They can talk. And what’s more, we can understand them. What they cannot do is lie. And that is why they have no place in a civilized society. A wolf cannot lie to us; neither can a dog. That is why we think we are better than them.

For Brenin, playing amounted to seizing the other animal by the neck and pinning it to the ground. There he would proceed to shake it violently back and forth, like a rag doll. And all of this would be carried on against a background cacophony of growling and snarling. Then he would allow the other dog to wriggle free and do much the same thing to

People say all the time that they love their dogs. And I’m sure they think they do. But, believe me, until you’ve cleaned your dog’s smelly, suppurating, disease-ridden arse every two hours for well over a month, you really don’t know.

If you want to see human evil in all its purity, ingenuity and freedom, you will find it in a shuttlebox. This is an instrument of torture invented by the Harvard psychologists R. Solomon, L. Kamin and L. Wynne. The box consists of two compartments separated by a barrier. The floor of each compartment is an electrified grid. Solomon and his collabo

When we talk about the superior intelligence of apes, the superiority of simian intelligence over lupine intelligence, we should bear in mind the terms of this comparison: apes are more intelligent than wolves because, ultimately, they are better schemers and deceivers than wolves. It is from this that the difference between simian and lupine intel

And so I kept running, and Brenin kept running with me; and we both got fitter, and leaner, and harder. This pragmatic impetus for my new-found fitness, however, quickly changed into something else. On our runs together, I realized something both humbling and profound: I was in the presence of a creature that was, in most important respects, unques

The most important way of remembering someone is by being the person they made us—at least in part—and living the life they have helped shape.

There is, however, another kind of duty involved: something that philosophers call epistemic duty. This is the duty to subject one’s beliefs to the appropriate amount of critical scrutiny: to examine whether they are warranted by the available evidence and to at least attempt to ascertain whether or not there exists any countervailing evidence. Tod

When we were running, Brenin would glide across the ground with an elegance and economy of movement I have never seen in a dog. When a dog trots, no matter how refined and efficient its gait, there is always a small vertical vector present in the movement of its feet. If you have a dog, watch it closely the next time you take it out. As its feet go