Par Segerdahl (Uppsala): Being Humans When We Are Animals. When animals get bored or anxious, they develop physical tics just like humans. Vint Virga on his book The Soul of All Living Creatures: What Animals Can Teach Us About Being Human. Benjamin Wallace-Wellson the case for the end of the modern zoo. Alex Halberstadt on zoo animals and their discontents: Do donkeys get depressed, are some aoudads anxious, and what can a zoo’s shrink do to help ease their minds? See Spot get depressed: Joshua Rothman reviews Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves by Laurel Braitman. When animals lose their minds: From anxious dogs to depressed gorillas, animals suffer from mental distress too, and the causes aren't always clear. Who wants to shoot an elephant: What kind of a person looks upon the world's largest land animal — a beast that mourns its dead and lives to retirement age and can distinguish the voice of its enemies — and instead of saying "Wow!" says something like "Where's my gun?" Save the elephants: Elizabeth Kolbert on how to curb an increase in poaching. Consider the lobster; pity the fish: Culum Brown does for the fish what David Foster Wallace did for the lobster. The death of a fly is utterly insignificant, or it’s a catastrophe — how much should we worry about what we squash? George Dvorsky interviews David Pearce on the radical plan to eliminate Earth's predatory species. Where do humans really rank on the food chain? We're not at the top, but towards the middle, at a level similar to pigs and anchovies. Chimps, always jerks, can now rub a new study touting their superiority in our faces — thanks for nothing, science.
