More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
My father was himself a college professor and a pedant to the bone. Every exchange contained a lesson, like the pit in a cherry. To this day, the Socratic method makes me want to bite someone.
One day, a package of junior-sized tampons was left on my bed along with a pamphlet that looked technical and boring, so I didn’t read it. Nothing was ever said to me about the tampons. It was just blind luck I didn’t smoke them.
About this same time, I made up a friend for myself. I gave her the half of my name I wasn’t using, the Mary part, and various bits of my personality I also didn’t immediately need. We spent a lot of time together, Mary and I, until the day I went off to school and Mother told me Mary couldn’t go. This was alarming. I felt I was being told I mustn’t be myself at school, not my whole self.
The sunset you see is always better than the one you don’t. More stars are always better than less. I feel the same about crows, though I know there are some who don’t. Their loss.
The Animal Defense League was formed. Up on the Magdalen Islands, eight crew members from the Sea Shepherd sprayed more than a thousand seal pups with a harmless but permanent red dye. This dye was designed to ruin their pelts and save the pups from hunters. The activists were arrested and, in pitch-perfect Orwellian double-speak, charged with violating the Seal Protection Act.
I came to a report on a 1985 break-in at UC Riverside. Among the many animals stolen was an infant macaque named Britches. Britches’s little eyes had been sewn shut the day he was born, in order to test some sonic equipment designed for blind babies. The plan was to keep him alive for about three years in a state of sensory deprivation and then kill him to see what that had done to the visual, auditory, and motor-skills parts of his brain. I didn’t want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that’s the sort of choice I expect science
...more
About Washoe, Roger Fouts has said, she taught him that in the phrase human being, the word being is much more important than the word human.
“It’s really easy to persuade people to be hateful,” I tell him, partly as a diversionary tactic and partly just because it is, and it can’t be said often enough. “You can train any animal into any behavior on cue if it’s a natural behavior to begin with. Racism, sexism, speciesism—all natural human behaviors. They can be triggered any time by any unscrupulous yahoo with a pulpit. A child could do it.
What chimps don’t seem capable of understanding is the state of false belief. They don’t have a theory of mind that accounts for actions driven by beliefs in conflict with reality. And really, who lacking that will ever be able to navigate the human world?
He’d told me about an experiment here in Davis that lasted thirty years. Generations of beagles were exposed to strontium-90 and radium-226, their voice boxes removed so that no one would hear them suffering. He said that the researchers involved in this jocularly referred to themselves as the Beagle Club.
the credits could claim that no animals had been harmed in the filming of this movie, because the harm had all happened before the shooting began.
Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov, who in the 1920s made several attempts to create a human-chimp hybrid, the elusive humanzee.
The spell can only be broken by the people. They must come to see how beautiful she is. They must storm the prison and demand her release. The spell will be broken only when the people rise up. So rise up already.
It seems to me that every time we humans announce that here is the thing that makes us unique—our featherless bipedality, our tool-using, our language—some other species comes along to snatch it away. If modesty were a human trait, we’d have learned to be more cautious over the years.
I’m unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using. Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through.
