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Journey on the magic lies within the trails we ride.
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You're listening to the Journey On Podcast with Warwick Schiller. Warrick is a horseman, trainer, international clinician and author who helps empower horse people from all over the world with the skills, knowledge and mindsets needed to create trusting partnerships with their horses. Warrick offers a free seven day trial to his comprehensive online video library that includes hundreds of full length training videos and several home Study courses@videos.warwickshiller.com G' day everyone. Welcome back to the Journey On Podcast. I'm your host Warwick Schiller and my guest this week is a previous guest I've had on the podcast before and it's Amelia Thomas. So Amelia is a Cambridge University educated British authority, naturalist and journalist and I had her on the podcast last year talking about all of her amazing life adventures and since then she has written a book and this book is called what Sheep Think about the Weather and the subtitle is how to Listen to what Animals Are Trying to Say and I'll read you the from the back of it. But that's what this whole podcast is about is Amelia's experiences in researching this book. But I read you from the back of it, it says. Are animals trying to tell us something and have we been too distracted to notice? It started with a hummingbird dive bombing Amelia Thomas over her morning coffee and a pair of piglets who wouldn't just stay put. Soon, Amelia, journalist and new farmer, begins to question the communication all around her. Her pigs, her dogs, the pheasant family inhabiting the woods, the difficult, quote unquote big red horse. We talk about that. Even the earwigs in the farm's dark, dank, tall corners. Are they all just animals reacting instinctively to the world around them, or are they trying to communicate something deeper? Driven by lifelong curiosity, Amelia embarks on a journey to uncover what animals truly seek to say to humans on the way. Along with groundbreaking chimps and circumspect octopuses, she'll meet an extraordinary cast of experts, from animal behaviorists, zoologists, to trackers and psychologists, and even explore the surprising insights of pet psychics, AI research and animal mindfulness practitioners. Each perspective offers a new layer of understanding about the subtle, complex ways animals connect with us and will deepen our appreciation for every creature with whom we share our planet. In what Sheep Think about the Weather, Amelia chronicles her sometimes difficult discoveries with humor, heart and awe. More than just a memoir, this book is a call to listen not only to the animals we love, but to the untamed world around us? What if the answers to some of humanity's greatest questions have been whispered to us all along? So that is the back of the book. And I was just fascinated by all the research that Amelia had done and the people she met doing the research. So I decided I'd have Amelia on the podcast and tell us all about those amazing people she met and some of the things she learned from them. So I've just. I think this might be the longest interview podcast I've ever done. I think the podcast I did on the Gouch, my experience on the Goucho derby was longer than this slightly. But this one, certainly the longest interview I think I've done because I just couldn't stop asking a question. She's so fascinating. So I hope you guys enjoy this podcast as much as I did recording it. Amelia Thomas, welcome back to the Journey on podcast.
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Thank you so much for having me again.
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So for you listeners at home, I had Amelia. And when was it earlier this year or late last year?
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I think it was last year now. Maybe about a year ago.
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Yeah. And then since then, Amelia has written a book called what Sheep Think about the Weather. And the subtitle is how to Listen to what Animals are Trying to Say. And apparently I appear in this book. So Amelia sent me a copy of this book and I'm. This book's 300 and something pages long. 300, let's say 20s. And I'm only up to page 80. And I had to like, I want to get Amelia on the podcast and tell us about all the stuff she learned researching this book. Because you want to give us a. The short rundown on. On why you wanted to do this book. And then I want to get you into asking some questions about some of the people that you talk to in the get in the researching of it.
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Yeah, sure. So I had a central question which was a question that had, I think a lot of people like you, like people who listen to you, feel the same. And it's just this sort of nagging question. What are animals trying to say to us? Not to each other, because there's loads of great books been written about that, about, you know, bumblebee waggle dances and all that kind of stuff. But you know, something as horse people that we're concerned about is what are the smallest things that we're missing? What are we missing when animals are trying to. Trying to say something to us, which they are all the time. And so, right. This is my central question the day I moved into our new farm where everything went wrong. Like the horses were screaming, the new pigs got out, the dogs were fighting. Everything just sort of went, went into a bit of a state that day. I thought, right, this is a good moment to start and I'm going to take a year and we're going to go to all the experts, you included, who I think are listening to animals in, you know, these interesting ways and see what I can learn. So that was the premise, was a year of listening really deeply to animal listeners and to the animals themselves and try and figure out how much more we could, we are, we can hear if we, if we know how to listen. And, and then I divided it into three parts. So the first part is, I think where you are reading right now is the science of it. And then I went to the training all the people who are training animals by listening or some of them are training people to listen. And then I went to the third part, which was sort of the intuitives. So that was like trackers, animal communicators, energy workers and those kind of people. So that was the sort of the structure. And it took me pretty much a year of deep listening. So that was what it was about.
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You know, I'm only up to the science part, not the trainers of the trackers part and the tracker part. You know, anybody who's listening to the podcast knows them really into, you know, hunter gatherer wisdom and indigenous wisdom and ways and all that sort of stuff. So I'm, I'm fascinated by that bit. But the I'm in the scientist part and reading this book, I'm like, you did. You spoke to so many really interesting people that each one of them will be a great podcast guest. But I thought, well, let's just cut to the chase and do the, do the short version. So I've got a copy of your book here with all these post it notes in it. And the first post it note I've got is about. You talked about someone named Simona from Warsaw with a pig.
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Yeah. So Simona Cossack was a naturalist. She was a professor and she came from a really wealthy background in Poland. Her family were all these famous painters that painted war battles, mostly horseback battles. And they're really well known and very wealthy, storied family. And she did not fit in. She was a girl, they wanted a boy. She was interested in the animals that she found in the garden and not in becoming a famous painter. And so she ended up becoming a naturalist and went to live in a forest in, in sort of deep within the forest. I think in a place called Bialowica. Not sure if I'm saying that right, but in. In. In Poland. And she lived with all these forest animals, but she also rescued a ton of animals. And a couple of years ago, a friend sent me a picture of. Of her, and she kind of looks a little bit like Greta Thunberg, and she's got these two braids and. And bangs. And she's sitting. Standing in a. She's sitting down in a dining room, and she's looking, like, just adoringly at this enormous wild boar. Like, huge, huge wild boar that's sitting just at the dining table with her. And I was just like, who is that? I want to do that. I want to. I want to be her, you know, So I kept that picture. And there's not a lot written about her in English. She wrote quite a lot of books, but they're all in Polish. But I got in touch with her biographer and asked her a few questions. I was like, okay, she's my inspiration, Simona Kosak. How can I be like her? How can I listen like her? I want that life. You know, she had. She had stalks, and she had fawns that she'd rescued and all these kind of animals all around her. And so I asked that biographer, and she said, well, she was just a really good listener. So I thought, right, okay. So. So I pinned up a picture of Simona in the kitchen with the boar, and. And that was like my little sort of inspiration wall. I kept looking at her as I went about this. This. This journey. And. And she also inspired me. I didn't think anyone in my family would allow me to get a couple of wild paws just to have living in the house. So I got a couple of piglets, which I felt like was sort of a. Some kind of. Close enough. Yeah. And so Simona sort of was one of the catalysts for this journey as well.
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You know, a few podcast guests. A previous guest is Chantelle Pratt. So Chantal is a neuroscientist, but we always reckon, like, Chantel's been to a couple of the podcast summits, and we. The first summit she came to, we dubbed her the love child of Robin Williams and Stephen Hawking, because she's a brain, but she's so funny. And in her book, it comes across. Well, yours comes across, you're funny like her, too. It comes across. Talking about this Simona here, you wrote in this book, little had been written about her in English. And my Polish begins and ends at. And there's a Polish phrase, and in parentheses, it says, two cherry vodkas, please. Like, you are funny. You're. You are Chantelle Pratt funny. There's some funny stuff here I actually want to get to as we. As we chip along here. So she was the. She was the catalyst for this. So when you got started, Tom, you and your daughter, I believe, son. Sunday.
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Yeah.
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And got to. Got to doing experiments with earwigs.
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Yes. Well. So, okay, I thought, right, if I'm going to figure out what animals are trying to say, what do you need to be in order to say something? Right? So you need to be an individual with the personality. That was what we kind of figured out. Like, you know, I mean, machines can say things, of course. You know, I think I use an example in the book. Or you can ask Chatgpt to, like, write you a limerick or tell you a joke, and Siri will tell you a joke, but it's not really like, that's not saying something, right? So I was like, okay, you need a personality as an individual. So then I thought, well, how small does personality go? Because we, you know, we know, our horses have personalities. Dogs, cats, the animals we have around in the house. But, like, okay, so what about, like, we had these hummingbirds that were living outside. And I was like, okay, these hummingbirds seem to have personality. What about smaller, Smaller, Smaller. How small can it go? So I talked to a cockroach researcher and a fruit fly, an Oxford professor who works with a neuroscientist who works with fruit flies, who both kind of convinced me that fruit flies and cockroaches have what they call sort of the rudiments of personality. Right? So I was like, okay, what about earwigs? Because when we moved into the farm, it's really rainy summer, there were earwigs everywhere. And Indy loves animals. Like, he'll. He's like Steve Irwiny kind of.
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Oh, how old's Indy?
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He. At that time, he was 11.
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Okay.
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So, yeah, curious age.
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Yeah.
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Yeah. He's just like. He loves the natural world. Everything, apparently, except for earwigs. And we moved in, and he was like, oh, he tried to get into a cupboard. He wouldn't tell me. He was scared of them, but he tried to, like, lock himself into a cupboard with a book. He was just like, I'm just gonna go and sit in this cupboard. I'm just gonna shut the door. And I. What? Why? And he's like, oh, no reason. Just trying to shut himself in the cupboard to get away from these earwigs that were everywhere. Because the farm had been empty for a little bit. And so I found in Darwin, in one of Charles Darwin's books, he had written the earwigs. I was like, why earwigs? Why is he scared of earwigs? He loves spiders and all these other creatures. And Darwin wrote that earwigs are really good mothers because if they're. You know, most insects, like, they don't really care if they're young or threatened, but a mother earwig will move its eggs if it feels that they're in danger. So I got this book and I read him Darwin through the cupboard door. I was like, hindy, listen. Listen through the door telling him this. And he's like, oh, so they're good mums? And I said, yeah. And he's like, oh, all right. And then he got out the cupboard and stopped being scared of them. And. And I kind of figured out that it's probably the name that was freaking them out. Because, you know, earwigs, there's these kind of old wives tales that they crawl into your ears and lay their eggs, which is not true. Like, they're actually called earwigs. They think because the shape of their little pincers looks like a human inner ear. So it's got nothing to do with, like, the. They don't actually crawl into your ears. I mean, they might occasionally, but that's, like, incidental. It's not that that's the thing that earwigs do. So we decided to see if earwigs have personality too. So we got this, like, based on the cockroach research's idea of this sort of stadium that he had, like this kind of cockroach stadium that he built. And he would put them in and see if they behaved consistently over different situations, which is one of the kind of markers of personality. So we recreated, in a very rudimentary way his experiments.
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Let's talk about his experiments. So didn't he have, like, an arena and cockroaches, like the dark? So he put a light in one side and dark on the other side, didn't he? And see if all the cockroaches went to the dark?
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Is that what it was? Yeah, he thought that cockroaches would act sort of as a body. So he thought whatever one does, they'll all do. And what he discovered is that no cockroaches actually have preferences. So some won't go where you think they'll go. They won't go to the dark. Just because you think that all cockroaches are scared of light. And no matter where he put this, where he moved them to whichever kind of stadium he created and however he arranged it, that particular cockroach would always do these certain things. And that there was a correlation between, like, a bold cockroach might not be very sociable, which would make sense because they would be the ones that would go away from the group, whereas a shyer cockroach would be more sociable, which would mean that they would tend to end up altogether. So, yeah, so he kind of found this. So it's. What are they called? It's not rudiments of personality, but it's something like that. They feel fear, they may feel joy of some sort. They get dopamine rushes like we do. So all these kind of elements that are similar to us that are consistent over time and space. Yeah. So we thought, okay, we're going to see if this is true with earwigs too. So we weren't very scientific, really. We were doing it in our workshop and we gathered a little selection of earwigs from around the house and put them this in this tub. And we tried to recreate it. But what was interesting was even with our fairly unscientific methods, we found exactly the same thing, which was that each of these earwigs would consistently behave in individual ways. So from that we gathered that, yes, earwigs are individuals.
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Every once in a while I have an idea come to me and I write it down on my phone. And the other day I had a little idea came down to me, I wrote down in my phone, okay, okay. So I used to do things differently than I do now.
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Okay.
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And other people do something similar to what I used to do. And when I look at them, I don't. I don't judge them as right or wrong. If it works, it works, whatever you're doing. And so what I wrote down on my phone was, it's not that one technique is good or bad. I'm doing what I'm doing now because I'm more aware of the level of the horse's consciousness. And it seems like the. The more aware of the level of sentience and the level of consciousness they have, you are. There's a lot of training techniques. Maybe you used to do that. Now you can't. You can't do anymore. Yeah, but I also wrote here, I said, think of it. And this was just me dwelling on stuff late at night. I wrote, think about levels of consciousness like height. You're either five foot six or you're not. It's not like if Someone's five foot five and you're five foot six, you look at them and go, oh, you're only five foot five, you know.
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Yeah.
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And, and so it's not a, it's not a judgment if the, the someone's awareness of, say, a horse's level of consciousness. When I look at that, it's not a judgment, it's just like, oh, that's, that's what, that's how they currently view the world. You know what I mean? But what I'm. But what I'm finding is, as I view, especially with horses, their level of consciousness differently and realize how much of a rich emotional life they have, you can, there's things you can't do anymore. And it's, you know, it's just, it's the same with interacting with people or whatever. But anyway, books like yours here are books that really make you go, oh, even cockroaches have that too, you know. And so, yeah, it makes, I think it makes life a little more challenging because you can't just do what.
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You can't unsee it. Yeah, yes, totally.
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You can't unsee it. So tell me about this suited the earwig experiment. But tell me about the fruit fly guy.
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Oh, well, he's really interesting. He's. Yeah, he's professor of neuroscience at Oxford. And he said to me that. So the reason that they use fruit flies in experiments often is because theoretically they can be cloned to be exactly identical. So if you're doing an experiment, you can clone a group of fruit flies that should behave exactly the same, no matter, you know, as each other, so that you can kind of extrapolate data from, from that set. But he said what actually happens is that even though they have been cloned, they're different from each other. And when you kind of go. And I just love this idea so much because he said when you come, when it comes down to it, it's just. And I think in the book I quoted some science articles, it calls it something like the inherent chaos of brain wiring or the inherent chaos of like, nature. But basically the way your brain is wired is chance. It's like a dice roll. And on top of that you stack nature and nurture. But underneath it there's something that's just, you know, that's just chance. So these fruit flies that are supposed to behave identically don't. And he said if you like, for example, there will be fruit flies that will always go to the left if they're like supposed to be following a line or There's a light. They'll go to the left, and some will always go to the right. But if you take those lefties and you. And you only breed from those ones, you'll still get some that want to go to the right because it's just a dice roll. And. Oh, I just love that because, you know, we've talked so much about nature and nurture. Right. Those are always the things we're trying to balance. Like, it's okay. Is this in the animal's nature or is it something we've accidentally taught them or someone's taught them, or they've learned from something we intended or didn't intend or. But underneath it, there's this understanding that individuality is just a dice roll. It's like, that's why nature is so diverse. And. And he found that on a fruit fly level and he did some crazy experiments, you know. So some of these are scientific experiments where they implant memories into a fruit fly's brain and they can get them to. So, like, they'll. They'll give them. I don't know exactly the techniques of how they do this, but they will implant a memory, like, let's say, of being scared of a certain taste. And then even though they've never experienced that taste, they'll give them that taste. And the fruit fly will act with the memory on the memory. So it will be scared of that taste, even though it's never actually experienced that in real life.
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I have heard of that experiment with. With what, before our conversation, I would have called more evolved animals. But now I think they're all probably just as evolved as each other. But it was with. Maybe it was some sort of a. Maybe it was. It was mice. I'm pretty sure it was. Oh, no, I know. It was just. It was. It was mice. And they would make a sound and give an electric shock.
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Oh, yeah.
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Electric shock. And then the offspring of that mice had never had the electric shock, but you make the sound and they get scared.
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It's kind of like generational trauma in mice. Yeah. Like, it gets into a cellular level. Yeah. So. But we just think of fruit flies as, like, you know, these annoying things that are buzzing around the kitchen that you're just trying to get rid of in quantity. Like, I think it's just like the quantity of them as well. Like if you've got a bunch of bananas in a. In a bowl in the kitchen or something in the summer, it's just like, oh, my God, all these fruit flies. But then when you start, it's what you said, you know, when you, when you start to see individuality in something, what, what do you do with that information? Are you still going to. I used to vacuum them up. I feel really bad about it now. Thinking actually like vacuum these fruit flies. And now I'm like, oh my God. So going to, you know, all summer I'm just putting fruit flies outside because you can't. Once you've looked at. I looked at one through a magnifying glass then. And you see, you know, these hairs on that. You see the individual effort that in this kind of tiny creation, like am I going to just flippantly be the one that's just like not you. You're in my way.
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Sorry listeners, but life's getting harder.
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Sorry.
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You know, I was talking before about your level of, of, of comedic genius that I can't find the exact bit here, but there's something about. You read something you went to. I don't know if you went or you read, but it was like the. Something about the Pavlovian Society and you said you. That you were excited because it was going to be all about eating meringues.
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Yeah, that was actually that, that neuroscientist, he said he was really tired when I spoke to him and he was just like, oh, I'm so jet lag. I've just come back from a meeting over the Pavlovian Society and I was just like in my mind I just imagined all these scientists like sitting around like comparing meringues and I just thought that's so great. And no, it wasn't. It was about Pavlov. You know, it was about.
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It was Pavlov's dogs.
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Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was a bit disappointed but.
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So every page I turn in this book there's something new. I'm like, oh, there's another rabbit hole and I've even missed one. But I just, you know, I've got all these post it notes here, but this, there's a little paragraph here, it says later as I sit reading a book chapter sent to me by its author, philosopher Hanok Ben Yami, I don't know. Titled Logic and the Boundaries of Animal Mentality. What the hell? A philosopher writing a book about logic and the boundaries of animal mentality. What was that all about?
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Yeah, so. Well, as much as there's these people who are discovering all the things that animals can do that, you know, we didn't know that they could do and these capabilities that they have and how similar they are to us in some ways there is a sort of vanguard of people who don't really want that to be the case. So. And there can be lots of reasons for that. Like, they interpret data differently, or maybe it's kind of an element of what we were just talking about, where it makes life more difficult. You know, the closer you think others are to you, the more you have to treat them differently or how you'd want to be treated. So, anyway, he. He is of the opinion of that camp that doesn't think that animals can do quite a lot of stuff. So he has written quite. I mean, he's. He's a great guy. We talked on the phone. He's so interesting and really, really nice. But he says, like, animals don't dream. They don't. Oh, okay. I have to try. Remember, what it's called is a.
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Animals don't dream.
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Yeah.
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Has he never owned a dog?
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That's what I thought.
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Really?
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Like, he said, no, no, it's, you know, when they're running and yipping in their sleep, something. He's like, no, that's just reaction. It's just, you know, biological function. It's just a discharge of energy or whatever. Disjunctive syllogism. That's something that he says that they can't do, which is, like, if not A, then B is the case. So like it says here, for example.
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I have a baby carrot concealed in one of my two outstretched fists. If it's not in the left hand, then it must be in the right. Animals, claims Hannah, a charming professor who I met. Want to chat on Zoom. Cannot understand this. Agnes, I guess, is your horse. Might beg to differ.
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Piglet.
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Oh, the piglet. Okay.
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Yes, one of the piglets. Yeah.
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Have you ever read a book called Beyond Words by Carl Safina?
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No. I've read some of his other books, but I haven't read that one.
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And in there, he was saying, in the scientific community, as soon as a scientist starts to go anywhere near what they would consider anthropomorphism, you're an idiot. You're no longer a scientist. And one of the big things he's trying to say in that. He talks about in that book is that. Yeah, the scientific community does not want you to go anywhere near admitting or exploring the. The. The. The sentience of. Of, like, these are big mammals, you know? Well, yeah, I think he. I think in the book, he talks. There's three parts of it. Elephants, whales, and wolves. I think the. The three parts of the book. But in the book, a scientist says to him, you know, he's talking about this stuff, and a scientist says to him, but, Carl, you have to remember they're not human. And he says, yes, but you have to remember we are animals.
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Yeah, yeah. You know, there are a few reasons I think, that I will say I think that that's changing in science a little bit. I talked to a really, really cool professor at the University of St. Andrews called Kat Hobeter, and she spe half a year in various forests in Uganda, I think, and somewhere else, and she's studying chimps and other primates in the wild. And she's looking at gestures. So she's looking at trying to decode gestural language in chimpanzees mostly. And she said that where once the kind of variety of responses that you would get would be seen as noise in the scientific data, because you kind of just want to know. You know, it's like, what is the answer? The answer is A or is it B? Like, tell me what the answer is. Right? And she said, now, like, instead of seeing that as just noise to be got rid of and put into a chart, it's more about, like, looking at the big picture. So she said that now she'll, like, if she's looking at two chimps and one gestures to the other, she'll be like, okay, what was Bob doing before he gestured to Terry? What were they eating? What was the weather like? What time of day was it? And that stuff was quite familiar to me in terms of the work that you're doing, because it's like, all right, let's look at the whole picture. It's not this horse does this, and therefore this is the case. And I think the other thing that's kind of interesting to look at with scientists not wanting to go into any kind of idea about anthropomorphism is if you say mice feel this, mice feel that, mice sing ultrasonic love songs to each other, which is actually the case, you know, all these things that we can kind of feel are familiar to us, then how can you experiment on them? Right. It raises an ethical question that people don't really want to think about. So I think, you know, my fruit fly professor was saying to me, yeah, he's like, well, you know, fruit flies are actually really similar to us in many ways. But I hate to say it because I don't want the animal rights people to shut me down if I'm experimenting on them. So I think that has always been this undercurrent in science, is like, if we say they're really similar to us, then what do we do with that? But I do think it's changing. Anthropomorphism in science isn't the kind of career ending kind of concept that it used to be. You know, Jane Goodall, who you and me were talking about a little bit before we started the podcast, she, you know, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, the professors at Cambridge told her, don't give the chimps names, that they are not individuals, don't give them names in your scientific papers. And now people can, and that's kind of expected. So I think things are changing in science, but there are all kinds of interesting sort of undercurrents why, why some people may not want to think of animals as similar to themselves.
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B
I guess you, your energy reminds me a lot of Jane pike, our friend from New Zealand who's been on the podcast. And Jane was having a. Jane and I were having a conversation one time about, about human and animals and the, the separation and the. Jane said one of the reasons that we, especially Western society, separates ourselves from animals. So you can drive down the road and see a dead animal on the side of the road and it's just, you can just keep on driving because otherwise it would affect you. You can't drive in the road instead of dead human and just keep on driving. You know what I mean?
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Right, right.
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B
And then, you know, she was talking about, she spent quite a bit of time in India and you know, different places like that. And she's talking about the, the, the Buddhist, what are they called? Channel houses. You've heard of that. Where they, where in, you know, Tibetan societies where someone dies, they chop the body up and spread the parts around for the.
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Yeah, for the vultures.
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Vultures, yeah, to get that circle of life again.
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But they have parsees right past. It's like the Tower of Silence, that, that's where they used to.
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Anyway, she was saying that these novice Buddhist monks, they make them go and meditate at the childhouse. So you are meditating with dead human, dead bodies scattered around in front of you.
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Right.
- [31:46]
B
Like it's the, it makes them aware of the, you know, like the sanctity of life, the shortness of life, the mortality is there and. Yeah, but anyway, Jane's point was that, you know, one of the reasons we separate ourselves from animals so much is so that driving in the road or, you know, the interaction you have with an animal, so much easier if you, if they're just an object.
- [32:09]
A
Yeah, totally. I mean, and throughout history, that's why people have done that. People have, you know, from Descartes and even before that, you know, the ancient Greeks. Well, I mean, I guess in, in the case of the ancient Greeks, they were still trying to find stuff out because they had this really weird sort of dichotomy where people like Aristotle would say, you know, animals don't have. Can't think. They don't. They're not like us. We're, you know, there's this scala naturae. We're at the top. Well, we're not at the top. Angels, I think, are at the top and rocks are bottom and somewhere down there are animals, you know. But then on the other hand, he would say things like, well, to stop him, if you've got a mare that, that keeps getting out, then chop, chop off her mane to make her feel disgraced. And then she won't do it anymore, you know, because then she'll. She'll be too shy and embarrassed to go out a horsing or whatever.
- [32:57]
B
Now that is anthropomorphism.
- [33:00]
A
Yeah. So, you know, they were trying to figure stuff out, but then Descartes was like, you know, I think, therefore I am. Humans have that, animals don't. We're separate. We can do what we want. You know, we're, We're. We're kind of the kings of, of planet Earth. And, and I guess there's loads of reasons that we do that. You know, it informs what we eat. Like, if you. I had to go to a factory farm once, and it was really. Yeah, it's really interesting because I've had pet chickens that have come from all over the place. Each one's different.
- [33:34]
B
You know, this was the chicken factory farm that you talk about in the book.
- [33:36]
A
Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting to kind of sit with your humanness in that situation because you know that each of your chickens that you have at home has certain, you know, one likes blueberries, one like sun baths, blah, blah, blah. Right. Each one's different. But then you see this factory farm with tens of thousands of chickens and your brain, your human brain will not allow that thought, that each of those is an individual. Right. Because that's horrific. Like, if you think that and then you look at that, you know, and I think that's maybe what happens when people are in situations of war. It kind of explains what people do to other people in all kinds of awful situations in the world, is that there's a little switch that's thrown in the human brain where you're just like, no, I do not. I Cannot handle. I don't know which. Which happens first. It's like, I can't handle this. So I don't see it or I don't see the similarities between us. Therefore I don't have to handle it. So I'm not sure which way around that goes.
- [34:36]
B
I was reading a book a little while ago and in there it was. And I forget what the book was about, but in there he said something about as. As I block out things in my life and. And in parentheses it said something about we block out so much stuff because if we did, if we, if we let the true reality of things in, we'd all go crazy.
- [34:57]
A
Yeah, yeah. You know, I, at the very end of the book, but something that I saw, I used to live in India and there we saw quite a lot of Jain Buddhists and they're the really observant Jain Buddhists will wear a face mask, which now of course we're super familiar with. But then I was like, why are they wearing these face masks? And they'll Jane Buddhist as Jane J I A I N J I A Sorry, J A I N Buddhists. Yeah.
- [35:25]
B
And what is a Jain Buddhist?
- [35:26]
A
So it's. They believe in like non violence to the degree, like to the, you know, as much as possible. Yeah. So they'll wear a face mask so that they don't accidentally like inhale a fly and they'll sweep the floor in front of them. The monks and nuns will sweep the floor in front of them with these really soft brushes so they don't accidentally step on something. So they're really, you know, in try and live this life where you don't harm anything. And it made me think. Yeah. Working on this book, it made me think a lot about like, okay, where are our personal boundaries? What do we. Yeah, we're all like kind of in this little shifting world where we're like, oh, this is an individual. This is something that I can kind of associate myself with and see myself in and then not this. So, yeah, it goes back to this thing as like. And you know, it made me think a lot about your work because, you know, once you see it, you can't unsee it. So, you know, once you see a horse's stress indicators, you can't unsee them. You can't just jump on it. Well, I mean you could, but you know, you would know that you were doing that regardless rather than just not seeing them. Yeah. It's such an interesting question. And it's interesting to ask yourself that because sort of just See the boundaries of where your human mind will go and won't go. And I talked to Peter Singer, who's a moral philosopher, and he talked about circles of compassion that have shifted over time. So we used to sort of. Our circle used to be just our little nuclear family or our tribe, and that kind of expanded to be our country, maybe, or our community. And. And he's kind of looking for this world in which everything, animals included, is kind of, you know, encompassed in this circle of compassion. So that's where he thinks he's got a very optimistic view of where humanity's going. He thinks that's where we're going.
- [37:22]
B
I have to look him up. Let's back up a minute. Because you said mice sing ultrasonic love songs to each other.
- [37:28]
A
They do. They do.
- [37:30]
B
Stop it.
- [37:34]
A
Yeah. You know, I think that's something that was really interesting that I came across again and again in this book is like, the more we look for things, the more we find. So you know how people have always thought that turtles kind of just lay their eggs on the beach, and then off they go and they abandon the babies. Babies make it to the water and survive, or don't. But there's a. I think her name's Camilla Ferrara, and she's a researcher in South America, and she found out that river turtles, they lay their eggs. Okay, this is really crazy. And I love this fact. The baby turtles inside the eggs communicate to each other before they hatch to coordinate hatching, because they all have a better chance of survival if they all hatch at the same time. Not only that. So they're communicating, like, not audibly, that we can hear, but she had a microphone. She could hear it. The mother turtle is in the water calling to them. Like, we didn't know that until a couple of years ago. No one knew that. Everyone was like, ah, turtles just abandoned their babies and off they go to live their good lives by themselves. No, that's not the case. So we're still finding out all these ways, like with ultrasonic love songs in mice, that animals are communicating, that we didn't know. And even at sort of the other end of the spectrum, you know, the kind of deep rumblings that elephants make that you can hear from.
- [38:57]
B
That's absolutely.
- [38:58]
A
That wasn't even. That was only discovered really, quite recently. And it was only because Katy Payne, a scientist, was standing in a zoo, and she had been there all week trying to figure out how elephants were communicating with each other through a kind of a concrete wall, I think it was.
- [39:14]
B
Yeah, it was concrete Wall, I think.
- [39:15]
A
Yeah. And she had felt this feeling in her ears, like when you've got the car window rolled down on the highway and she was like, what is that? And it turns out that, you know, that's elephant communication. That wasn't very long ago. So, yeah, we're always figuring out these ways in. Even elephants, you know, one scale, mice on the other are communicating with each other.
- [39:35]
B
It wasn't very long ago that scientists thought that infants didn't feel pain.
- [39:40]
A
True.
- [39:40]
B
Wasn't very long ago women didn't have the vote. You know what I mean?
- [39:43]
A
Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's. Yeah, it's interesting. And you know, there are still people like Hanok. And then I met this other guy called Herb Terrace, who's a primate researcher who are like, no, apes cannot communicate with. They don't have, they're not interested in communicating with humans. This is like. There was a whole series of experiments done in the 60s where they taught apes American Sign Language, chimps specifically. And he's still like, no, it doesn't exist because his, he thinks his experiment didn't work. So he said, no, that is not. It was all a big mistake. Chimps cannot speak American Sign Language. They're basically parroting the signs. But it turns out, and I think this is really interesting for anyone training horses is that they. He was teaching them with non referential rewards. So he was trying to teach chimps a word, so it would sign the word and then he'd give him a treat, right? Like just a treat. So sign the word for like ball or apple and he'd give him a treat. Whereas some other people who were doing the same experiments, the chimp would sign the word for apple or ball and they would give them the apple or the ball. And that's how you make connections, that's how children learn language.
- [40:59]
B
Right.
- [40:59]
A
You don't give a child a cookie because it learnt a word. Unless the word might be cookie. Yeah. So there are still people who are like, no, even our closest relatives, like chimps and gorillas and orangutans, they've got nothing to say. So, yeah, we're still on that path, I think.
- [41:16]
B
Wow. Okay, so let's get to the Dick Cheney mask. Dick Cheney mask. So you're talking in here, you're talking about. You said there was a report from the University of Edinburgh saying that a certain type of hummingbird has an exceptional memory for individual blossoms they've visited. But then you said you read a slew of studies about wild crows, how they recognize human voices. And face. And then you said, your favorite experiment where they donned rubber mask. Tell me about that one.
- [41:50]
A
Yeah, so I think they were trying to figure out whether crows could remember human faces. So they had researchers walk through an area that crows were nesting and not bother them at all. And then I think they put a researcher in like a rubber. You know, those, like rubber Halloween masks. And it was Dick Cheney's face.
- [42:13]
B
Actually, the other way around, it said here, researchers donned a rubber caveman mask to trap, banned, and released crows and a Dick Cheney mask. Someone else in a Dick Cheney mask just walked through their territory but didn't do anything. So the caveman mask caught the trapped. The birds put bands on them and released them. The Dick Cheney guy just walked through. Two years later, the crow community, it's a younger generation included, still scolded and dive bombed the caveman, but left lucky Dick alone.
- [42:44]
A
That's right, yes.
- [42:46]
B
So, and then this next sentence here, I love your writing, it said, but so the. Two years later, the crow community, its younger generation included, still scolded and dive bombed the caveman, but left lucky Dick alone. The kind of cultural transmission that reminds me of being warned to steer clear of a neighborhood house in which something nasty once happened.
- [43:07]
A
Yeah, right. It's like, you know, the children were told, oh, stay away, stay away from, stay away from that one. Don't go near there. And that kind of cultural transmission happens in lots of. I mean, it happens with whales as well. The reason I was looking into that was because we have some hummingbirds here. And I can't remember if this was exactly why I mentioned this in the book, but the hummingbirds started hovering at the kitchen window if the feeder was empty. And I was like, am I imagining that? Are they looking for me? Because of course, they fly a little distance away and watch while you refill the feeder. And I guess we were always underestimating what a creature might be capable of. So I was like, oh, I must be imagining this. This can't be happening. And then I started looking into it and finding there are lots and lots of at least anecdotal evidence and then other scientific evidence of hummingbirds recognizing flowers, birds recognizing human faces, bees recognizing human faces. And then my. This little room that I'm talking to you now is on the other side of the house. And one day the hummingbird is, like, hovering at this window. And I was like, well, there's never been a feeder here. There's no flowers that he would be feeding from here. Is he? I mean, am I. Is this real. Is he actually waiting for me? Because I hadn't hung the feeder up. So I walked through the house, all the way back around to the kitchen, and there he is waiting. And. Yeah, and so.
- [44:43]
B
So did you then let it run out again to see if he would come back around?
- [44:46]
A
And I tried not to because, yeah, it was kind of like an angry little. Little creature.
- [44:52]
B
Angry hummingbird.
- [44:53]
A
Yeah, he's quite angry. Yeah. They make their feelings known quite. You know, they dive bomb you or. Yeah, a few will dive bomb you if they think you're too close to their food. So, yeah, no, I didn't keep doing it. It felt like a bit mean, but, yeah, that was sort of set me off on this. Like, can animals, except for our pets, recognize human faces? And again, the answer is yes. I think there's even a study that shows that fish recognize human faces. So, yeah, it's quite. It's really cool.
- [45:24]
B
You know, it's really interesting. We're 42 minutes into this, and we're up to page 11 in the book. Like, that's the thing I just love. I'm like. I was in reading this book, I'm like, I was just thinking about all the stories behind the research. You know, we're up to page 11, and you're spoken to this guy, and you went to this guy and you talked to this guy. And so then you kind of get into Darwin, and then we kind of get into B.F. skinner, and then you get into. What do you know about. Who did Noam Chomsky get into arguments with About.
- [46:03]
A
He got into lots of arguments with Skinner. Yeah, because they were really the two sort of faces of the nature nurture debate. So Skinner said, you can teach anything. Any. You know, he kind of came up with the four quadrants of conditioning. And he was. He was like, no, you can condition pretty much. And everyone's born a blank slate. And upon that, you write conditioning, you know, so you can learn things. That's how we learn. That's how we learn language. And Chomsky said, no. And, you know, this is, I think in the 50s, Skinner had just published a book where he, you know, he was this great professor who'd said, this is how we learn. And then Chomsky, who was young at the time, like a young student, typewrote him a really angry letter and said, you're wrong. This is not true. You're absolutely incorrect. And this is why. And his idea is that we. It's kind of like almost like human exceptionalism, that we have a gene that Allows us to have human language. No one else can have it, and that's specific to humans. So they got into lots of. Well, at first, Skinner, you know, who's this great professor, was like, who is this young undergraduate, you know, like, challenging my ideas, and kind of ignored him. But Chomsky was like, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, and wouldn't go away. And they ended up getting into some big fights about it. And, yeah, that's. You know, that debate's still going on. I think most people now think it's a combination of things. It's not one thing. It's not that we're nothing. Language, for example, is not innate, but it's also not just learned. It's like a combo of the two. And, you know, I think somebody has. Lots of people have done research into whether that gene even is specific to humans, and there's some question about whether birds have a similar gene which allows them to learn songs, specifically songbirds. So that. But that was basically. They had big fights about the nature versus nurture, and people tended to fall into one camp or the other.
- [47:55]
B
Yeah, yeah, interesting. There's, you know, you're talking about personality, and there's a little note here at the bottom of one of these pages that I loved that I noted. It said, another useful way to think about personality is as a consistent display of individual behavior in response to any given stimulus. If this same behavior is broadly exhibited across the species, it might be a species behavior, not a personality trait. And like your fruit flies are all different, and your earwigs were different, your cockroaches were different. And it says, for example, if a human runs away from a bear, that's not necessarily because they have a fearful personality, but if they always run away from a butterfly, this could be considered a personality trait. So, yeah. Yes. I just love this book, but I just love all the research that went in it. So now we're up to. My note says cockroaches. Tokyo Metropolitan Museum.
- [48:55]
A
Oh, that's that. That's the cockroach researcher.
- [48:58]
B
That was the cockroach researcher.
- [48:59]
A
He's a. Something I thought you would find cool about this, actually, is that he. He came to this all through a Sherlock Holmes story, and he was reading a Sherlock Holmes short story. And there's something about. I can't remember the exact quote, but it's about the aggregate. You know, the aggregate of people would do. Would follow the crowd. That's the sort of. The basic kind of idea of that quote. And that was what set him onto this path of Discovery of personality in cockroaches. And I thought it was very cool because wasn't Sherlock the horse that set you on this?
- [49:39]
B
As soon as you said Sherlock Holmes story, I'm like, okay, yeah, I can see it all being tied in together here.
- [49:45]
A
So I thought that was pretty cool. At the time I was like, I remember I was chatting with him, you know, I already knew the story about Sherlock. And so I was chatting with him and he said, sherlock Holmes. I was like, oh. And I remember writing Warwick and then just putting a circle around it because it's, you know, interesting that both those things would be, would send you on a path of discovery, you know, from a Conan Doyle kind of perspective.
- [50:08]
B
Right. And here's a fun fact that you had in your, in your book here. And I forget what this was in the fruit fly, okay, talking about the guy with the fruit flies. But it said in another report to.
- [50:21]
A
This effect, I know which one you're going to say.
- [50:25]
B
The mating choices of male earwigs, earwigs who each have two penises, were studied in 2021 in Japan. To researchers surprise, earwigs randomly favor the use of one of their pair of penises, either being a southpaw or a righty. To study this further, and this is not good, but to study this further, scientists amputated one of the earwigs penises only to find he was just as fecund with the remaining previously lesser used one.
- [50:56]
A
Yeah, you know, to be a fly on the wall in that experiment, you know, somewhere very scientific in Tokyo, there's, you know, all dressed in white in some laboratory. That is the experiment that they're doing. Yeah, but you know, again, it was to do with the fact that choice, even if you've got. So I think the idea, the idea behind that experiment is similar to the righties or lefties in a fruit fly, is if you've got a choice of two things, some, in this case penises, then some creatures will choose one, some will choose the other. And that isn't inherited. That's just almost back to that kind of biological roll of the dice as to which wiring was wired where in the brain. But I actually didn't tell Indy that fact at the time.
- [51:53]
B
I didn't read that little bit. But it says, I didn't tell, I didn't tell Indy about the two pins.
- [51:57]
A
Yeah, I thought he'd be horrified. I just got him liking earwigs. I was, I'm not sure what that's going to do to him. So I left that one out.
- [52:06]
B
Okay, so what's the next big mind boggling thing I wanted to talk about? Oh, okay. So Bernie. Tell me about Bernie. So Bernie is a sound guy, isn't he?
- [52:23]
A
He's a soundscape ecologist. Yes. So the reason I took to. So one of the chapters in the book, I kind of wanted to. Okay. So I. At the beginning I thought, right, what is listening? All right, what? Let's define what listening to an animal is. So I did that. And that was cockroaches and fruit flies and things. And then I thought, all right, I think the next question that people might ask is why? Why listen? Like, why bother listening to animals at all? So for that I went to all these other different scientists and asked them and got all, you know, that mentioned Peter Singer, the. The philosopher. And he. He talked about sort of circles of compassion. So there's lots of different reasons for listening to animals. Bernie Krause is very cool. He's in his 80s. He. This is something. I don't know if scientists have this particular ability to still be like, extremely youthful in their 70s and 80s, but lots of them that I met, the really cool ones, were all like that. And he.
- [53:24]
B
Don't you think that they're still passionate about something? Like they're fascinated by the subject, can't let it go.
- [53:29]
A
You know, you and I were chatting about Jane Goodall. She was the same, Right. You know, you wouldn't have pegged her for nearly 90 when she was in her late 80s, just as passionate as she was 50 years before. Right. So, yeah, I think that probably keeps you young. So he had a flourishing career in the 60s in LA. He was doing soundtrack. He told me that. So blithely he goes, oh, yeah, I was working on Apocalypse now and I kind of like dropped my pen and went, sorry, what? And he's like, yeah, yeah. You know, with Coppola on Apocalypse now, it was like, it wasn't my bag man. Because he's still like talking like, he's like in 1960s California. And he goes, yeah. And I worked on a Monkees record. I played the synthesizer and I'm just like, what? This is crazy.
- [54:17]
B
Monkeys. The band. Not Monkeys.
- [54:19]
A
Yeah, Monkeys.
- [54:21]
B
Not soundscaping Monkeys.
- [54:23]
A
Yeah, yeah. And you could actually, I think it's called. Oh, it's called Star Collector was the song. So I lit it up and listened to him playing his synthesizer in the background. But he. Then he gave it all up. He was like, yeah, that was not it. That was not it for me. I decided to go the other way. So he left LA and went to study sounds in nature. And at the time, the way that they recorded natural sounds for kind of catalogs of sounds was to isolate an animal or a bird song or, you know, a natural sound of some sort and record just that with a parabolic disc and then put it in, like a library of sounds. And he was like, yeah, you know, that doesn't really tell you that much. That's like listening to, I don't know, a flute in a symphony and just the flute. Like, if you listen to a flute out of the context of the whole symph, what are you going to hear? You're not going to hear the beauty of the whole thing. So his idea was, which was kind of revolutionary at the time, was to go out into nature and just record the whole sound, everything that you could hear. And then he came to the realization that you can hear the sounds of extinction better than you can see them. So if you listen to a soundscape over a period of time, even if that sounds, the landscape itself looks like not to have been altered, the sounds will tell you things that your eyes won't about biodiversity, which was so interesting. And he also. The other thing that he did was he kind of separated sounds into three different kinds. So I got to try and remember them. There's the anthropony, which is the sounds that the human world makes. There's a biophony, which is the sounds that, you know, the. The non human world makes. And then there's the geophony, which is sort of natural sounds like the wind and the rain and things that aren't that are kind of natural biological sounds, but they're not created by an organism. Yeah. And so he went off into the wilderness and for years he listened to this specific meadow in California. And then after a while, it was selectively logged, so sensitively logged by logging companies. So it looks the same. And so from the outside you'd say, oh, they did a really good job. But when he listened and recorded the sounds and, you know, you can kind of see them on a spectrogram, so it's kind of like you might get it on your phone for like bird song. He realized that most of those birds had gone. So even though it looked the same, it sounded very different. And it was like a really good indication of the health of that ecosystem having actually suffered stuff that you couldn't see. So, yeah, that's Bernie Kraus work. And he's done that his whole life. He's got catalogues of sounds. I think his House suffered like a massive forest, like a forest fire. He lived in California, and forest fire ripped through and destroyed his house and his own personal library of sounds. But he'd already digitized them, so they were somewhere else. So it sort of saved his life's work. But yeah, and actually it was the sound that saved him because he's so attuned to sound that I think he heard the crackle of the flames and realized that this forest fire was rushing to the house. Yeah.
- [57:37]
B
There's a bit here where he says, He says the insidious influence our own sound has on the environment. He said, like car noise from a highway, that prevents birds from finding each other with their calls. When synchronicity is broken like this, lone voices become vulnerable to predators. So just the sounds that humans here on Earth make actually interrupt the communication of. Yeah, say birds and stuff. Anyway, yeah.
- [58:16]
A
You know, that's a lot of the underwater issues too, right? Is like the sounds, marine sounds, whale calls, not being as audible to whales from long distances because of shipping and things like that, you know, because of the way that sound travels underwater.
- [58:34]
B
And there's a bit in this book, and I hope you don't mind if I read directly from the book.
- [58:39]
A
No, not at all.
- [58:40]
B
You said to him, how can we listen better? I ask, go outside three times a day. He prescribes first half an hour before dawn, then late afternoon, when human created noise tends to die down, settle in and just listen and finally do the same in the same place at night. Night, he adds, is magical. It's how we got our spirituality. People don't know what they were hearing, so they made up tales about gods in the forest. And you said, so in a sense, listen to animals created culture. He nods and smiles. Wow. Is all I can say. I open my mouth, close it, open it again. Wow. I've been reading this book at nighttime and I got to the end of that part and like, okay, I need to close it now and close my eyes and go to sleep and think about that. That what aligns. So in a sense, listening to animals.
- [59:46]
A
Created culture, isn't that amazing? The thought that that's what our ancestors were doing? Yeah, yeah.
- [59:59]
B
So cool. Yeah. I had a big post it note there. Listening to animals created culture. So at some other point in time further along here in the book, you talk about a good guy named Mark Beckoff. And one of the things you said he. I first read Mark's classic, the Emotional Lives of animals almost 20 years ago. So I'm not sure when this thing was written. You read it 20 years ago. But the thing is, for me, and we talked about this before we started the podcast, the thing is, for me, you know, it's only been a decade since I've been aware of, you know, like, opened up to the. The sentience of. The complex sentience of, of animals. But, yeah, this book, the Emotional lives of animals 20 years ago. I mean, I wasn't thinking about stuff like that 20 years ago.
- [60:55]
A
But you say that, but. But what about, you know, your pet dog? I bet you were.
- [61:02]
B
Well, yes, yes. But I certainly wasn't thinking about earwigs and cockroaches and hummingbirds coming around the house to say, hey, come. You know what I mean?
- [61:12]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [61:13]
B
So what do you know? You obviously had a. Did you have a chat with this Mark Beckoff?
- [61:18]
A
Yes. Mark Beckoff is another one of those just phenomenal scientists. He's in his. I think he's late 70s, so, you know, he's. He's a. He's a. He's a young one of the. Of that old vanguard, but he is, again, not. So I'll just preface this by saying that when I started the scientific portion of this book, I was pretty scared of science. I thought I wasn't good at science. I was like, I'm not going to understand it. As a child, I was kind of told, that's not your thing. So I was like, okay, okay, this is going to be challenging. So I thought, oh, I'm just going to meet all these really dry people. I'm not going to understand what they're talking about. Not the case at all. Mark Beckhoff is an ethologist. He's a professor at the University of Boulder, Colorado. And he's. He was best friends or really close friends with Jane Goodall. They'd written books together. So he's so, you know, just like Bernie Kraus is telling me. Oh, yeah, Coppola. You know, in a throwaway way. He said, oh, Mark says to me, oh, yeah, Jane and I are doing this. And I stopped him and said, jane, Jane and you. Who's Jane? And he's like, oh, oh, Goodall. And continues talking like it's, you know, oh, just in passing. Okay, it's me and Jane. Yeah, that's me and Jane. So they've. Because they've written some books together and things. Anyway, he studied coyotes for a long time. He studied penguins for a long time. He teaches a course in understanding animal communication at. I'm not sure if it's a county jail, but he's at a prison in Colorado as well. Because his idea is that these inmates who felt very othered, you know, often they feel like they're sort of separate from their families. They've never fit in, or they've been othered by society because now they're prisoners and, you know, they're convicts, they've done something bad. And he kind of helps them reconnect with themselves through their memories of, like, their pet that they had as a child who understood them unconditionally. So he's very, very cool. Mark Beckhov is. He has a ponytail, an earring, wears Lycra. And then he says to me, I was telling me about my piglets, and he goes, oh, I've got a couple of great friends who are pigs. And starts sending me these photos of himself, like giving the thumbs up in Lycra with these friends of his that are pigs called. I can't remember what they're called, like Ernestine and something else, you know, these glorious pigs that he spends time with. He started the first non dissection biology lab at the University of Boulder. And I guess this was probably in the 70s or 80s, and all the other professors were like, yeah, no, no one's going to come to this. They're not going to come to a non dissection lab. Everybody needs to do dissection. They are not going to come to your lab. And his class, you know, sold out. And he had to start another class. And so he's kind of changed perceptions about the idea of individuals. He also, I think before he decided to become an ornithologist, he wanted to be a doctor. So one of the labs that he had to work in was experimenting on cats. And he gave the cats names. And the scientist was like, you cannot do that. You cannot name these cats. And he's like, yeah, oh, I'm going to. And so he gave them names. And again, he's kind of like reminding the people in the lab that these cats are not any different to your cat at home. And your cat at home has a name. Yeah, very cool guy. And he's been working on that stuff. He's been talking a lot about individuals as well. So he talks about coyote individuals, Adelie penguins, how even if a penguin colony all looks the same, if you sit there and watch them for long enough, you'll start to see how each individual penguin behaves differently.
- [65:15]
B
And how did, why did you look him up? What, what did you say?
- [65:18]
A
He is So I think I was asking him, why. Listen, why should we Listen to animals. And he said, because they're individuals like us. You know, that was a message that I got from Clive. A surprising amount of scientists was like, there's another guy, a writer called Jonathan Balcombe. And he said, animals, he has a great way of putting it. Something like, they don't just have biology, they have biographies.
- [65:48]
B
It says, because you said, why listen? And he said, because animals aren't just alive, they have lives. They don't just have biology, they have biographies. They have good days and not good days. Their life matters to them. Listening is an act of empathy, of caring about them and putting ourselves in their position. And so that's who. Jonathan Balcombe, he's an anthropologist.
- [66:08]
A
That's Jonathan Balcombe, yeah, he's an ethologist and an author. Yeah, he's written some cool books. He's written about fish joy, you know, the feelings of joy in animals in species that we wouldn't expect. Like, does a fish feel joy? Does a cow feel joy?
- [66:22]
B
His book's called Pleasurable Kingdom, which details how animals seek experiences just as humans do, simply for feeling good.
- [66:28]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's pretty cool. I don't know if you've had that experience, but I know that, and I mentioned this in this book, is that we used to go every day to the beach in Goa when we lived in India to watch the sunset. And lots of sort of locals go down to the beach and the sort of travelers go down to the beach and everyone sort of congregates on the beach to watch the sunset. And a lot of the stray dogs would come down to the beach as well and sit on the beach. And so did a lot of the free roaming cows. And they weren't being given anything. So there wasn't any sort of temptation. Like it wasn't like, you're going to get, you know, some tourists are going to feed you or whatever, but everybody sort of quietly congregated on the beach every day and just sort of sat there waiting for the sun to go down and then wandered off into the evening. And I always thought that that was because the cows are just enjoying. Why wouldn't the cow be enjoying the sunset like we are? I mean, that's a feeling, right? That's not intellectual pursuit, that's just a good feeling. And the thing that we have in common with animals is that they are feeling beings and so are we. So, you know, it kind of. It's not a great leap of logic to think that animals may be doing things just for enjoyment just like we do.
- [67:53]
B
But it's not just animals. Looks like here you talked to. You looked into the National Library of Soil Sounds. Is that. Was that Bernie stuff, too?
- [68:07]
A
That's not Bernie, but it's another. It's. It's kind of a similar field. So there's a project called Soundwell, and I think it's in Switzerland, and it's looking at. It's measuring soil health by listening to soil. And so just in much the same way that Bernie's listening to the environment and figuring out the health of it, that is like sticking a probe underground and listening. And, you know, soil health is measured by sound just. Just the same as our environment. And so there's all kinds of creatures all the time making sounds inside the earth. And they're not necessarily sounds of communication. It can just be them going about their day. But if you have an area of soil that has no sound, then that's an indication that that soil is probably not doing. It's probably not very healthy in terms of the microorganisms and things that aren't there. And I listened to some of those recordings, and you can listen to them online, so you can go to their website and you can click on this little map, and you can click in on the map, in. On the map to some weird little area somewhere in, like, a vale, somewhere high up in the, you know, in the mountains of Switzer. And then you can click on a recording. You can listen, and that recording might be from, like 10 years ago. And you hear. Oh, you hear all these sounds, like your brain's trying to figure out what they are. And of course, you don't know. And it can be like springtails and like little creatures munching on things underground or the sound of roots growing. I mean, that's crazy. Like, they make a sound, you know, when they're growing. And I just think that when you're having a bad day, when you're just like, oh, feel really disconnected from the world, I would really recommend that you go to that website and just listen to those sounds, because you're just like. That is going on underneath us all the time. Like, night and day. No matter where you are, the soil underneath your house or your apartment building or the road or the highway that you're on is making a sound. Isn't that so cool? Just like, we are not alone.
- [70:11]
B
Fascinating.
- [70:12]
A
Yeah. It made me feel really connected to everything. Right. And then I think that's part of listening is feeling connection, right?
- [70:23]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if you. You can't separate the two.
- [70:27]
A
No.
- [70:28]
B
You know, if you want to feel connected, you got to listen. But if you listen, you'll feel connected. Yeah, yeah. The next part I thought was fascinating because I think we've all heard stories about this is about. Anecdotal evidence of animals leaving places like before earthquakes or tsunamis or things like that.
- [70:53]
A
Yeah, yeah. Something that sort of surprised me a little bit about that is that. And that kind of goes back to what you were saying earlier about anthropomorphism, is that it hasn't really been studied extensively. Given that the studies that have been done show quite clear correlation between animal behavior prior to some sort of catastrophic event like an earthquake or a tsunami and then that thing happening. Right. So that cause and effect has been established in science, but then research sort of has tailed off on that. So, yeah, a lot of the accounts are kind of anecdotal. And I write in the book about my experience with that, which was we used to live before for a little while when I was working as a journalist. We were living in a city center, and my dog started barking one night on the roof. We lived on the top floor, and he was running out to the roof, barking, running back in. And I was just like, oh, shut up. It was like the middle of the night, and I'm like, stop it. You're going to wake the baby up. You know, just stop barking. He would not stop. Kept running outside, barking, running back in. Eventually I got up because I was just like, what do you want? You know, went outside and the building was on fire. And I called the fire brigade and the fireman told me, you know, well, the fire was sort of inches away from this bank of propane tanks, and had it gone on a little bit longer, then, you know, everybody would have just gone up. And we walked through the lobby with the dog. We hadn't even met the neighbors. We'd just moved in and in middle of the night, got the dog. I was pregnant, got a baby. Glass block kind of lobby, you know those, like, glass block walls.
- [72:34]
B
Yeah.
- [72:35]
A
So those were exploding in the heat. So it's like boom, boom, boom. With these exploding. We were walking through the lobby. Yeah, that was because of the dog. So listening to your animals can actually be really beneficial because we would have slept through it. Like, it was not, you know, there was no noise. He could just see the flames from the balcony. And he was like, I am going to wake these people up. I don't know why they're sleeping through this. So, yeah, that's my anecdotal evidence. But I mean, there's examples of elephants running before the huge, you know, the kind of historic tsunami in South Asia. And that's a. You know, there are even some examples from antiquity and they're again, a little bit like. Okay, you know, some of them are kind of. A little bit more kind of mythological, but still. Yeah, it's been kind of. I think, think that it would be beneficial to study that a little bit more.
- [73:31]
B
Yeah. You know, the thing is these days, you know, have CCT tv, you know, cameras everywhere and stuff. And I got on the other night on Instagram, I was scrolling, and I got a. A reel or a. On a thing of animals rescuing people caught on, like, you know, ring cameras or. Or CCTV cameras or whatever. But like. Like there was a. A baby on a. On a footpath in a stroller. I've got to translate that into American. On a sidewalk in a buggy. No.
- [74:10]
A
Maybe they call it a stroller in America. It's a push chair in England.
- [74:13]
B
Yeah, A push chair is what they call it. Okay. And the mother. And the mother's standing there as well, but. And there's a big. She's got a big dog with her. And the dog jumps up on the stroller, grabs the baby by the front of the shirt sort of thing and drags the baby out of the stroller. And then the next thing, you see a tire that had come off a car come straight through the middle of the camera and just demolish that stroller. Wow. And I got on a whole. And so these are all CCTV footages. This is, you know, like, think about. If you go. The reason I said that, I think that if you're going to study that. How would you study that? You know, I mean, you can't set the situation up. Anyway, this was a whole lot of footage of. Of animals saving people. You know, like, there was another one where a tree fell down, you know, and the dog grabs the person and drags them out and then the tree falls down. Stuff like that.
- [75:06]
A
Wow.
- [75:06]
B
In your research, did you ever. Did you ever read Rupert Sheldrake's Dogs who Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home or. Have you ever read that one?
- [75:16]
A
Yeah, so, yeah, I watched the. There's also, like a little, I think, a documentary that they made about that. Have you seen the little documentary?
- [75:24]
B
No.
- [75:26]
A
So they. They set that up as. I think it was some kind of funny thing that was like a German or a Swiss television production company. And they found one of the people who. Rupert Sheldrake had been studying. And they. And this is like an old documentary now. It's probably from the 80s, I guess. And they. So they filmed her going to work, and then they filmed her dog, who was at home with her very, very British parents. And you can tell they were British because they were both sitting reading the newspaper in their armchairs, and they still had their shoes on in the house. And that's such a British thing. It's like, you know, their. Their nice shoes done up properly in the house, and they're behind their newspapers. And the one film crew found follows her, and then the other film crews at home with the dog and she. I think somehow they coordinate it that she decides to come home different. Different ways. So she'll come home on a bicycle or she'll get in a taxi and come home unannounced, different times of day. And then they filmed the dog to see how many times the dog was waiting at the window for her unexpected arrival. While the parents were still behind the papers, they didn't know she was coming home. And they found this, you know, this crazy correlation between the two. And I think that was an offshoot of. Of his experiments, and they had set it up so that you could actually see it in practice in real life. Yeah, right.
- [76:45]
B
What about. Have you ever read the Elephant Whisperer?
- [76:49]
A
I think I've got that here. Oh, no, that's a different book. No, I don't think I have. No.
- [76:53]
B
There's a guy in Africa that started at this elephant sanctuary, but the. He had a small plane once. He. Once he. And all these were rogue elephants. These were elephants that, you know, were uncontrollable, whatever. And. But once he had this established sanctuary or whatever, and he was doing things like he had a small plane and he'd fly off to Johannesburg or whatever, and then he'd fly home, and the elephants would always come up to the house before he landed.
- [77:21]
A
Oh, my gosh.
- [77:23]
B
Okay. But that's cool. But there was a story in there about he was in Johannesburg and he took off and they got in the air and then he's like, oh, no, hang on, we've got to go back. So he goes back, lands, stays an extra night for some reason, and then comes back, and when he lands at home, the elephants are all at the house. But the servant said it was really interesting yesterday. I don't know what happened. Like, they never get it wrong, but they all came up to the house yesterday, and then you didn't show up.
- [77:59]
A
Wow.
- [78:00]
B
It's like, wow.
- [78:03]
A
Yeah, that's Crazy. Yeah.
- [78:07]
B
Is it?
- [78:08]
A
Well, not really. I mean, it's crazy in the sense that you're like, wow, that's amazing. But, you know, we. I think we have these experience, you know, Rupert Sheldrake also did those experiments, didn't he, with, you know, how many times you might think of someone and then they call you or, you know, knowing someone's about to show. Not. Not just the dog, but you also knowing that someone's about to come home, and then they walk in and, you know, thinking of someone, they appear. So, yeah, there's a lot more. So actually in the third part of this book, I, you know, that's the little territory that I. That's. That's when I allowed myself to go down that rabbit hole. Because until then I was sort of working with. Listening to. Reading reports, listening to experts. And then in the third part of the book where I'm sort of start like playing around with the idea of intuition. I mean, I still was talking to experts in that field, but that was where it all started to go a little bit more, you know, where the. The boundaries start to sort of blur a little bit.
- [79:08]
B
I can't wait to get to that part of the book. But there's part here where you talk to an animal psychologist named Irene Pepperberg about birds.
- [79:17]
A
Yeah, quite a lot. People may have heard of her, so. Or they may have heard of the bird that she worked with. So she worked with Alex, the African grey parrot. And so she is also part of those that. That era of experimenters which were around the 60s and the 70s, where their interest was. It was what have animals got to say to us, but in our language. So interested in finding out how much human language an animal could learn and then not just like parrot, but actually use like. So she went into a pet shop, she asked the guy behind the counter to randomly choose one of the African grey parrots that they had for sale so that it wouldn't be that she picked out like a particularly smart one or a particularly sort of personable one. And then she decided to train him using the same kind of referential learning that worked with the chimps. So it was, you know, show him something that he was interested in, like paper he'd like, because, you know, they can crinkle it and play with it. And then when he said paper, he received the paper. And she also figured out that a really good model of learning with a parrot would be to have. So there would be her, another researcher and the parrot. There'd be like three people present, one of whom is a parrot. And then two would be the students, and one would be the teacher. And they would kind of rotate through those tasks. And she realized that Alex really, really liked being the teacher. This is the parrot. And he really liked it when the researcher got the answer wrong. And he could be like, no, incorrect. So he was. He was a really good teacher. And he learned, like, a tremendous amount of usable human language. So he learned to count and use numbers up to. I think it was eight, might have been higher. He knew colors. He knew you could say something like, oh, Alex, which of these is a red plastic key? And there'd be all kinds of, like, different things lying around. He would go and get the red plastic key.
- [81:15]
B
Yeah, there's one here where you said she would. She would hold up, for example, two keys, one smaller metal, the other large and plastic, and ask the. The. The parrot, what's different? And the parrot would say, color. So these are two keys of different colors, different materials, and different sizes. And she says, what's different? And he says, color. And she says, what's the same? And he says, shape.
- [81:42]
A
Yeah.
- [81:43]
B
And then she says, which one's bigger? And he says, the yellow one. Also yellow. Yeah, like. Like that. That's a conversation. That's not. That's not rote learning, you know, that's not like, repeat after me sort of thing. That is totally.
- [82:00]
A
You know, my favorite fact about Alex, apart from the fact that he also came up with words for things that he didn't have a word for, maybe my favorite fact about him is. So he knew colors like you just said, but he looked in the mirror and he looked himself, and he said, what color? And the researcher said, gray, because he's an African grey parrot. And from that, he learned his own color, but he also was able to generalize. He learned the word gray. And then could be like, that's gray. That's gray. That's gray. I mean, and until then, people thought that birds had no. You know, they've got tiny little brains, size of a walnut. People thought birds couldn't learn anything. Right. Let alone. I mean, everyone knew that a parrot could parrot stuff back, but nobody knew that parrots could use that kind of language and could actually, like, assimilate it and then use it not only to describe but to also ask a question, which is like, a really complicated thing to do. The one sad thing, though, I think about those experiments is that Alex learned a lot of that stuff because he was on his own for a really long time in the laboratory. So if he Wanted to talk, it had to be in a human language because he did not have any other parrots with him. So Alex died, and now Irene has two other parrots, and they aren't actually as motivated to learn a human language because they can talk to each other in parrot. And I wrote about this, and I wasn't sure because she's a really, excuse me, interesting researcher, really warm, very passionate about what she does. Also in her 70s, yet another one. But I had to ask her, so I was like, okay. So she said, yeah, they're not as interested in talking to me in human because they can talk to each other in Paris. So I said, oh, wow. Do you know what they're saying when they're talking in parrot? And she was like, no. Why. Why would I. And that struck me as kind of sad, you know, is that we. That's. That's sort of the old way of. Of learning that we impose something upon them and then expect them to, you know. So after that, I talked to a different parrot researcher who could tell me what they're saying in their language and to us. So that kind of redressed that balance a little bit.
- [84:32]
B
This is Pame Clark.
- [84:33]
A
Yes. Yes. She was crazy. She was very cool. She was. She was like, you know, if you imagine somebody who's passionate about parrots, that's. That's who you might imagine.
- [84:46]
B
You know, it's interesting. One of the things you said in here, she was telling you to. To. It says. She really tells me, though. Parrots are considered one of the most vocal of the planet's animals. It's their body language that counts.
- [85:05]
A
Yeah.
- [85:06]
B
And you said, what kind of body language? And she said, for starters. And this is so interesting because it parallels with horses, for starters. She said, you should always look where a parrot is looking to understand what the interest or where their interest or their concern lies.
- [85:21]
A
Yeah.
- [85:21]
B
He or she is communicating with that moment. We just aren't listening. And it's. And, you know, years ago, if I had a horse and their head was stuck up in the air and they were looking at something with interest, just I would be doing something to give. Hey, pay attention to me.
- [85:35]
A
Yeah.
- [85:37]
B
Whereas these days I will look at what they're looking at, and you find that when you look at what they're looking at, not very long after that, they, you know, they. They let go of that thought, like, oh, you know, because that. It's not so much about what happens exactly in that moment, but I feel like the more you, you especially with horses, the more you can Communicate your awareness of their awareness. The more a part of the herd you are, the more a part of that. More part of that what I, you know, bearing what I call the awareness burden of the herd. The more you can do that, the more trust they have in you and the less behavioral issues you have. So who'd have thought that looking at what a nervous horse is looking at is actually going to strengthen the bond between you?
- [86:22]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [86:23]
B
And getting their attention and saying, hey, do what I tell you just makes them more obedient, but it doesn't make them have that deeper level of trust in you.
- [86:32]
A
Absolutely. And there were a few other parallels between parrots and horses, because that's one of them. And then she was also talking about how she makes. Regularly makes men cry. Grown men cry by telling them, don't carry your. Because you know how like parrots often have feather plucking, you know, this kind of stereotypes. They'll pluck their feathers if they're stressed or they'll do other things like over groom and, or bite. And she said she'll often tell grown men that they cannot carry their parrot around on their shoulder, you know, stroking them and these things, because that actually stresses a parrot out, you know, because what parrots really value is parallel activity. So they like to be doing something the same as you. So it totally made me think of horses because, you know, like matching steps or, you know, the hurdle grazing together.
- [87:27]
B
But it also reminds me of horses with, with, you know, the things that people will do. That I call inappropriate touching. Yeah, which, which, which. And it doesn't mean the touching is wrong. It's inappropriate for that particular moment. So imagine if the, if the, the patting the parrot wouldn't be a bad thing if the parrot was kind of mutually grooming you or, you know, but something I see a lot is someone's got a horse that's nervous and his head stuck in the air and he's looking at something and the person beside him scratching the neck, going, it's okay, darling. And you know the analogy I kind of use for that. It's like, you know, if I was reach. It's not a bad thing for me to reach over behind my wife's ear and caress the back of her neck. Neck. But if there's a big spider, you know, on the floor or there's a snake or something, rather than she's looking at that and she's worried about that. That's. That's not appropriate at the time.
- [88:28]
A
It's actually kind of irritating.
- [88:29]
B
Yeah, well, it's irritating. And it's also communicating my lack of awareness of her nervous system state and what is important, you know, what her level of safety is at the moment. Like, it. It wouldn't just be not good in the moment. It would carry forward to where she would have a, you know, a bit more of a lack of trust in my judgment about things. And I really feel like with horses, that's a big, you know, like these. These grown men that were told they can't pet their parrots and they, you know. Yeah, they're not paying the parrots to make the horse, the parrot feel stressed. They feel they're doing it out of. This is cool. This is what we're supposed to be doing. And when you realize it's not what you're supposed to be doing, it's very much like when I first read Men are from Mars, Women from Venus. And I realized that when I come home from work and my wife starts telling me about her day and I try to fix her problems for her, I'm not doing it out of being a dick. I'm actually. I think that's helpful until you realize, oh, it's not only not helpful, it's actually, you know, it does the opposite of being helpful.
- [89:37]
A
Yeah.
- [89:38]
B
And once, you know, it's. It's kind of like the five love languages. Once you figure out what their love language is, if you can just do that thing, it makes a whole lot more difference than doing every other thing.
- [89:51]
A
Totally. And. And I think the other. The other thing that's kind of interesting about that is that we as humans do tend to have. We sort of. We have a very visual way of interacting in the world and attacked our way of interacting in the world. So something that we tend to do, you know, and I was thinking about that character in the. Is it like Looney Tunes? You know, the I'll love him and pet him and call him George and it's like trying to squeeze Daffy Duck. You know, we tend to just want to touch. Right. We're like, oh, but I want to. You know, and it's not from a bad place of being bad or necessarily greedy. It's just like, oh, that's our way of wanting connection. So, yeah, with a horse, often you'll see people go like, oh, isn't he, you know, like hands first and then like, oh, he doesn't like me. You know, whereas.
- [90:41]
B
Or they even don't even notice he doesn't like me. And, you know, when I see a lot is someone reach a lot of times A horse will reach out with their muzzle to say hello, and the person skips the muzzle, puts the hand between their eyes and starts rubbing them on the head. And the horse turns their headlines like 40 to 5 degrees to the side. And the person's hand follows it and keeps rubbing it. And then the horse's head turns the other way and they're running, and then they take the hand away and they go, I just hi to the horsey. And the horsey was like, I tried to tell you I don't want to be touched there five times. And you didn't hear any of it, you know, and yeah, a lot of little interactions like that really adds up to those horses not feeling safe around people. Yeah, not. Because, you know, I. I have a thing I talk about where I think there's two types of trust with horses. One is that they trust that you're not going to hurt them, so they feel safe from you. But the other type of trust is they feel safe with you because you're an aware member of the herd and you can basically, what we would say in human terms, you can read the room. And I feel like a lot of times people with their horses just, well, meaning stuff, wanting to pat the horse or whatever, they kind of communicate they're not reading the room. The other horse doesn't feel safe with you, not from you, but with you. And then you get all these behaviors that people want to fix, and it's like, we just. We don't need to fix those behaviors. Those behaviors are fallout from the little ways you've been interacting with them. And. And yeah, it's getting these days to where it's really subtle, whereas, like, the beginning of a lot of the problems is things people do out of the goodness of their heart. Like, you know, I love my horse and I, you know. Yeah, it's interesting.
- [92:28]
A
Yeah. And, you know, I was guilty of that as well. I went to meet a giant Pacific octopus, and I knew better. I knew better because I do exactly know that with horses, you know, I'm very aware of, with our horses, of those tiny little signals. Signals and stress indicators and being respectful in space and all that stuff. But I went to meet this giant Pacific octopus and I was kind of like a little bit starstruck because, oh, my goodness, I'm going to get to spend time with this octopus.
- [92:56]
B
Where was this?
- [92:57]
A
This was the aquarium. What's it called? The. It's not the National Aquarium. It's in Boston. It's the main aquarium.
- [93:06]
B
Is this the place where did you read the book Soul of an Octopus.
- [93:10]
A
So I. No, you know, I specifically didn't read that before I went to meet an octopus. I didn't want to be influenced by it because. But that's Sy Montgomery's book, isn't it? I think.
- [93:19]
B
Is it the same place?
- [93:20]
A
It might be the same place. Like, I haven't read the book, so I'm not sure. It's the New England Aquarium, I think it's called. Anyway, I went to meet, and her name's Sedna, and I did exactly that. You know, I reached in to the tank and she was sort of reaching towards me and I was just. It was this human impulse of just a little, I just want to pet her. And then she was like, get lost. And she just recoiled, like, literally coiled back up with one of her tentacles with the wheel of her arms, you know, she was like, you know, piss off. And I felt so bad because I was just like, oh, I just did that thing that you're not supposed to. Yeah. But then after that, I stayed for a long time and just sat next to her and we were on our own and we met eyes and it was that moment that you have when everything's wonderful with your horses, where you're like, oh, okay, that's it. That's that, you know, that's that connection right there.
- [94:25]
B
What's it like looking into the eyes of an octopus that's looking at you?
- [94:28]
A
It was. It was. It was quite profound. Again, my human mind afterwards said, am I making this up? Just like with the hummingbirds?
- [94:37]
B
Because, you know, we've seen my octopus teacher before this.
- [94:40]
A
No, I also hadn't watched that. And I hadn't watched that because I really am not a fan of watching things that I know is going to make me cry. So I didn't watch it.
- [94:50]
B
Have you watched it?
- [94:51]
A
I haven't because it will make me cry.
- [94:54]
B
Oh, no, there's a good tears. No, you need to. There's life before my octopus teacher and life after my octopus teacher.
- [95:01]
A
Okay. And I will watch it.
- [95:02]
B
His book, Amphibious Soul. There's life before that book and there's life after that.
- [95:09]
A
Okay.
- [95:10]
B
Craig Foster's Amazing.
- [95:11]
A
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. So I went and asked an octopus expert. I was like, you know, he's. He's called the. His name's Ahmad Abdallah and he's the. He's a octopus rescuer. Like, he saves them on. He's got a little octopus sanctuary, saves them from pet shops where they've ended up, you know that the pet shop doesn't know how to look after them or supermarkets, things like that. And I said to him, he's. I, was I imagining that, that we sat looking at each other like that? And he's like, oh, no, no, you were not imagining that. And when it happens to you, like you said, there's before that happened and then there's after. You have this moment of communing with this creature that on the outside is as different from you as can possibly be imagined. You know, our mutual ancestry is millions and millions of years ago. And yet you're connecting. I mean, you're both, both sinking beings. Octopus. Octopuses are very intelligent. You can have this moment of connection without touching, you know, because octopuses are not social creatures in the sense they don't love touching each other. They like exploratory touch, but not really. They don't cuddle, really. Yeah, it was, it was very meaningful, that moment.
- [96:26]
B
I think you need to brave the crying and watch my octopus too, because after watching that, that it's like we don't know anything. I don't mean we don't know anything. I mean, the, the thing I got from octopus teacher is, oh, they are way more evolved than we are. Like, they, Yes, I think they're some sort of alien, but, yeah, they're way more evolved. So they have a brain in every one of their arms and they can.
- [96:57]
A
Taste with their suckers.
- [97:00]
B
Well, but think about how they can change shape, I mean, change color as they go over things. So they have photoreceptor cells in their skin. So they see with their skin. Yeah, and, you know, they've got however many suckers they've got, and they can operate each one of them individually and could pick up enough pressure to pick up a bowling ball. And it's like the brain power to, to, you know, think about all the power it takes to take run AI these days. It's like octopuses. The computing power is just off the.
- [97:36]
A
Charts and yet they don't have long lives. You know, even these giant Pacific octopuses live five years, maybe maximum. So I spoke to a cephalopod researcher called Dr. Alex Schnell. She's made some, some documentaries on octopuses for National Nat Geo. And she was saying that she thinks that one of the reasons that they've created, you know, they've got this like, massive intelligence is because that's. They don't have claws, they don't have teeth. You know, that's their survival strategy is to understand as much of the world as they can. Plus they don't live in, you know, in groups. They don't learn from an older. So exploratory behavior is their way of learning and keeping safe in the world. Things like, you know, being able to undo a bottle, you know, a pill bottle cap, you know, to get something inside and figuring that out really quickly and puzzles or the one where they.
- [98:33]
B
Put them in a, in a jar with a screw top lid and they've got to figure out from the inside how to unscrew the lid, you know.
- [98:40]
A
Yeah. And she's, you know, even so she works with cuttlefish and she did experiments. Have you ever heard of, you might not. I don't know if you've read this bit yet of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment. Have you ever heard of that?
- [98:54]
B
No.
- [98:55]
A
So that's a, it's, it's with children, human children. It was started and it's this, it's kind of a classic experiment now where you say to a little kid, do you want this one marshmallow? I'm going to leave it on the table, I'm going to go out and if, if you don't eat this one, then when I come back I'll give you three marshmallows. So then they have to choose, right. It's like can you exercise self control in order to know that you can resist this one thing in front of you and you know, in order to get a bigger reward. And lots of children can't do it or they can't do it for very long and they'll like, you know, scoff the marshmallow before the researcher comes back. So she, Alex Schnell did the same experiment not with Marshallos but with kind of little shrimp with cuttlefish. And she proved that cuttlefish can pass that Stanford marshmallow test so they can exercise self control with the foreknowledge that if they wait they'll get something better. And that's an experiment that loads of other animals can't even pass. And yet we think of the, you know, a cuttlefish as just like this weird little creature that's swimming around in the sea. It can pass. An experiment that like 3 year old children can't pass.
- [100:05]
B
Wowzers. Who knew? Okay, so this brings us all the way to con. I can't pronounce his last name.
- [100:15]
A
Name Slobotchikov. That's. Yeah.
- [100:18]
B
Klotikov is a. What is he, a prairie dog researcher?
- [100:25]
A
Yeah, that. Yeah, he's retired now but you know, because yet another very old and amazing and spirited scientist he spent his career trying to figure out if prairie dogs, which, you know, people think of as kind of a bit of a nuisance, are what their kind of communication, what. How complex their communication is as a group. And he found out some crazy things. He found out that prairie dogs have alarm calls that are different for different threats. To the extent that they will have a different call to say that a human is coming through wearing one color sweatshirt versus a human is coming through with a different color sweatshirt, that this was just alarm calls as well. He didn't even have time in his entire career to go into, like, their social calls and all the kind of chatter that they do. This was just looking at alarm calls and the amazing complexity of those alarm calls.
- [101:30]
B
Yeah, I was reading this bit. So he says they can describe sizes, shapes, and the speed at which a predator is approaching when the alarm calls rules.
- [101:38]
A
Yeah. And he was sort of, you know, some researchers, again, were like, yeah, no, this is bullshit. This can't be real. Why would it be important? I think that one of the questions is why? Why would this information need to be encoded in an alarm call when a general alarm call might work just as well? It would still make the group dive back into their holes. And Kahn's response to that is, that's important information for them. You know, if there's a certain coyote, for example, that really likes the taste of prairie dog and keeps coming back in again and again, it would be really useful information for that colony to know that this particular coyote is approaching versus a coyote that has historically not shown so much of an interest in eating their relatives. Right. So. And that made me think a little bit about the story that you tell about zebra and how zebra will watch. Well, you know this. You tell that story. Tell me, because I like that story.
- [102:46]
B
Oh. So, you know, when I was in Kenya a couple of years ago, we stayed at this place that's surrounded by all this open land. And so there's herds of zebra and wildebeest and stuff like that. And I noticed that when the, you know, those zebra will be out there grazing, all their heads are down the grazing. And as you approach, the first one notices, you said, pops up, and then the rest of the heads pop up, whatever. But I also noticed watching these zebra that, you know, when some of them would lay down to sleep, the other ones would not graze. They would stand around, like, in a big circle. But I always wanted, like. And they take turns in doing it. But I always wonder, like, who. Who says, okay, I'll stand watch, you lay down, like, is there how that order. Order works out? And it's, and it's almost like it's a shared, a shared thing to where everybody understands we don't graze while the others are laying down. You know what I mean? It was really interesting to observe that.
- [103:45]
A
And didn't you say as well that zebra will, Will look up and will know the difference between a predator who's just walking by?
- [103:54]
B
I mean, that's, you know, I, I don't know that, but, you know, I'll come up with a lot of analogies for teaching to get a point across. And yeah, you know, I talk about with horses, you know, they use horses a lot for like, equine assisted therapy. And one of the reasons why is because they're very good at detecting incongruent behavior when your inner landscape and your outer landscape don't really line up. And I said, I think that's probably an evolutionary thing. You know, I said, if you've watched National Geographic and you see the zebras are grazing and in the background a lion's walking past, and the zebras don't even pick their heads up because the line is he's walking to the watering hole both inside and outside. Whereas if he was pretending he was walking to the watering hole, but he was actually keeping an eye out on the zebra, I'm. I'm sure that energy would feel, Feel slightly different. But that's not. Yeah, that's not any scientific research. That's just, you know, me using an analogy to try to get people to think about having their, their inner landscape and their outer landscape line up in order to get along with the horse better.
- [104:56]
A
Right. Well, that's certainly the case with prairie dogs, that they will distinguish between predators so that they'll know, you know, this one. So another difference in their calls that Con Slobodchikov discovered is that if one of, he got one of his researchers to sort of walk through the colony and do anything, and they had a certain call that they would make for that, and then he got that same researcher to go and fire a gun in the air, and the call changed consistently even after that. So once he didn't have the gun. Yeah, because now that research is a different, different category of threat, you know, so. Yeah, so that he was talking about how even a creature that, again, you see all these prairie dogs together, they all look the same, all fat, brown, fuzzy, small, have these complex ways of communicating amongst themselves. And so my question being, how do animals talk to us? That's really interesting. His Research was groundbreaking. I then went to a prairie dog researcher who researches human prairie dog relationships and asked her how much of that herd behavior or that sorry, group behavior translates into how a prairie dog in a pet situation would. Would communicate with a human. And she said that what's really important to know if you're going to own a prairie dog as a pet is you're part of that group now. In it, in the prairie dog's mind, you now are part of its colony. And the one really sad thing she said is that a prairie dog, when you come home, you'll go out to work in the morning, and you'll come home and the prairie dog will be really pleased to see you. And she said, and owners, it fills their hearts with joy. It's like, oh, my prairie dog's so happy to see me. She said, from the prairie dog's point of view, if you as a colony member leave the colony all day, that prairie dog spends the day thinking, oh, my God, it's my. My colony member's dead now. Because, you know, if a prairie dog disappears from the colony, it's because they've been eaten by something. So she said, oh, you know, this poor prairie dog all day sitting there going, oh, oh, is it. Is my. Is my owner a cow? So every day when the owner comes home, the prairie dog's like, oh, oh, I'm so pleased you're still alive. So you might think that the prairie dog's just going, hey, did you have a good day? Whereas actually, the prairie dog's, like, extremely relieved that you're still. You're still in the land of the living.
- [107:14]
B
Did she give you any indication as to whether she thinks that prairie dogs can acclimatize to the fact that you leave every day and you're okay. Or is every day the same day? Is it Groundhog Day? Right. You know, when you disappear in the morning, does the prairie dog grieve you all day when you come home like, oh, thank God you're alive, when the next morning, oh, he's dead again. Or does the prairie dog actually kind of figure out, oh, no, he's done this before. He's going to go away. He's going to come back.
- [107:43]
A
The sad thing is, I think she thinks that every day, you know, the prairie dog's like, oh, today's the day. He's dinner today.
- [107:49]
B
Every day's Prairie Dog Day.
- [107:51]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So because of the way that their existence is, like, sort of predicated on the safety of the group, you know, again, it's another creature that doesn't really have any natural defenses. The defense that they have is safety in numbers. So if their beloved colony member goes missing for the day. So she said that, you know, it's just. And this is something that lots of scientists and also trainers and many people kept coming back to is the idea that a really important part of understanding what animals are saying to us humans is just to try to take away our human perspective and try to get into the animals, you know, what, what a scientist might call their unwelt, which is like their way of seeing the world. So just try and imagine that, you know, like, I know it's really hard and it's almost, you know, you could argue it's impossible because we are not. All we can imagine is that we are a prairie dog. We can't imagine being a prairie dog. We're imagining us, ourselves as a prairie dog. It's not the same. Right, but you still can try and imagine how it would be maybe for sight not to be the primary thing sense that you use. Like with dogs, it would be smell and just to kind of try to sort of slip into that. And I think that's something that I really tried to do again and again. And as I went through the book, it kind of. That's where maybe the animal communication and stuff came in, made it a little bit easier to sort of slip out of that human humanness occasionally and into just even fleetingly into the kind of world view of a different creature than ourselves.
- [109:29]
B
So anyway, all of that, an hour and 45 minutes is up to about page 75. And there's 300 something pages in this thing. Yeah, in the trainer part, you, you have previous podcast guest Nashon Cook in there at least horse trainer part. And I guess I'm in there a little bit too. What sort of other trainers did you talk to?
- [109:55]
A
Actually, that was the bit that I really enjoyed because I got to talk to quite a lot of horse trainers. So I talked to some dog trainers and they were really interesting. They were talking about how. Oh, I talked to one really cool dog trainer, actually. She's an elderly Norwegian lady. She's quite formidable. She really reminded me of the grandma from the Witches, you know, this kind of stern older lady. And she told me a great story. She said, she said, oh, I don't, I don't like to teach. So I. I have a kind of American bulldog and she loves. I. Well, I kind of thought that she really loves being taught tricks. Right. So we like teach tricks together. So I've Taught her to, like, bark on command. But I also ask her, like, whisper. And she just goes really, really quietly. And I've told her if I go bang, bang, she falls over and plays dead. Like stupid stuff like that. And she said, no, no, no, no, I don't, I don't teach animals tricks. She's like, I don't even tell them to sit. I just sit down myself and then the dog will sit down. And I was like, oh, wow, okay, I'm not going to tell her about my tricks. She said, but you know, the reason that I don't teach them tricks is because when I was a young trainer many years ago, I had a dog and I thought it was really wonderful tricks to teach this dog to say mama. So she said, so I trained the dog to say mama. And I was really like, okay. If anyone else was telling me this, I would not believe them. But this lady has probably never told a lie in her life. She's like, too scary. She's like, very serious, old Lou, she said. So I thought it was a wonderful trick. And then one day between I think she was going somewhere, she said, so we stopped at a food kiosk in Oslo and I ordered my food and the dog jumped up and put his paws on the counter and looked at the man behind the counter in the fast food kiosk and said, mama. And she said, and the man turned quite green and had a heart attack. She said, I mean, thankfully, he didn't die, but I, I don't teach animals tricks anymore.
- [111:57]
B
The. Just the people you must have chatted to. That's what I wanted to talk to you about on this service of the podcast. Just the people that you talk to in researching the book. But anyway, forget the trainers because we know a bit about training and we don't have much time left. But the tracking, like, I'm fascinated by, you know, like, hunter gatherer stuff and especially like hunter gatherers and their tracking skills. What's, what's the craziest tracking story you, you heard in your research?
- [112:33]
A
Louis Liebenberg, who works with hunter gatherers, sand hunter gatherers, and has created this sort of software for master trackers to be able to gather scientific data even if they can't read or write, and create kind of job creation for sand trackers. He told me something I really wanted to know is, and I think this interests you too, is these accounts of a tracker becoming an animal. Right? So like shapeshifting. Yeah, yeah. And I really wanted to know. I was like, I wanted to get to the Bottom of that, I wanted to try and figure out what that means. You know, is it metaphorical? Is it sort of. Is it storytelling? What is it, you know? And so he told me about his experience of sort of becoming an animal on a persistence hunt. And he said that, you know, a persistent hunt, persistence hunt is a hunt that you track all day on foot until you're really exhausted. And eventually, you know, your quarry will be exhausted and you'll. You'll be able to catch them. And he was. I think he was hunting kudu with, you know, master tracker. And he was saying that there's something about the rhythmic footfall of, you know, for many, many hours, combined with close, close attention to detail, like to every tiny sign of the world around you that sort of your humanness leaves you. And he said he became the kudu. And he said he kept. He. He had it in flashes, so it kind of come in and out. So he would have this moment of being the kudu, and then he'd be back in this kind of clumsy human form again. And then he'd be back into this. This feeling, almost feeling like he was in its skin. And then he told me that he thought that that is the origin of the rituals around the fire. Where you would. Where a shaman might become an animal is. It's the. That's the kind of symbolic representation of a persistence hunt because it's, you know, rhythmic drum beat that would go on for hours and hours and hours combined with footfall that goes along with that and the kind of concentration on the dance steps or the fire or the visual of the fire that sort of takes you out of this world. So that answered my question, and I read some interesting anthropological reports on that as well, where people had gone out and lived with different sort of tribes and trackers of. It's almost like you're tapping into this commonality that we all share and you may get in flashes. And I think, you know, a lot of the animal communicators that I talked with and some of the experiences I had with testing those things out, some weird experiences, gave me these little flashes of that too, of this sort of greater fabric of something upon which we're sort of imposed. So that was really interesting because also something that he said that I thought was super interesting was that he thinks that tracking is the origin of science, because a master tracker will have a hypothesis and try to either prove it or disprove it. And so he said there's this kind of conventional idea that in inverted commas, is primitive societies. And the way that they behave and then in another set of inverted commas like our western evolved society and how science behaves and how actually they're behaving exactly the same way. It's about having an idea, testing it out, trying to prove or disprove it, changing that idea and moving through. So he said that trackers, indigenous trackers were really the first scientists.
- [116:41]
B
I've heard that before too. You know, it's interesting, the very start of your book, the very first quote or the second quote in the book, in the introduction is a quote from Charles Foster in his book Being a Beast. And I have read his other book, Being a human adventures in 100,000 years of consciousness. And so in that book he goes into the forest in northern England, lives as a hunter gatherer for quite a long time. And at one point in time he doesn't eat for nine days. And when he does, he eats a hedgehog, hoggers and rather. But he said about the, the, the living like a hunter gatherer and the, the fasting especially like the nine days. He said he would, he said, I don't know if I hallucinated or shape shifted or whatever, but I would have these visions. And it's like, you know, when we, when life was a lot harder, it's. Almost everybody had access to these, these states just from the way you lived. If you don't eat for nine days, days, you know, or like the, the persistence hunting and like I was thinking it's, it's just, it's like ceremony. It's like the, the beating, the drum beating or the chanting or the dancing that turns into the, you know, the shamans.
- [117:57]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [117:59]
B
Have you, did you ever listen to the podcast I did with Rupert Isaacson?
- [118:02]
A
Yes.
- [118:03]
B
About the, when they hunted. The hunted the Hemsbok and it.
- [118:08]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [118:09]
B
Like. And they were, they were Khoisan Bushman too. But yeah, yeah, I, I find that stuff. Yeah. Absolutely fascinating.
- [118:19]
A
So I, I had an experience which was not anywhere near on the same level, but I did do a tracking workshop which I felt really, you know, it was an interesting moment where you're sort of self consciousness and is called into question because I was like, oh, you know, I thought we were just going to go and look at tracks. And he's like, no, now we're going to move like the coyote. And I was like, oh shit, you know, I'm going to have to like, I'm English, I don't like doing this stuff. You know.
- [118:46]
B
Where was this?
- [118:48]
A
It was on a beach in public, which Was just.
- [118:52]
B
I was like, oh, which country?
- [118:53]
A
Oh, no, it was in Canada. It was in Canada.
- [118:55]
B
Oh, okay.
- [118:55]
A
Yeah, yeah. He's like a French Canadian tracker who learned from. Who's the really famous sort of American?
- [119:08]
B
Tom Brown.
- [119:09]
A
Tom Brown, Yeah. So Tom Brown's his sort of. His successor, is that guy's mentor. So.
- [119:18]
B
Have you ever read any of Tom Brown stuff? No, I haven't because it almost gets to where their shapeshifters. You know what I mean?
- [119:27]
A
Yeah, yes. Yeah, I've read, I've like read sections of his books. Haven't sat down and read them. But. Yeah, like he, you know, when he doesn't. Didn't he for a while pursue like he was asked to sort of pursue escaped criminals because he was such a good tracker and.
- [119:42]
B
Yeah, I don't know. But they, you know, like this. In his books he talks about you can become invisible. You get to a state where you become invisible. You can walk past someone and they don't see you.
- [119:54]
A
You. Right.
- [119:54]
B
You know, so you're getting in that shamanic realm.
- [119:58]
A
Yeah. So, yeah, so I, I had to do these kind of exercises which at first I felt so stupid about. I was like, oh my God, are you gonna make me take my shoes off and proud like a coyote? I'm like, oh, did you know these are things.
- [120:11]
B
Did they get you to foxwalk?
- [120:13]
A
Yes. Yeah.
- [120:14]
B
Fox. You know, fox walking is a great. Just a meditative thing to do. And then they would have had you do your. That soft focus thing where you've, you know, you've got 180 degree vision.
- [120:26]
A
Yeah, yeah, that.
- [120:27]
B
I, I do that for my, for my, my. I don't know if she's my therapist or whatever, mentor, but you know, she has this stuff that she wants me to do that slows. Do things super slowly. And that's one of the things I'll do is go walk around here and have that, that's really soft vision thing to where you're not focused on anything but you can see everything and then. And foxwalk. And so you're really thinking about how you place your foot and just doing things really slowly. And when I first started doing it was, you know, if you ever. I don't know if you've had this experience at some point in time when you're novice meditator and you sit down and five minutes of sitting still and your skin starts to crawl or whatever. It was like that while moving. Like I just wanted to, to run, like.
- [121:14]
A
Right.
- [121:15]
B
You know what I mean?
- [121:16]
A
Yeah.
- [121:17]
B
But think about that. It's all that stuff's almost a spiritual.
- [121:21]
A
Practice, you know, and, and, and sort of goes along with what you were saying about you becoming invisible. Because something that I did quite a lot is those little practices of being slow, being intentional, being quiet, and realizing how you don't have to do it for very long and you don't have to. You can't hold onto the idea, I am going to be. Be quiet now. You have to sort of let that go. And seeing around the farm how much wildlife started to come so close to me, things would, like, run across my feet or right behind my shoulder, you know, that you become part of. So I think the way I described it was like you become a part of nature rather than apart from nature. Right.
- [122:12]
B
Let me write that down. I had a podcast guest, I don't know if you listened to one with Donagha Market Guard was a. She's a redundant farmer, but she was a wildlife tracker. She was a wolf tracker in. In Idaho for a while. But she talks about your ring of disturbance.
- [122:29]
A
Yes.
- [122:30]
B
And she says, you know, what you're trying to do is because she went to wilderness awareness School, which was, I think was started by Tom Brown. But she says you're trying to. To. She says you'd like to get to where you can move through the forest and a bird will be on a branch singing a song. And as you approach it, go underneath it and go away from the song, does not change. It doesn't turn into alarm call. The song stays the same. She goes, that's when your ring of disturbance, and I think that ring of disturbance has a lot to do with your. Your inner energy and your inner chatter. And when you can get your mind to be. To quote another podcast guest, Mark Rash should have a mind like still water to where you're not influencing the things around you.
- [123:13]
A
Yeah. Something that's kind of. I found to be that maybe horse people are a little bit further down that path in the first place is because you know how, like, a lot of people will go out into nature and they'll be like, right now I want to listen to birds. Now I want to be part of nature. So I'll sit down and go, right, here I am. Am in nature. Let it happen. You know, like, let's watch what happens now. And then nothing happens. Whereas if you're. If you happen to be out in a pasture or a corral or whatever and you're shoveling shit, you're kind of not thinking that. Right. Because you're just doing a thing, you're just shoveling shit. And that's like a walking meditation because you're, oh, am I going to miss a bit here and there. And so I think, like, that's a really cool thing that I notice is that horse people, maybe a little bit, have an advantage in that because they're already quite good at being out in nature without expecting anything.
- [124:08]
B
Shoveling shit is a meditative place.
- [124:10]
A
It's the best that I found was really good for wildlife appearing around me. And I think something useful that one of the trackers said was that we tend to forget that ring of disturbance almost has a time frame attached to it. Most people will sit outside for 15, 20 minutes. And he said, you need 45 minutes before those ripples have gone and life goes back to normal. Yeah, unless you're sitting outside. Some people said sit. Some people said, don't sit. Yeah. Move through the environment because the intention of moving keeps your mind busy. But 45 minutes is, like he said, it's the magic number. You're not part of the environment until you've been outside at least that long, which is hard in, you know, modern life, but it's worth doing. Yeah.
- [125:03]
B
Yeah. That whole tracking thing, that's fascinating. So have you ever heard of a guy named Boyd Varti from South Africa?
- [125:12]
A
Is. Yes, but I don't know why.
- [125:14]
B
He wrote a book called Lion Tracker's Guide to Life.
- [125:17]
A
Right.
- [125:18]
B
You know, he spent a lot of time with some really amazing trackers. And funnily enough, Donagh Market, who's been on the podcast, she bought those trackers to California. She said she took them, these Koi San Bushmen, she took them up into a glass elevator in San Francisco. And like, they thought this was the strangest thing. Thing ever. But, yeah, some of the stories about the, the. I think the tracking and the, the deep spiritual connection both are the same thing. It's. It's kind of like you said before, with that persistence tracking, where you get into this state and you can do it around a fire. Drumming, you know, it's that rhythmic and it's that. Yes. Staying in that, having that. I don't know if it's got something to do with your breathing like. Like exertion that makes you breathe hard or something. Rather. We had a. We had a. Someone come down here on the weekend who does breath work stuff. We did a breath work thing on Saturday night here and oh, my gosh, was so good. Like, I went to some place. I don't know where I went to, but yeah, we.
- [126:27]
A
I had. You're going. So, Karen.
- [126:29]
B
Oh, I was just going to say, I. It was while I was saying that I was thinking, oh, well, the, the movement for that long, like tracking for eight hours, like your breathing gets this. I wonder if it has to do with the breathing too.
- [126:40]
A
I wonder that too, because one of the. So, you know, as I, as I went through this book, I thought, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go into those territories that I think are, you know, because this, like, like I was saying to you before the.
- [126:54]
B
This.
- [126:54]
A
I wrote this book for a general audience. So it's not necessarily for the people only who listen to your podcast or somewhere on that journey already, you know, that might, this might be for people who are sitting on the tube in London. That's who I had in mind. Like somebody who's got a cat interested in animals sitting on tube in London on the way to work reading a book. So that was who I kind of thought of. So when I started going into these territories, like tracking and then animal communication, which I went. Tried to approach really journalistically, like open mind, no preconceptions, let's see where this goes. I thought, oh, God, there's gonna be people who start who've read through the science, gone, yes. Read through the training, and gone, okay. It's a little bit like, woo, but all right. On occasion. But yeah, okay, we'll go with it. And then they get to the third part of the book and go, what is she on about? Right. What is she talking about? But I thought, I'm gonna do it anyway. It doesn't matter, I don't really care. So I did a workshop with. Not a workshop, a kind of visit to the Horse Nation with one of your other previous guests, which is Catriona MacDonald.
- [127:55]
B
Oh, cat's amazing, isn't she?
- [127:59]
A
Oh, my goodness. That was something else. It was so. It was a zoom call. So you think, all right, well, what, you know, where can you go in a zoom call? It's just in front of the computer. She had a shaman who was beating, like a regular beat. And she said, okay, we're just going to. She did a few preparatory things. Like, she did some breathing and those things. I was like, okay, now we're going to break for tea. Got a cup of tea, came back and now we're going to visit the Horse Nation. So I was like, okay. Oh, no, it was another one. I felt a bit like when I went and worked with the coyote, like a coyote. And I was like, what if nothing happens? Because afterwards we're going to Break out into groups. I'm going to tell each other what the horse nation told us. And I was like, oh, God, what if. What if nothing happens? You know? Okay. It was unbelievable. Like, I went to a completely different place. Like, it was just. And I remember at the time thinking, okay, I'm gonna see if I'm imagining this. I'm gonna try and make something happen, right? I'm gonna try and like, make. Make that tree have ice creams in it. I'm gonna try and, like, I'm gonna try and influence this scene, you know, Couldn't. And it wasn't like a dream. It wasn't like a. It wasn't an imagining. It was something else completely. And it was just mind blowing. Honestly, it was mind blowing. And then I came back from that thought, I'm gonna have to write this down. I'm gonna have to write this down. I'm gonna do it. And so the coolest thing about it, which just jumping forwards a little bit, is that I met a professor later who has an entire department in the University of Saskatchewan devoted to other ways of knowing and interspecies communication. I was just like, there's an actual university department studying what she calls icc interspecies. I'll quickly look it up. But it's different kinds of iic, intuitive interspecies communication. So there's the link between academia, science, and these other ways of knowing is there are actually university professors who are studying that particular sphere and where those things link. And so I told her about my experience with Cat, and she said, well, the reason I got interested in this, and she's like a really hardcore professor, she said, is because my plan started talking to me, and I was like, okay, I'm talking to the right person. So she sort of brought all these threads together, like how those things all kind of connect and how those experiences that you have that you can't kind of explain or quantify are if you. She called it. She said, if you discount those other ways of knowing, that's epistemological ignorance. That's just saying if we can't see it, it doesn't exist. La la la, la la.
- [131:07]
B
Right? Yeah.
- [131:08]
A
You know, and. And kind of going full circle. That's kind of the stuff like that goes back to the fruit flies. Like, just because we can't see it doesn't mean they don't feel it. You know, just because we don't see their individuality doesn't mean it's not there. So that was pretty cool to see that people Are actually researching it in a kind of university setting as well as, you know, know, in all these other. In other spheres and respects. Yeah.
- [131:31]
B
Can you share what the horse nation told you?
- [131:35]
A
Yeah, well, I'll just share one little bit of it, which was that, okay, I had this really clear image of a little pinto horse jumping up and down, saying, like. Like, wait for me, wait for me. Right? Like that was. It just kept. Kept happening. And I was like, what? And a year. So that was about a year and a half ago. And now that little pinto horse, and I've never really been a fan of pinto horses particularly, is outside the window, really. Also, it was interesting because in the breakout group afterwards, I was. Was with two ladies, I think one was from Montana and one from New Zealand. And I said, yeah, this. This. At first, this sort of bay mare came up to me and she'd, oh, that'll be my horse. She does that? Yeah, she. She does that. And it was so matter of fact, and I was like, oh, okay, right. And because I had felt a bit like, silly about telling them, you know, what I saw. And she was like, yeah, sure, she'll do that for newcomers, you know.
- [132:45]
B
Really?
- [132:45]
A
Yeah, it was. It was really transformative. And I know that, like, some people will think that maybe I shouldn't have written all that down, but some things that the. The professor from in. In Canada told me at that depart at that department of Interspecies Intuitive Communication, she. She said, what we're interested in studying is not. Not how it works or whether it works, but a person's lived experience when that happens. So she said, that's phenomenology. That's like this academic term for that would be, we are interested in documenting and listening to people's lived experience. So she said, when a First nations person is certain, like a Cree person tells you that they. An owl spoke to them, then an owl spoke to them, we're not trying to find out why it spoke to them or if it's true or how that would work. We're interested in that experience itself. So that was sort of the framework with which I wrote the third part of the book was kind of phenomenologically to say this was my. And you know, something that I think our mutual friend Cathy Bryce talks about is this is my. My. My experience is my truth, you know. And so I did the journalistic thing and I wrote it down, regardless of how many people told me that might say it was. And that's okay.
- [134:16]
B
So let me ask you the question about this Book.
- [134:20]
A
Yes.
- [134:23]
B
Did. Was. Was there any part of you that was like, you know, what if it's not accepted? Did you have a part? I mean, I think everybody writes a book probably has a bit of that, but because of the subject material.
- [134:38]
A
Yeah, I was sure. And I. And I know. Oh, so here's a really. Okay, this might give away a little bit of the book, but the daily, you know, the. What's called the Mail on Sunday, which is like a UK tabloid, gave me a really nice review for the book, but they decided that the headline should say my horse told me he wanted to die. That's their headline in the newspaper. And I was like, all right, well, you know, it's eye catching. So I thought that there would be some people who, you know, don't go for it. And that's fine, right? Like, it's fine. This was a journey into asking a question from every aspect of. So that would be, you know, the intuitive stuff, the animal communicators. I wanted to know, like, I was really interested. Like, okay, you get messages from animals. How, like, how, how does that work? Like, what, you know, where does it come from? Is it a feeling? How does it work? I just wanted to know just as much as I wanted to know, like, okay, a fruit flies personality. Is that because of wiring or because, you know, like, I felt like the whole topic needed to be explored and otherwise it wouldn't be a full account of the things that I think are interesting about that question. So, yeah, I went everywhere and I was like, I, you know, whatever, there's. There's always going to be people. Where is it you can't please. You can please some of the people all the time or all the people some of the time. Fine. I, I'm not trying to convert anybody. I'm not trying to convince anybody of anything. There's no manifesto really for this book. It just was this burning question that I had and the opportunity to sort of dive into it in all these different ways. Things that I wasn't familiar with over this one, like, intensive year.
- [136:26]
B
Right. You know, one of the reasons I asked that question, you got talking about messages from the horse nation sort of thing. And one of my podcast guests, Emily K's daughter, who lives in Sweden, has. She runs a. She has a sanctuary, but she runs a school for impact. Interspecies, empathic, interbeing. Right, what she calls it, people go there and the curriculum is dictated by the animals or the trees. So Emily gets messages from the animals or the trees or whatever about what this particular group of people should do. And sometimes it's an exercise they've done before, but that's what happens. So when people show up there, Emily doesn't know what they're going to do yet till the trees and the horses tell them. But I went up there, we're doing a documentary and Emily's part of it. And I went, went to Emily's place this past summer and there's a young girl from Sweden named Tuva who picked me up and took me up there. And I've known Tuva for several years now and she's an amazing young woman. It was actually Sweden's Young Entrepreneur of the Year a couple years ago. She started this business. Anyway, she sold that and now she's kind of a bit of a free spirit. But so we're driving up to Emily's and I said, so what have you been doing? And she's been telling me, you know, I've been in Thailand playing beach volleyball and oh, I've written a book on clicker training. And I said, oh, did you publish it yet? And she goes, no. Like, why not? She goes, well, what if it's not right? What if people think, what do you know, all those questions, you know. So we get up to Emily's and we, we're filming for a couple of days up there. And one day Emily says, okay, so today we're going to do some of the exercises that people do when they come for the retreats. And today we're going to do the water exercise. And so we walk through the forest, we come to this little, little, little streamy, pondy sort of a thing. And she says, so this exercise was relayed to me by the oldest horse, we have, a 34 year old stallion. And he said that humans are mostly made up of water. And so what we're going to do is we're going to sit by this water and we're going to take our hands and place it in the water and allow the true essence of you to be imbued into this water, okay? Allow yourself to be truly seen. And he said, she said, this whole exercise is that when the next person comes along and they put their hands in the water, they're going to absorb the essence of you, the true essence of you. So you've got to be able to do this with no thought of how it's going to be received. You've got to put your hands in the water and allow yourself to be transmuted into the water with no care about how it's going to be received. And I'm on one side of this little. It's only, only, you know, 10ft across this thing. I'm on one side of it. Tuba's on the other side with her hands in the water. And as Emily says that, Tuva looks me in the eye and she mouths the book. And I'm like, yes, the book. You need to publish the book because you need to be, you need to, you need to share your view on this subject at this point in time in life without any care. Care of how it's going to be received on the other side. Yeah, it was that.
- [139:34]
A
Yeah, that's so cool.
- [139:36]
B
The water exercise that came from this 34 year old stallion and it was perfect for where, for where Tuva was at in life. So, yeah, it was just when you said you got messages from the horse nation, I'm like, yeah, I've heard.
- [139:48]
A
Yeah. Quick question for you as well, though, on that. When you sort of started, because this is something I asked you about in the book, I think is like, when you changed your approach a little bit, you know, when you went through those shifts and changes in the way that you were working, how did you feel? Like, how did you feel about. How did you consider how you might be received? Because you already had like a, you know, a dedicated following. People were doing things the way that you. And it was working. Like, how did you feel about that?
- [140:22]
B
I didn't ever give it a moment's thought, actually.
- [140:25]
A
You did.
- [140:26]
B
No, because I've always, you know, I mean, I imagine there's some trainers out there who might do one thing in front of people, one thing behind the barn sort of thing, you know?
- [140:35]
A
Right. Yeah.
- [140:36]
B
I've always shared exactly what I was doing and how I was doing it, and now I'm doing it differently.
- [140:42]
A
And you didn't worry about how that would be received? Okay, that's good.
- [140:46]
B
I wasn't thinking about that. I was like, this is what I'm doing and it seems to be working better than what I was doing before.
- [140:51]
A
I wonder, you know, I wonder if that's like a female thing that we're sort of taught to do really is like.
- [140:56]
B
No, no. I mean, there's, there's plenty of, there's plenty of patients I worry about being received, but for some reason, that wasn't one of them. It was, it was like, hey, I've been trying this stuff and this actually works better than what I was doing. You know what I mean? Coming at from that angle, I was, I was sharing something that works better. Not. Yeah, for me. I didn't have doubts about it. Like, oh, I wonder if this is too strange for people. I was too. I was too excited to kind of go, hey, this stuff. I mean, I've discovered something here that, That I think I've been missing, that. That makes a huge difference, you know? So I was more excitement and I wasn't dwelling on how it's going to be received, just be. Just because, you know, I've had people say, oh, you're so brave to. To change publicly, you know, like, change public. And I said, well, I never thought about it that way. I said, I've always. I've always shared exactly what I was doing, and now I'm doing something slightly different. I didn't feel like it was. To me, it wasn't. To me, it wasn't. It didn't feel brave or anything like that. Because there was no. There was none of that. I wonder how this is going to be received. Because I remember I went weird stages at a time. Okay. I didn't get from where it was to completely weird in one. Just.
- [142:14]
A
Yeah.
- [142:14]
B
So the first little step was like, yeah, this is what I'm doing now. And then the next step. But if you look from, you know, 10 years ago to now. Yeah. Trying to go from there to here in one step, I probably could have been like, I wonder if people are going to think this is weird. But no, I didn't really have any of that.
- [142:31]
A
And I think if you're excited about something, I guess that was sort of what, you know, where I was like, if people don't like this, you know, the things that I'm discovering or finding or whatever, that's fine. Because if you're excited about it, it. And you. You're genuinely like, this is like, oh, my God, this just. Okay, this just happened. Then, you know, like I said, you can't please everybody. Some people are going to resonate with that and some won't, and that's all right. And. And, you know, in this, in this case, like, with. With listening to animals. I was talking to a lady yesterday and she was saying, so, you know, in the end, do you know what animals are saying? And it was really an interesting discussion because, like, how much do we even really understand of what each other are saying? Like, we. There's no, you know, life is subjective reality subjective. You know, I. I can say something to one of my kids or they can say something to me. And how do I know that we meet? We're on the same page. Like, I gave that example to her yesterday of like, you know, if I say to my husband, like, oh, I love you and he says, I love you too. Like, I mean, we might not mean the same thing. You know, that's the, we've got a, we've got a code to express that. But those, you know, so, you know, in the end, since there is no objective reality, you may as well say what you think because. Yeah, people are always going to have their own interpretation of what you say anyway. So. Yeah, like in, in that sense, I hope she did publish that or is going to publish.
- [144:00]
B
I think I'm pretty sure she's going to. But.
- [144:02]
A
Yeah.
- [144:02]
B
Yeah. So I'm, I'm so glad you said what you thought. In this book is this, this, you know, I'm only a fifth of the way through it and already it's one of my favorite books so far. It's very Malcolm Gladworthy. Do you, have you ever read any Malcolm Gladwell?
- [144:17]
A
I have, yeah. You know, that's a very big compliment.
- [144:20]
B
He's a, he's a dot joiner who joins all the dots in a way that's informative and entertaining all at the same time. Like it's a, it's a page turner. It's not like it's not you. You mentioned Yuck. Pancept in here somewhere.
- [144:35]
A
Yes.
- [144:37]
B
I can't read his book. It is just too dense for me. What's it called? The neuroscience.
- [144:44]
A
Oh.
- [144:48]
B
I forget what it's about. Animal emotions. But yes, you know, it's, I mean I need a dictionary to get through every sentence. You know, it would take me, it would take me years to decode it. And so it's almost like you've, you have. Like I said, it's, it's very, very Malcolm Gladwelly where it's very easy to read and you've done all the work and put all this research together that we don't have to go and. Cause we don't, we don't need to look into all of Mark Beckoff's life's work. Like reading a couple of pages about him was like, oh yeah, you know, I got enough there. So. Yeah. Thank you for writing this book. It's an amazing book.
- [145:27]
A
Oh, well, thank you. Thank you for being in it.
- [145:29]
B
You're.
- [145:30]
A
You're in it a couple of times. And in the UK edition there's an index, so you're indexed in it too.
- [145:35]
B
I'm indexed in it. I don't know if I have the UK edition. You sent me this once or. Let me Have a look on the back.
- [145:41]
A
If you've got the blue one, then that's the US one.
- [145:43]
B
Yeah, I was going to say in the back it says it's got the price in US dollars. It doesn't it.
- [145:48]
A
No, no, the. The UK one's like a hardback one. I think I maybe sent you one. But anyway, it's got a. Yeah, it's got an index in the back. Back. Because you. You appear in it more than once and I reference you right at the end when I'm giving like a sort of conclusion of what people can do at home to listen better, I sort of refer back to you as well.
- [146:07]
B
Oh, cool. Anyway, so where can people find this book?
- [146:11]
A
Anywhere that books are sold. So it's on Amazon, you know, in UK bookstores or American Canadian bookstores. Independent bookstore, of course, are very happy for your business. So small independent bookstores. I recorded the audiobook version, so that was very exciting. Have you. Have you done that for your book?
- [146:32]
B
No, I was just going to ask you. What was that? How long did that take you?
- [146:35]
A
It took a week. Sitting in a studio, getting so sick of the sound of your voice because you do a sentence and then, you know, you make like a little mistake or there's a sort of a mouth sound or something, so they cue you back in halfway through the sentence. Sentence. So you're constantly just hearing yourself again and again. And there's a couple of times when I had to read a line, I was like, I didn't write that. I'm like, no, I actually did write that. I remember now. Yeah, but so I had to sing in a bit of it. I had to pronounce things in Latin that I'd written down, but, you know, had to recite poetry in it. So that was exciting. But it took a week of about six hours a day. And after the first day, I thought, I don't know if you have this after a clinic. But I was just like, I don't think I'm going to have a voice tomorrow. I. I don't know how I'm gonna talk. I went back to the apartment. We recorded it in Toronto. Went back to the apartment, and my husband was like, you know, so, what do you want for dinner? And I had to. I was writing it down and showing him notes because I. Yeah, but a week. You should do it. It's fun.
- [147:33]
B
Yeah, we're planning on doing that this winter. Did you find. You know how they said you gotta start in the middle of a sentence again? You know, if you say a Sentence from the start. You'll. The intonation of your voice is at a certain place in the middle of the sentence. But when you have to write, read half a sentence again, it's hard to start instead of starting, you know, like when I start the podcast. G', day, everyone. Welcome back to the journey of podcast. I mean, you know, up and down sort of thing, but in the middle of a sentence, usually you start out, hey, how's it going? And then it goes down. We're in the middle of the sentence. You've almost got to start down here instead of up here.
- [148:08]
A
Yeah, you get really good at it, though. You get good at kind of like anticipating the words and then leaping in. Especially because some of the. Because I was recording it for the North American audience, there were some things I kept pronouncing wrong because I gave them the English pronunciation. And then the sound engineer would stop me and say, what did you just say? And I can't remember an example, but I'd be like, I said this word. And he'd be like, no, no, no, that's not how we say it here. Say it again. And then I'd get it wrong 12 times until I got it right. And so he was like, I'm not listening to this sentence 12 times. You'll just have to start halfway through the sentence. Yeah, so. But it's a fun experience.
- [148:44]
B
I call bullshit on that.
- [148:45]
A
Why?
- [148:46]
B
Someone with an accent like yours and he's telling you how to pronounce words like piss off.
- [148:52]
A
Thank you. But I was like, well, this is how we say it in Britain. He's like, no one's going to know what you're talking about.
- [148:57]
B
Well, that's the thing is, that's the thing you do have to, to think about. How are you going to be understood? You know, so, Yeah, you've got, you've got to figure out is that particular terminology going to be understood by an American audience and you don't want to spoon fit them too much. But if it's something, then definitely not going to understand the context. Especially if it's a slang. Like Australians come to America and Australians speak in slang and every second word they say, Americans don't get it.
- [149:29]
A
Yeah, yeah, I had. Yeah, yeah. Like you have to kind of sort of change that a little bit. So I had, I don't know about the expression. So in the UK edition, I wrote Happy as Larry. So is that an Australian expression too?
- [149:43]
B
Yes.
- [149:44]
A
Yeah. So my American editor was just like, as who's Larry? Where have you referenced him? Can you put a reference for which page you talked about Larry before.
- [149:53]
B
Do Brit say Bob's your uncle.
- [149:55]
A
Yes.
- [149:56]
B
Yeah, I've had Americans go, I don't have an uncle named Bob.
- [150:01]
A
Yeah, so I did. I had to adjust some things. But so anyway, it's an audiobook as well, and it's going to be out in Australia and New Zealand, I think in January as well. Oh, cool. Yeah, so you bet you can. Basically going back to where you can buy it. You can buy it anywhere the books are sold. Really awesome.
- [150:19]
B
Well, it's an amazing book and congratulations on the book and congratulations on being the longest podcast episode I have ever recorded.
- [150:29]
A
I think the last one was really long, too. Sorry about that.
- [150:34]
B
I don't think I've gone. Maybe the one I did on the Gaucho Derby was 2 hours and 30 minutes, and we're 2 hours 27 now, so. But I think you might be the longest interview. Well, you know, we've covered 77 pages of 300 of them. I didn't want to give the whole game away, but really I want. Wanted to talk to you about the experience, you know, the people you met while researching the book.
- [150:54]
A
So, yeah, yeah, it was, it was really a privilege to meet so many inspiring people. And yeah, I'm, I'm really happy that you were in it. Like, you're in a really important part of the book. Talking about how, how to train something via listening, you know, and how to sort of switch that paradigm around from a traditional kind of telling to listening was really, really important part of the, the book. So, yeah, I hope that I represented you well.
- [151:22]
B
Oh, no, you did. It was, it was great. And yeah, I loved it. So, yeah, all you guys at home, you got to read this book. This is one of my favorite books ever and only 77 pages into it, so thank you. Okay, well, thank you so much for taking the time to join me here. I'll let you get back to your pigs and your chickens and your earwigs and cockroaches and whatever else is you got going.
- [151:46]
A
Thank you. Yeah. And thanks so much for having me. It's been, it's been a pleasure to.
- [151:50]
B
Talk to you and thank you. And you guys at home, thanks for joining us and we'll catch you again on the next episode of the Journey on Podcast. Thanks for being a part of the Journey on Podcast with Warwick Schiller. Warwick has over 850 full length training videos on his online video library@videos.warkshiller.com Be sure to follow Warrick on YouTube Facebook and Instagram to see his latest training advice and insights.