one convinced them that “maybe he had empathy.” This realization rubs against old-fashioned scientific approaches that insist on never projecting human traits onto animal subjects—anthropomorphizing them—but Parfit believed that empathy was only logical, considering the highly social nature of orcas in the wild. “That seemed like a very human thing to expect in an animal,” he later wrote in his deeply felt account of the Luna saga, The Lost Whale. “But not really. Scientific studies have shown that something like empathy is at work in several species. And when I thought about the social nature
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