In this lovely conversation, activist Alice Wong and science journalist Ed Yong talk about the diversity of the natural world, the senses of organisms, ableism in science, the strangeness and unpredictability of sensory biology, and more.
Many people knew this before, but the last three years have hammered home the fact that we cannot protect things that we don’t empathize with.
Animals aren’t interesting just when they are better than us. Things that are simpler than us are actually deeply fascinating too.
He’ll smell plants, places where other dogs have peed. I think of going for a walk with Typo as him checking his social media. It’s very much like when I’m scrolling through Instagram or Twitter and seeing what my friends are up to. He does this on a walk. He checks out what all the neighborhood dogs are like, what they’re doing, where they’ve been. It’s a deeply social activity for him.
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