely singing fly scarce heard amid the
Speaker 1: guns below. But it wasn't just a million men who died.
Speaker 1: Untold numbers of animals died in Flanders Fields, and doctor
Speaker 1: John McCray loved animals, especially horses. McCray had sailed to
Speaker 1: Europe in nineteen fourteen in a military convoy with thirty
Speaker 1: thousand men, had eight thousand horses, including his own horse, Bonfire,
Speaker 1: bound for the front. McCray mentioned Bonfire and letters home
Speaker 1: to his sister. It was as if Bonfire could communicate.
Speaker 1: McCray wrote, I wish you could meet him. He puts
Speaker 1: his lips to your face and give us a kind
Speaker 1: of foolish waffle. McCray marched with nine hundred men and
Speaker 1: six hundred horses to Flanders Fields. The ensuing slaughter, the suffering,
Speaker 1: It was unfathomable. The staggering, needless loss of life, the maiming,
Speaker 1: the killing, and the anguished, tortured suffering of all those horses.
Speaker 1: Britain alone lost half a million horses in the war.
Speaker 1: One horse was killed for every two men. They died
Speaker 1: in the fighting where they died of starvation. They died
Speaker 1: of infection and of exhaustion. They fell into minds, they
Speaker 1: were shot, they died of poison, gas terrified. There is
Speaker 1: nothing I hated more than that horse scream, McCray wrote home,
Speaker 1: Bonfire's leg got infected. McCray was there to treat men,
Speaker 1: but he began mending animals. Somewhere along the way he
Speaker 1: acquired a dog. He wrote. He ran to me and
Speaker 1: pressed his head hard against my leg. He named him Fleabag.
Speaker 1: He wrote his poem, which went on to become the
Speaker 1: best known poem of the First World War, and McCray
Speaker 1: became the war's best known poet. Then, in nineteen eighteen,
Speaker 1: he contracted pneumonia and meningitis and died before peace came.
Speaker 1: At his funeral, bonfire followed the casket, carrying in his
Speaker 1: stirrups McCrae's empty boots. We are the dead. Short days
Speaker 1: ago we lived, felt dull, saw sunset glow, loved and
Speaker 1: were loved, and now we lie in flanders Fields. I
Speaker 1: can't see that anyone's ever made this claim before, but
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure Doctor John McCrae was the inspiration for
Speaker 1: the character of doctor John Doolittle, a character who was
Speaker 1: created by another soldier at flanders Field, a brit named
Speaker 1: Hugh Lofting. Lofting served in the Irish Guards, and he
Speaker 1: too wrote and spoke about animals just the same way
Speaker 1: McCray had. Certain horses that were attached to your own company.
Speaker 1: You became very fonder. It upset Hugh Lofting that the
Speaker 1: horses were left to die in flanders Field. There was
Speaker 1: very little you could do. Nearly all the horses that
Speaker 1: were injured had to be shot. If we were as
Speaker 1: far behind and medicine for ourselves as we were apparently
Speaker 1: for our beasts of burden, we would go around shooting
Speaker 1: all of our men. Lofting was supposed to be writing
Speaker 1: letters home from the front to his very little children,
Speaker 1: but what could he possibly write about? Everything was horrible,
Speaker 1: So instead he began drawing pictures and writing his children's
Speaker 1: stories about animals. Here are some animals playing ring a
Speaker 1: ring of roses, Peter Piglett, Timothy Turtle, Frederick Fish, Daniel Dog,
Speaker 1: Miss Catherine Cat, Miss Deborah Duck, Miss Melissent, Mouse, Master
Speaker 1: Teddy Bear, and Squire Squill. They have all been to
Speaker 1: the donkey's birthday party and have been enjoying themselves very much. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: at the front, watching those horses suffer in the field,
Speaker 1: he kept thinking about them, and then it occurred to
Speaker 1: me that, of course, to treat a horse properly, we
Speaker 1: would have to have horse language. And then it occurred
Speaker 1: to me that, of course, to be a good animal
Speaker 1: doctor required a very much higher order of intelligence than
Speaker 1: it did to be a human doctor. In one of
Speaker 1: Laughting's letters home, he invented a fictional character, a man,
Speaker 1: the Story of Doctor Doolittle. Once upon a time, many
Speaker 1: years ago, when our grandfathers were little children, there was
Speaker 1: a doctor and his name was Duelittle. The name, well, Doolittle,
Speaker 1: was Lofting's nickname for his son Colin, who was lazy
Speaker 1: Dolittle get it. But the character he, I'm pretty sure
Speaker 1: was inspired by John McCray m d. The first patient
Speaker 1: doctor Dolittle treats is a horse who's going blind in
Speaker 1: one eye. The doctor gives him spectacles. I think Bonfire
Speaker 1: would have liked that. Hugh Lofting was wounded and left
Speaker 1: the service. He moved with his family to Killingworth, Connecticut,
Speaker 1: a little farming town, where he kept writing about doctor Doolittle.
Speaker 1: He lived in a little town called Puddleby on the
Speaker 1: marsh All. The folks young and old knew him well
Speaker 1: by sight. In nineteen twenty Lofting published a book, The
Speaker 1: Story of Doctor Doolittle, the first in a long series.
Speaker 1: One day, doctor Dolittle's parrot Polynesia scolds the doctor. He's
Speaker 1: a medical doctor, not a veterinarian. Remember about how stupid
Speaker 1: people are? People make me sick. I think they're so wonderful.
Speaker 1: A vote has been going on now for thousands of years,
Speaker 1: hasn't it? And the only thing in an animal language
Speaker 1: the people have learned to understand is that when a
Speaker 1: door quakes his tail, he means I'm glad. I happen
Speaker 1: to have a very good friend who writes children's books
Speaker 1: and who lives in a little farming town in Connecticut,
Speaker 1: just like Hugh Lofting. Her name's lis Broach. She's magic
Speaker 1: with animals. Actually, I believe she is my dog's very
Speaker 1: favorite person. Oh oh my god, this is Ben. So
Speaker 1: I asked Elsa if she'd be willing to join me
Speaker 1: and Ben on a search for Doctor Doolittle, because Lofting
Speaker 1: wound up publishing nearly a dozen do Little books in
Speaker 1: his lifetime. And I wondered if there wasn't some magic
Speaker 1: about the town of Killingworth that it helped Lofting, an
Speaker 1: Mit trained civil engineer, hold onto the belief that animals
Speaker 1: have minds and souls. She's a little trueman. She had
Speaker 1: a boxer growing up in Oh yeah, oh yeah, he's
Speaker 1: a foxy little I've known at least forever. We go
Speaker 1: on writing retreats with our friend Jane. We walk in
Speaker 1: the woods with our dogs and talk about the books
Speaker 1: we're writing. I don't know anybody who's thought more carefully
Speaker 1: about children's stories involving talking animals than at Lease. My
Speaker 1: favorite of Elise's books is called Masterpiece. It's about a boy, James,
Speaker 1: and a beatle named Marvin. There's a chapter book series
Speaker 1: two based on the same characters. In one story, they
Speaker 1: go to the country with Marvin's cousin, Elaine, another Beetle.
Speaker 1: They go to a town just like Killingworth. Later on,
Speaker 1: I asked Elise to read a little bit of the story.
Speaker 1: Elaine and Marvin sit on the rail of the fence
Speaker 1: in the warm sun, watching the animals. Isn't this nice? Marvin?
Speaker 1: Elaine asks, don't you think it would be fun to
Speaker 1: live here? All around them is the country, the big fields,
Speaker 1: the rushing creek, fences and trees, and wide blue sky.
Speaker 1: It's so different from the city. It is quiet, it
Speaker 1: is green, it is full of animals, not people. In
Speaker 1: Elisa's books, Marvin and Elaine, the Beatles, can understand everything
Speaker 1: James the boy says, but James can't understand them. So
Speaker 1: my point was just that I wanted kids to look
Speaker 1: at all beetles and think, oh, you know, they may
Speaker 1: be understanding what I say, and they may have these
Speaker 1: rich family relationships, and you know they may be afraid
Speaker 1: or the way that animals actually are. So I didn't
Speaker 1: want to have kids think oh, that was just a
Speaker 1: magic beatle. I wanted them to be able to see
Speaker 1: the world, you know what I mean. Our first up
Speaker 1: was the killing Worth Public Library. Elise and I talked
Speaker 1: to one of the librarians, Tammy Eustace. I asked her
Speaker 1: if there was anything about the town that made it
Speaker 1: the kind of place you might want to live if
Speaker 1: you were in the business of writing stories about animals.
Speaker 1: I think it's very much the place. I've read a
Speaker 1: lot of the history books, history essays, and people are
Speaker 1: always writing about their farm animals or you know, being
Speaker 1: even being on social media now everybody is posting pictures
Speaker 1: of their chickens, and you know, a dog gets lost
Speaker 1: and the town turns out to try and find the
Speaker 1: dog or the cat. They've they've grown so much, would
Speaker 1: be proud of what's happened here. I'd hope the library
Speaker 1: might have some of Hugh Lofting stuff or a statue
Speaker 1: something they didn't, but it turns out that Tammy, who
Speaker 1: didn't grow up here, is known for her way with animals,
Speaker 1: and everybody actually called me doctor Doolittle in college. That
Speaker 1: was my nickname. So small world. We got back in
Speaker 1: the car and headed for the Killingworth Historical Society. I
Speaker 1: wondered if maybe they would have Lofting's papers, diaries, photographs, something.
Speaker 1: It's housed in a nineteenth century farmhouse. So sweet. Unfortunately
Speaker 1: they did not have Hugh Lofting's papers, but visire halts
Speaker 1: these beautiful silly you know. They had Hugh Lofting's top hats.
Speaker 1: And the curator also showed us a binder full of
Speaker 1: Lofting memorabilia that he'd collected over the years, including a
Speaker 1: photo of a historical marker that used to be out
Speaker 1: in the front of Lofting's old house. It says Doctor
Speaker 1: Little's House, built seventeen sixty one, owned in the nineteen
Speaker 1: twenties by Hugh Lofting, author of the children's book series.
Speaker 1: It was here that his stories came to life and
Speaker 1: his animals learned to talk. Lofting's old house. I figured
Speaker 1: maybe there'd be something there, tucked away in an attic.
Speaker 1: One more stop on the drive, Lisa and I got
Speaker 1: to talking more about animals and children's books. There's a distinction,
Speaker 1: I think in children's literature between the books that are
Speaker 1: entirely an animal world, um, you know, like the Beatrix
Speaker 1: Potter books or um. Trying to think of other examples,
Speaker 1: you know, honestly, it goes back to like Esop's Fables,
Speaker 1: right where it's just an animal world that is animated
Speaker 1: by human emotions or human values or whatever it is.
Speaker 1: And then there are these other stories that involve human
Speaker 1: animal relationships. Animal fables, stories about talking animals go back
Speaker 1: to antiquity, but the so called Golden Age of children's
Speaker 1: literature ran from eighteen seventy to nineteen thirty. Beatrix Potter
Speaker 1: a a Milne, that whole late late Victorian sort of
Speaker 1: tweet sensibility. All of that, which includes Doctor Doolittle stories,
Speaker 1: came out of changing ideas about animals, and this itself
Speaker 1: had to do with what scientists have been doing to
Speaker 1: animals and laboratories. So hold onto your top hat while
Speaker 1: we make a brutal last archive historical detour, a hard turn,
Speaker 1: not so much historically but emotionally. After the break in
Speaker 1: the seventeenth century, rants the philosopher Renee Descartes argued that
Speaker 1: animals have no rational souls and no minds. They can't
Speaker 1: experience pain. They were basically just machines, Descartes said. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: over in England, William Harvey dissected animals living animals without anesthesia.
Speaker 1: This is called vivisection. Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood,
Speaker 1: a major discovery. His experiments were brutal and cruel, but
Speaker 1: if you didn't think animals had souls or felt pain,
Speaker 1: then maybe those experiments were less cruel. Vivisection became common
Speaker 1: during the Scientific Revolution. Often it was done on dogs.
Speaker 1: The experiments took hours, sometimes it was days before the
Speaker 1: animals died. A century later, people finally started saying vivisection
Speaker 1: had to stop, partly because another philosopher came along and said,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, Descartes, he was just entirely wrong. In the
Speaker 1: seventeen eighties, Jeremy Bentam insisted about animals, the question is
Speaker 1: not can they reason nor can they talk? But can
Speaker 1: they suffer? I mean, obviously they can suffer. Thus was
Speaker 1: born the animal welfare movement in England. The first animal
Speaker 1: welfare legislation was passed by Parliament in eighteen twenty two.
Speaker 1: In eighteen twenty four, reformers founded the Society for the
Speaker 1: Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Animal welfare advocates especially wanted
Speaker 1: to outlaw vivisection, which was still taking place. That movement
Speaker 1: was led by an Irish suffragist named Francis power Cobb.
Speaker 1: It also, to a degree, enjoyed the support of Charles Darwin.
Speaker 1: Darwin loved dogs. He devoted a chunk of the Descent
Speaker 1: of Man to them. In eighteen seventy one. He wrote,
Speaker 1: it is curious to speculate on the feelings of a
Speaker 1: dog who will rest peacefully for hours in a room
Speaker 1: with his master or any of the family, without the
Speaker 1: least notice being taken of him, but if left for
Speaker 1: a short time by himself, barques or howls dismally. What
Speaker 1: staggered Darwin was that this love extended even to his torturer.
Speaker 1: The vivisectionist who nailed a dog to a table, cut
Speaker 1: him up, left him there all night to suffer, and
Speaker 1: went back to do more cutting in the morning. As
Speaker 1: Darwin wrote, everyone has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection,
Speaker 1: who licked the hand of the operator. This man, unless
Speaker 1: he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse
Speaker 1: to the last hour of his life. Darwin helped draft
Speaker 1: an anti vivisection bill. He also testified before a parliamentary
Speaker 1: commission charged with investigating the practice. A version of that
Speaker 1: legislation passed in eighteen seventy six, but it continued to
Speaker 1: be a source of debate. Americans had gotten involved by now, too,
Speaker 1: founding the American Anti Vivisection Society in eighteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: three years before Hugh Lofting was born. By the time
Speaker 1: of the First World War, when Lofting wrote those letters
Speaker 1: home from the Western Front, the Royal Society for the
Speaker 1: Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was working hard to save
Speaker 1: war horses, had established a fund for sick and wounded horses,
Speaker 1: had set up horse ambulances, had built horse hospitals. Doctor
Speaker 1: Doolittle came out of all of this when Lofting began thinking,
Speaker 1: maybe the best way to treat animals would be to
Speaker 1: learn their languages. Talk to the animals their languages. Maybe
Speaker 1: take an animal degree. I'd study elephant and eagle, buff
Speaker 1: and eagle, alligator, guinea pig, and flee. Chances are you've
Speaker 1: never read The Doctor to Little Books. Maybe you've seen
Speaker 1: that old Rex Harris and Musical though, or the lousy
Speaker 1: Eddie Murphy movies or the Robber Downey Junior one. Believe me,
Speaker 1: they're all terrible, But the original stories from the nineteen
Speaker 1: twenties are full of fantastic elements, like the Pushmi Pullyu,
Speaker 1: a lama with a head at both ends. There are
Speaker 1: many voyages, there are many adventures. The Doctor to Little
Speaker 1: Books are a little like superhero comics. Still, Dolittle is
Speaker 1: older than Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Those characters were
Speaker 1: created in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties. Doolittle was
Speaker 1: created in the nineteenteens and nineteen twenties. That means there's
Speaker 1: all kinds of datedness to the stories, including a lot
Speaker 1: of truly outrageously racist depictions of African and Indigenous peoples.
Speaker 1: In spite of the fact that Lofting, a progressive and
Speaker 1: a pacifist who wrote for the Nation, was an ardent
Speaker 1: opponent of racism and of imperialism too. In a nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty four article in the Nation, for instance, he damned
Speaker 1: race hatred and urged the writers of children's books to
Speaker 1: get away from the bigoted misrepresentation of people of different races.
Speaker 1: Back in Connecticut, Elise and I were just pulling up
Speaker 1: to the house where Lofting used to live, a yellow
Speaker 1: farmhouse with a fence out front. The house he lived
Speaker 1: in on the edge of town was quite small, but
Speaker 1: his garden was any large, and he had a wide
Speaker 1: long and stone seats and weeping willows hanging over. It
Speaker 1: turns out a doctor lives there now, Caroline, an emergency
Speaker 1: room doctor. She and her son Ben answered the door
Speaker 1: and invited us around back for iced tea. We're gonna
Speaker 1: stay outside. That's fine, both multitude of reasons, of course,
Speaker 1: that's fine. Not always Lofting he always had three or
Speaker 1: four dogs around at his house. Caroline and Ben have two,
Speaker 1: two German Shepherds, rescue dogs. We could hear them inside howling.
Speaker 1: They harmonize too, and um, what do you think they're
Speaker 1: trying to tell us? They just they want to come out,
Speaker 1: They want to say hi. They're crazy. I mean they
Speaker 1: won't they won't hurt you, but they're crazy. I know
Speaker 1: all about those crazy dogs. Sadly they didn't come out
Speaker 1: to join us. Carolin hadn't known much about too when
Speaker 1: she bought the house, but the spirit of the place
Speaker 1: had been hard to resist. We would need a party,
Speaker 1: a big neighborhood party. And made little push meeep never
Speaker 1: mind who was then a little plastic horses and cut
Speaker 1: them in half, really include them together for glue their
Speaker 1: heads to play around still at the house. Didn't come
Speaker 1: with any secret stash of Hugh Lofting's papers, but Carolyn
Speaker 1: did end up collecting a set of first Editions, each
Speaker 1: illustrated by Lofting. She said she'd planned to leave them
Speaker 1: in the house and someday she moves out. We went
Speaker 1: her on the front to see the homemade painted wooden sign,
Speaker 1: a new one that Caroline's kids had updated. My brother
Speaker 1: made this one. Um so it says Doctor Dolittle House
Speaker 1: Circus seventeen sixty one, owned by author Hugh Lofting eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty six to nineteen forty seven. That's his life in
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties. This is where doctor Dolittle came to life
Speaker 1: and learned to talk to his animals. The old one said,
Speaker 1: where his animals learned to talk rated an issue or correction,
Speaker 1: You just uplogether. I loved that the updating of the
Speaker 1: historical record correcting it. The animals didn't learn to talk
Speaker 1: to us. People learned to listen to the animals, and
Speaker 1: it's true. Learning animal language was Doctor doolittle superpower, not
Speaker 1: talking to them. The Doctor Dolittle stories date to the
Speaker 1: era of animal welfare, when reformers were fighting against cruelty
Speaker 1: to animals, trying to end vivisection. Today there are different fights.
Speaker 1: It's an age of mass extinction and climate catastrophe. There
Speaker 1: are other questions to ask about humans relationship to animals,
Speaker 1: including whether sometime soon there will be hardly any of
Speaker 1: them left. Animal cognition is like any other signiance. It's
Speaker 1: a means of producing knowledge, but it's also freighted with
Speaker 1: an almost existential burden, the burden of this moment. If
Speaker 1: we could understand better what animals know, would we find
Speaker 1: better ways of sharing the planet with them. Ben and
Speaker 1: I have gone to Killingworth, Connecticut with a children's book
Speaker 1: writer a lease Broach, to search for doctor Doolittle, who
Speaker 1: could talk to the animals. I came away from that trip, though,
Speaker 1: wondering what had happened to that idea, to an interest
Speaker 1: not in teaching animals to talk. But in listening to them,
Speaker 1: I could talk to the animals. Just imagine it chatting
Speaker 1: to a chimp in chimpanzee chatting to a cheetah. What.
Speaker 1: Right around the time Hugh Lofting was writing the first
Speaker 1: Doctor Dolittle Stories, the scientific study of animals was changing too.
Speaker 1: In nineteen oh eight, Margaret Floy Washburn published a book
Speaker 1: called The Animal Mind. She was a psychologist and her
Speaker 1: work involved trying to imagine the minds of animals. For instance,
Speaker 1: we talk about an angry wasp, or like when we
Speaker 1: say someone as mad as a hornet, Washburn wrote, anger
Speaker 1: in our own experience is largely composed of sensations of
Speaker 1: quickened heartbeat, of altered breathing, of muscular tension, of increased
Speaker 1: blood pressure in the head and face. The circulation of
Speaker 1: a wasp is fundamentally different from that of any vertebrate.
Speaker 1: The wasp does not breathe through its lungs. It wears
Speaker 1: its skeleton on the outside, and it has the muscles
Speaker 1: attached to the inside of the skeleton. What is anger
Speaker 1: like in the wasps consciousness? We can form no adequate
Speaker 1: idea of it. Even as she was making that point,
Speaker 1: a new kind of psychology was on the rise. Behaviorism
Speaker 1: an attempt to discipline the science of psychology to make
Speaker 1: it more accountable to experimentation, more of a lab science.
Speaker 1: But behaviorism also had inside it an old idea, the
Speaker 1: idea that non human animals are just machines. Behaviorists experimented.
Speaker 1: They brought animals into buildings and caged them, and essentially
Speaker 1: tortured them, not by vivisection, but by experiments so artificial
Speaker 1: and painful and emotionally tortuous that one critic said that
Speaker 1: if these experiments had been done on a person, it
Speaker 1: would be like taking a living man in a coffin,
Speaker 1: lowering him against his will, into the earth, and attempting
Speaker 1: to deduce normal psychology from his conduct. With this device,
Speaker 1: we can put a mild electric shock on the grid
Speaker 1: on which the rat starts. You will see that it
Speaker 1: supplies enough drive to produce a radical change in the
Speaker 1: behavior of the satiated rat. He hits the bar, the
Speaker 1: shot goes off, and he's reward. That approach lasted for
Speaker 1: decades into the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, right around
Speaker 1: when animal rights activists were challenging all kinds of animal testing.
Speaker 1: But I was on the hunt for something new in
Speaker 1: animal science, something doctor Doolittle had done in fiction and
Speaker 1: Margaret Floyd Washburn had tried in real life. I was
Speaker 1: interested in the kind of animal scientists who are studying
Speaker 1: how animals think and communicate. I think it's this left
Speaker 1: right here, see what these this break is your destination.
Speaker 1: It says it's in there. The study of animal cognition
Speaker 1: is just exploding right now. So I decided to seek
Speaker 1: out one of its leading practitioners, a German scientist named
Speaker 1: Yuliana Breuer, whose new book is called What Dogs Know.
Speaker 1: To meet her, I had to go to Germany, to
Speaker 1: a town I'd never been to before. Dogs, of course,
Speaker 1: are famously good at finding places sniffing things out. I'm
Speaker 1: terrible at this. So to help me out on my
Speaker 1: trip to Germany, I took one of my kids. He's
Speaker 1: studying German. Yeah, it says it on the sign right there,
Speaker 1: Max Planck Institute for me. Okay, I figured at least
Speaker 1: he could read the signs out loud mensch heights human Yeah,
Speaker 1: human history. You're a stumped. The Max Plank Institute for
Speaker 1: the Science of Human History sits on top of a
Speaker 1: hill in the North German city of Yenna. It's a
Speaker 1: cluster of buildings, sort of Walter Gropia style. Everything's connected
Speaker 1: by cobbled paths. I think I had in mind that
Speaker 1: we just follow the sound of barking, but the place
Speaker 1: was dead silent, so we tried to follow a map
Speaker 1: and read the signs using our eyes. A dog. A
Speaker 1: dog would have just sniffed this place out. Hello, Sorry,
Speaker 1: we're looking for Yule. The doglet would be like a
Speaker 1: round corner in this building. Finally we found it, our clue,
Speaker 1: a dog bowl outside the door. We stepped over the
Speaker 1: dog bowl and Yuleiana Broyer let us inside to a
Speaker 1: glass wild office overlooking the city. Broers this very no
Speaker 1: nonsense sort of person, jeans, pull over, short hair. She
Speaker 1: has my dream job. I kept thinking, that's pretty keen
Speaker 1: to meet her dog, but she was nowhere to be
Speaker 1: seen or heard my dogs. If someone came to visit,
Speaker 1: there'd be no talking over their barking. This dog unseen
Speaker 1: and unheard. Brower is a biologist who's interested in the
Speaker 1: differences between humans and other animals. Technically, her field is
Speaker 1: comparative psychology. The idea of comparative psychology has basically to
Speaker 1: find similarities and differences between humans and animals. And you
Speaker 1: can come from the psychological perspective than you are usually
Speaker 1: more interested into the humans or what's special ah about
Speaker 1: the human? Why are we different from animals? And we
Speaker 1: are obviously, or you can also come from a more
Speaker 1: biological way of thinking just to look at the similarities
Speaker 1: and to look what cognitive skills do animals have, and
Speaker 1: and let's say, to find the animals interesting in themselves.
Speaker 1: Broyer didn't start out studying dogs. She started out studying
Speaker 1: chimpanzees in an apouse at the Leipsig Zoo. And of
Speaker 1: course they share a lot of skills with us, but
Speaker 1: there are skills and where chimpanzees are really not not
Speaker 1: good or where where you are surprised that they are
Speaker 1: not doing well. And one topic there was a huge
Speaker 1: topic when I started, actually was that chimpanzees do not
Speaker 1: use a human pointing gesture. If I want to show
Speaker 1: you something, the school bus, a cloud in the sky,
Speaker 1: I'll point at it and you'll look where I'm pointing.
Speaker 1: That's common knowledge, a universal human cognitive skill, a skill
Speaker 1: you'd assume chimpanzees have because they're so closely related to us.
Speaker 1: But strangely enough, chimpanzees do not do this. One day,
Speaker 1: about twenty years ago in that zoo and Leipzig Brier
Speaker 1: and her dissertation advisor, the whole lab, they're all talking
Speaker 1: about this, and another graduate student says, yeah, but my
Speaker 1: dog can do that. So they started testing dogs and yeah,
Speaker 1: with dogs, you point at something, they look where you point,
Speaker 1: no problem. But then it turned out that really even
Speaker 1: hendread wolves cannot do it as as good as dogs,
Speaker 1: or dogs are special. A laboratory and Hungary at the
Speaker 1: very same time came up with that same result. I
Speaker 1: think was that paper. The view on dogs changed a
Speaker 1: lot because before, I mean my abiology professor would say,
Speaker 1: our dogs they are somehow artificial, strange creatures, and they
Speaker 1: are not as intelligent like wolves. The wolves are the
Speaker 1: real animals, and dogs out something in between, something strange.
Speaker 1: But then if you changed, because people thought, look, the
Speaker 1: dog has a very very special kneed. So the ecological
Speaker 1: niche of a dog is being with a human, and
Speaker 1: that's why dogs have evolved very very special skills. Now
Speaker 1: you might think, if you have a dog, yeah, this
Speaker 1: isn't very surprising. I know, my dog looks where I point,
Speaker 1: but you don't know that in any scientific sense for dogs,
Speaker 1: we don't have that. We have this what you would
Speaker 1: call common knowledge, and I assume that most of this
Speaker 1: is what we can read in and common dog books
Speaker 1: is correct, but we do not have studies about it.
Speaker 1: So they started doing those studies. The more you think
Speaker 1: about that pointing situation, the more you investigate it, the
Speaker 1: more striking the finding brower. Another dog scientists around the
Speaker 1: world are writing a kind of codebook decoding the behavior
Speaker 1: of dogs. There are a thousand reasons to do this research,
Speaker 1: but the biggest is dogs are the first animal humans
Speaker 1: ever domesticated. Why out of all possible animals did humans
Speaker 1: domesticate dogs first. One theory has it that it's because
Speaker 1: dogs have such an incredibly sophisticated sense of smell and
Speaker 1: we have such a worthless one. It's a thing humans needed,
Speaker 1: but you do not know much about the sense of smells.
Speaker 1: It's sometimes really amazing. What's funny to me is doctor
Speaker 1: Doolittle had this all figured out, at least in his imagination.
Speaker 1: My favorite scene in all the books is when the
Speaker 1: doctor is talking with his dog Jip about what it's
Speaker 1: like to smell like a dog. Then Jip went up
Speaker 1: to the front of the ship and smelt the wind,
Speaker 1: and he started muttering to himself. Tar, Spanish onion, kerosene oil,
Speaker 1: white raincoats, crust raal leaf, rubber, burning, lace, curtains being walsht. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: my mistake, lace curtains hanging out to dry, and foxes,
Speaker 1: hundreds of them, cops. And can you really smell all
Speaker 1: those different things in this one wind, asked the doctor. Why,
Speaker 1: of course, said Jim. And those are only a few
Speaker 1: of the easy smells, A strong one. Any mongrel could
Speaker 1: smell those with a cold in his head. Wait now,
Speaker 1: and I'll tell you some of the hardest scents that
Speaker 1: are coming on this wind are view of the dainty one.
Speaker 1: Then Jip closes his eyes and seems to be barely breathing,
Speaker 1: almost dreaming. Bricks, he whispered, very low, old yellow bricks
Speaker 1: crumbling with age in a garden wall, the sweet breath
Speaker 1: of young cows standing in a mountain stream, the lead
Speaker 1: roof of a dovecoat or perhaps a granary with the
Speaker 1: midday sun on it. Black kid gloves lying in a
Speaker 1: bureau drawer of walnut wood, a dusty road with a
Speaker 1: horse's drinking trough beneath the sycamore, the little mushrooms bursting
Speaker 1: with the rotting le. Okay, so that's fiction. Juliana Breyer
Speaker 1: is a scientist. She got interested in figuring out there's
Speaker 1: so many sense How do dogs decide what to smell?
Speaker 1: They imagine being a dog entering a room, and then
Speaker 1: how can I distinguish all these different orders? How do
Speaker 1: I distinguish what is important to me? Breyer came up
Speaker 1: with an ingenious idea and then began experimenting. I should
Speaker 1: explain that she uses dogs, any dogs, people's pets, and
Speaker 1: her experiments. She's got a few hundred of them on call.
Speaker 1: They volunteer, They come with their owners, their owners stay
Speaker 1: for the tests. The dogs are not special genius dogs,
Speaker 1: They're just ordinary dogs. Before she explained the smelling study
Speaker 1: to me, though, she showed me how the laboratory actually works.
Speaker 1: She took us through a hallway and into the dog
Speaker 1: lab itself. So dark, basement room empty, but in the
Speaker 1: back of the room, Brier opened a door and let
Speaker 1: out her dog, a Border Colli mix. What's her name?
Speaker 1: Nah nah nah Hey Brier took us to another room
Speaker 1: set up for an experiment. Yeah, so we're in a
Speaker 1: sort of polygon almost room with file cabins on one
Speaker 1: long end and three windows. We're in the basement, so
Speaker 1: there's sort of garden windows French windows, and there are
Speaker 1: four boxes spread across the window sills. They are this
Speaker 1: black boxes, size of maybe a kid's shoe box, and
Speaker 1: each have a number one, two, three, four. There's a
Speaker 1: camera stand set up, there's not a camera, and then
Speaker 1: there's a red chair in the middle of this tiled
Speaker 1: great floor room. Also on this test, sole knew already
Speaker 1: that dogs are able to even unskilled dogs, untrained dogs
Speaker 1: are able to communicate up all the hidden toy and
Speaker 1: we wanted to know how it works. Exactly like if
Speaker 1: your dog loses her tennis ball under the sofa and
Speaker 1: you ask her to go get her ball, she'll find
Speaker 1: a way to tell you that that's where her ball
Speaker 1: is and then it's stuck there. Right. This is called
Speaker 1: the showing behavior. Briar wanted to test that you can
Speaker 1: only do this test with dogs who really love toys.
Speaker 1: Nana loves toys. Briar came back with a yellow ball
Speaker 1: with a bell in it and she threw it for Nana.
Speaker 1: So she's crazy about toys. This is what we need.
Speaker 1: Then Brier handed me the ball and told me to
Speaker 1: put it inside one of the numbered shoe boxes on
Speaker 1: the window sill. Yeah. You show the ball to her
Speaker 1: and she can watch me, but she can know where
Speaker 1: it will lose. Okay, okay, I have this ball. She's
Speaker 1: gone putting it in box number three. Okay, you saw
Speaker 1: the Broert called back from the next room. Yes. She
Speaker 1: came back in and sat down on the red chair.
Speaker 1: She told Nana to sit, and then she asked her
Speaker 1: where the ball was. Sex see. Nana ran to the
Speaker 1: window and jumped up at box number three. Brower got
Speaker 1: up and walked over to the box. Wallah, the ball
Speaker 1: was inside that box. What Broyer studying here is exactly
Speaker 1: which gestures dogs use to communicate with us. Sometimes they jump,
Speaker 1: Sometimes they go to the box and bark. Sometimes they'll
Speaker 1: look at the box, then look back at their owner,
Speaker 1: look at the box, then look back at their owner.
Speaker 1: One of my dogs does this when she wants to
Speaker 1: go outside. She doesn't like to bark. She's the smart one.
Speaker 1: She'll go to the back door, look at the door,
Speaker 1: look at me, look at the door, look at me,
Speaker 1: look at the door until I finally get the message
Speaker 1: and open the door. That's showing behavior. That's one way
Speaker 1: dogs communicate with us. But how do they think? How
Speaker 1: do they think about smells? For one, were smell studies.
Speaker 1: Brower came into the lab and made scent trails for
Speaker 1: the dogs to follow. We have a track or a trail,
Speaker 1: and in the end of the trail is not the
Speaker 1: thing that was made by the trail. The dog enters
Speaker 1: the room smells a favorite toy, say it's a red ball.
Speaker 1: The dog follows that smell the trail left by the
Speaker 1: red ball. Sometimes at the end of that trail, the
Speaker 1: dog will find that red ball. Sometimes, in some trials
Speaker 1: of the experiment, the dog will find something else, another
Speaker 1: favorite toy, say a yellow frisbee, that Brower's switched out
Speaker 1: for the red ball. The important thing was here, that
Speaker 1: both toys were really important with the dog, so they
Speaker 1: locked them equally. Here's what she was trying to find out.
Speaker 1: When a dog is following a scent trail, sniffing along,
Speaker 1: is he thinking, oh, something good, something good, something good,
Speaker 1: or is he thinking, ooh, my red ball, my red ball,
Speaker 1: my red ball? How would you find that out? What
Speaker 1: would happened if sniffing the scent of the red ball,
Speaker 1: that dog following that trail found at the end of
Speaker 1: that trail a yellow frisbee. They went there, and then
Speaker 1: when the toy was exchanged, they took the toy, but
Speaker 1: then they would just keep on searching for the real one.
Speaker 1: This would seem to suggest, then that the dog isn't
Speaker 1: just following the trail thinking good smell, good smell. The
Speaker 1: dog is following a specific smell, looking for a specific thing,
Speaker 1: and thinking something like I was following the trail of
Speaker 1: my red ball, but what the hell, here's my yellow frisbee.
Speaker 1: Broyer's experiment proved that dogs have an idea, a way
Speaker 1: of thinking about what they're smelling. Doctor Doolittle imagined that
Speaker 1: Broyer proved it. Saying goodbye to Breyer, I remembered something
Speaker 1: my friend Elisad told me that she'd learned about on
Speaker 1: a podcast. Dogs can smell time, so they can tell
Speaker 1: it's morning because of the way the air and the
Speaker 1: smells in the summer, and they can tell evening because
Speaker 1: those things change. And that's the dog's way of interacting
Speaker 1: with the world. I love that smelling time. That was
Speaker 1: an idea. I was really interested in the totally unique
Speaker 1: experience of being a dog in the world. At least
Speaker 1: dug up that podcast. It was an interview with a
Speaker 1: scientist named Alexander Horowitz. She'd written a book called Inside
Speaker 1: of a Dog, What Dogs See, Smell, and No. I
Speaker 1: figured I should meet this Horowitz and headed to New York.
Speaker 1: I wanted to get a kind of dog's eye view
Speaker 1: or I guess a dog's noses scent of the dog park.
Speaker 1: You may think this is a lot of globe trotting
Speaker 1: for a podcast episode about dogs, but have you read
Speaker 1: the Doctor Doolittle stories. The man is half the time
Speaker 1: gallivanting across the planet looking for obscure animals like the
Speaker 1: giant sea snail. One time, he even rides a lunamoth
Speaker 1: to the moon. I didn't take a lunamoth to the moon,
Speaker 1: but I did take Amtrak to New York to meet
Speaker 1: Alexander Horowitz, a Barnard professor and head of the Dog
Speaker 1: Cognition Lab. She's got a fantastic podcast about dogs called
Speaker 1: Off Leash. Her basic research question is what is it
Speaker 1: like to be a dog. She's interested in how dogs smell.
Speaker 1: That's how she figured out dogs can smell time. But
Speaker 1: she started out as a fact checker at The New Yorker.
Speaker 1: It was really, really fun. Yeah, it was a great
Speaker 1: exercise in thinking about knowledge and truth. Yeah, what counts
Speaker 1: us truth? Horowitz came at dog research by way of
Speaker 1: fact checking for one writer in particular. Yeah. I was
Speaker 1: checking for Oliver Sacks, and I thought, oh, cognitive science. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oliver Sacks, the neurologist, wrote about how people think, what
Speaker 1: it means to be a human. Hero books like The
Speaker 1: Man who Mistook his Wife for a hat, about a
Speaker 1: disorder where you see things as things that are not there.
Speaker 1: Sachs had this tremendous moral imagination combined with his own
Speaker 1: scientific mind, and then his extraordinary gifts as a writer.
Speaker 1: He could picture and then conjure on the page how
Speaker 1: an entirely different being experiences the world. He inspired generations
Speaker 1: of scientists and writers, including Horowitz. So she left The
Speaker 1: New Yorker and went to graduate school. I was interested
Speaker 1: in a metacognitive skill called theory of mind, which is
Speaker 1: an ability that humans develop typically at about age three ish,
Speaker 1: where we start thinking and realizing others have opinions and
Speaker 1: knowledge different than we do, which is obviously foremost in
Speaker 1: our cognition. There hadn't been any evidence in these experimental
Speaker 1: approaches with non humans of theory of mind, but it
Speaker 1: seemed to me something that you would expect to see
Speaker 1: in a lot of social animals, because sociability requires having
Speaker 1: some sense of what others. Yeah, one kind of evidence
Speaker 1: for a theory of mind is play playing, you have
Speaker 1: to have a theory of mind. Harwood's decided she needed
Speaker 1: to watch animals play. So I was looking for playing animals,
Speaker 1: seeing if I could see anything in their interactions which
Speaker 1: would tell me about their minds. But animals don't just
Speaker 1: play on demand typically right often they might want to
Speaker 1: disappear from view to play. It probably took me about
Speaker 1: six months before I realized taking her out three times
Speaker 1: a day to play with other dogs, I should study
Speaker 1: dogs they're playing. It was a Eureka moment, ah dogs,
Speaker 1: but she wasn't alone. Suddenly we all found we had
Speaker 1: this very good subject. They were good because they're convenience,
Speaker 1: but they were good because they're also smart. They have
Speaker 1: a lot of social cognition, meaning they are skilled socially
Speaker 1: they're able to get information from others. They're very cooperative,
Speaker 1: not just with other dogs, but inter specifically with humans.
Speaker 1: And so a few old of dog cognition kind of
Speaker 1: started blooming in the early two thousands and now actually
Speaker 1: is quite prolific. Right, there are hundreds of articles written
Speaker 1: every year on the field, whereas when I began their word,
Speaker 1: there were none. Horowitz took hundreds of hours of footage
Speaker 1: of dogs playing and analyze them second by second, breaking
Speaker 1: them down into episodes of play. A unit of play
Speaker 1: she called about like in boxing, about talking about dogs
Speaker 1: playing is like singing about bicycle riding. We had to
Speaker 1: go watch it. So I packed up and headed up
Speaker 1: to a dog park along the Hudson River. Now they're
Speaker 1: staring at each other, right, there could be a something, ye,
Speaker 1: So that's like an exaggerated approach. And there's a playbout
Speaker 1: under the bench and sort of wandering off. For this
Speaker 1: dog is wagging, but I don't know if she's going
Speaker 1: to engage. She hiding under her owner. She's like tentative
Speaker 1: with the keeping in touch, more touch with the owner.
Speaker 1: Not maybe the most confident dog. I'm surprised because he
Speaker 1: did go mount right away. She reminded me of a
Speaker 1: sports commentator. Oh look, here's another here's another little belt.
Speaker 1: So you have a dog on their back. You can
Speaker 1: really take advantage of that, and the good player will not.
Speaker 1: We'll just see if he's doing little feigning. But he's
Speaker 1: not all going all in like he could and waits
Speaker 1: and then she jumps up. That's a nice little bout.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of turn taking there here. Like
Speaker 1: I do a job, I knew. I was fortified with
Speaker 1: new information to bring back to the dog Bark with
Speaker 1: my dogs Greta and Daisy. I also couldn't help prontriloquising
Speaker 1: the tall doodles looking for a playmate. I could see
Speaker 1: longingly over the gate, who's coming in? I only have
Speaker 1: a dreevers in here. He Real dog science isn't ignoring
Speaker 1: everything common sense tells you about the reality of animal
Speaker 1: consciousness so you can experiment on animals. It's following your
Speaker 1: own curiosity, your own love of dogs, in this case,
Speaker 1: out of curiosity just to know, but also for the
Speaker 1: same reason that Hugh Lofting created Doctor Doolittle while watching
Speaker 1: horses being slaughtered on Flanders fields. I want to know
Speaker 1: what it's like to be an animal in order to
Speaker 1: treat them better. Every road you drive down in the
Speaker 1: town of Killingworth, Connecticut, you come across another farm, horse farm,
Speaker 1: goat farm, sheep farm, goose farm, duck farm. Hugh Lofting,
Speaker 1: the creator of Doctor Doolittle, loved this place. Near the
Speaker 1: end of his life, he decided he wanted to be
Speaker 1: buried here. He died in nineteen forty seven. His body
Speaker 1: was shipped back to Connecticut. When Ben and I went
Speaker 1: there with my friend Elise Brooch. We went in search
Speaker 1: of his grave, trudging across a field, watching out for
Speaker 1: ticks and poison. Ivy all right, three leaves green and shiny.
Speaker 1: Right yeah. With the owners of Lofting's old house, we
Speaker 1: crossed a field of very tall grass. Man, I feel
Speaker 1: that this is very last dark right here. Yes, would
Speaker 1: nearly come to the end of our mad cap adventure,
Speaker 1: hunting for the evidence of the age old knowledge that
Speaker 1: animals have minds and souls. Finally we spied the cemetery
Speaker 1: the back corner. Okay, so it's a granite marker, like
Speaker 1: a small rectangular almost like a child sized coffin, baby
Speaker 1: sized coffin, And says Hugh Lofting, eighteen eighty six to
Speaker 1: nineteen forty seven. Maybe we should look up how to
Speaker 1: pronounce the left for you quiz right? I mean I
Speaker 1: think quo quis? Okay, quick, separate rabbit. I like how
Speaker 1: you just rolled. They are just want to Caroline, who
Speaker 1: lives in Lofting's old house, comes by every once in
Speaker 1: a while and leaves animals here by Lofting's grave plastic animals.
Speaker 1: Alise helped me out with the Latin quiss separabit. Who
Speaker 1: shall separate us? It's the motto of the Irish Guards,
Speaker 1: the regiment Lofting fought with during the First World War,
Speaker 1: when so many animals, human and horse and dog alike
Speaker 1: died needlessly. Who shall separate us? I loved that for
Speaker 1: Lofting's grave marker. For a very long time, people have
Speaker 1: believed in a great separation, a wall dividing humans from
Speaker 1: all other animals. Weirdly, children's literature is one place where
Speaker 1: that wall gets broken down, and lately it's being broken
Speaker 1: down by animal science. The more scientists study animals, the
Speaker 1: more we know what animals know. What do dogs know?
Speaker 1: We still don't really know, But the more we do know,
Speaker 1: the clarer it becomes that less separates us than some
Speaker 1: people used to think. The Last Archive is written and
Speaker 1: hosted by me Jill Lapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane,
Speaker 1: Ben Natt of Haffrey and Lucy Sullivan. Our editors are
Speaker 1: Julia Barton and Sophie Crane, and our executive producer is
Speaker 1: Mia Lobel. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking by
Speaker 1: Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans
Speaker 1: of Stellwagen Symfinett. Our research assistant is Mia Hazra. Our
Speaker 1: full proof players are Least Brooch and Robert Riccatta. Many
Speaker 1: of our sound effects are from Harry Jeannette Junior and
Speaker 1: the Star Jeannette Foundation. The Last Archive is a production
Speaker 1: of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show, consider subscribing
Speaker 1: to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content like The Last Archivist,
Speaker 1: a limited series just for subscribers, and add free listening
Speaker 1: across us our network for four ninety nine a month.
Speaker 1: Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or
Speaker 1: at pushkin dot fm. If you like the show, please
Speaker 1: remember to rate, share and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
Speaker 1: Listen on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts. I'm Jill Lapour,