I’m the dog walker in my family and for 12 years, Toby and I have sauntered, dawdled and poked around our neighborhood streets. For Toby it’s never a straight line from A to B. He stops and sniffs and often pees on the bushes and trees we pass, bounds up to the people we meet (hoping for handouts) and warily eyes the other dogs he encounters. It’s a sensory explosion for this small corgi. I often try to imagine the world as Toby experiences it. What’s he thinking? How does his super-charged nose detect scents several yards away? What triggers his memories?
Of course, people have always wondered what animals are thinking. It’s baked into our evolutionary history. Back in the 1960s, Jane Goodall showed that the emotional lives of chimpanzees are quite similar to our own. Now, scientists are starting to get insights into species that seem more alien to us. For instance, we’ve discovered that the octopus is not only extremely intelligent; most of its neurons are in its arms, not its brain, and these arms can act semi-autonomously. That raises a fascinating question: Does it have a unified sense of self, or multiple selves? Can we even begin to fathom octopus consciousness?
We explore these questions in “Thinking With Animals.” We also got a chance to enter the world of a few animal-obsessed naturalists. Like Helen Macdonald, who has a rather unusual relationship with her parrot. And Charles Foster, who wanted to live like a badger, so he dug and slept in a hole and even ate worms. Yum!
—Steve