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Have you ever wondered
what animals think and feel?
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Let's start with a question:
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Does my dog really love me
or does she just want a treat?
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Well, it's easy to see
that our dog really loves us,
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easy to see, right,
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what's going on in that fuzzy little head.
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What is going on?
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Something's going on.
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But why is the question always
do they love us?
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Why is it always about us?
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Why are we such narcissists?
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I found a different question
to ask animals.
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Who are you?
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There are capacities of the human mind
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that we tend to think are capacities
only of the human mind.
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But is that true?
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What are other beings
doing with those brains?
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What are they thinking and feeling?
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Is there a way to know?
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I think there is a way in.
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I think there are several ways in.
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We can look at evolution,
we can look at their brains
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and we can watch what they do.
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The first thing to remember is:
our brain is inherited.
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The first neurons came from jellyfish.
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Jellyfish gave rise
to the first chordates.
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The first chordates gave rise
to the first vertebrates.
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The vertebrates came out of the sea,
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and here we are.
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But it's still true that a neuron,
a nerve cell, looks the same
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in a crayfish, a bird or you.
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What does that say
about the minds of crayfish?
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Can we tell anything about that?
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Well, it turns out that
if you give a crayfish
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a lot of little tiny electric shocks
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every time it tries
to come out of its burrow,
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it will develop anxiety.
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If you give the crayfish the same drug
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used to treat anxiety disorder in humans,
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it relaxes and comes out and explores.
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How do we show how much
we care about crayfish anxiety?
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Mostly, we boil them.
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(Laughter)
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Octopuses use tools,
as well as do most apes
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and they recognize human faces.
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How do we celebrate the ape-like
intelligence of this invertebrate?
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Mostly boiled.
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If a grouper chases a fish
into a crevice in the coral,
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it will sometimes go to where it knows
a moray eel is sleeping
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and it will signal
to the moray, "Follow me,"
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and the moray will understand that signal.
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The moray may go into the crevice
and get the fish,
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but the fish may bolt
and the grouper may get it.
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This is an ancient partnership that we
have just recently found out about.
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How do we celebrate
that ancient partnership?
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Mostly fried.
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A pattern is emerging and it says
a lot more about us
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than it does about them.
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Sea otters use tools
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and they take time away
from what they're doing
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to show their babies what to do,
which is called teaching.
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Chimpanzees don't teach.
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Killer whales teach
and killer whales share food.
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When evolution makes something new,
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it uses the parts it has
in stock, off the shelf,
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before it fabricates a new twist.
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And our brain has come to us
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through the enormity
of the deep sweep of time.
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If you look at the human brain
compared to a chimpanzee brain,
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what you see is we have basically
a very big chimpanzee brain.
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It's a good thing ours is bigger,
because we're also really insecure.
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(Laughter)
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But, uh oh, there's a dolphin,
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a bigger brain with more convolutions.
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OK, maybe you're saying,
all right, well, we see brains,
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but what does that
have to say about minds?
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Well, we can see the working of the mind
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in the logic of behaviors.
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So these elephants, you can see --
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obviously, they are resting.
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They have found a patch of shade
under the palm trees
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under which to let their babies sleep,
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while they doze but remain vigilant.
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We make perfect sense of that image,
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just as they make perfect sense
of what they're doing,
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because under the arc of the same sun
on the same plains,
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listening to the howls
of the same dangers,
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they became who they are
and we became who we are.
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We've been neighbors for a very long time.
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No one would mistake
these elephants as being relaxed.
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They're obviously very
concerned about something.
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What are they concerned about?
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It turns out that if you record
the voices of tourists
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and you play that recording
from a speaker hidden in bushes,
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elephants will ignore it,
because tourists never bother elephants.
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But if you record the voices of herders
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who carry spears and often hurt elephants
in confrontations at water holes,
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the elephants will bunch up
and run away from the hidden speaker.
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Not only do elephants know
that there are humans,
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they know that there are
different kinds of humans,
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and that some are OK
and some are dangerous.
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They have been watching us for much longer
than we have been watching them.
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They know us better than we know them.
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We have the same imperatives:
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take care of our babies,
find food, try to stay alive.
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Whether we're outfitted for hiking
in the hills of Africa
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or outfitted for diving under the sea,
we are basically the same.
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We are kin under the skin.
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The elephant has the same skeleton,
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the killer whale has the same skeleton,
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as do we.
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We see helping where help is needed.
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We see curiosity in the young.
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We see the bonds of family connections.
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We recognize affection.
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Courtship is courtship.
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And then we ask, "Are they conscious?"
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When you get general anesthesia,
it makes you unconscious,
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which means you have
no sensation of anything.
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Consciousness is simply
the thing that feels like something.
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If you see, if you hear, if you feel,
if you're aware of anything,
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you are conscious, and they are conscious.
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Some people say
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well, there are certain things
that make humans humans,
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and one of those things is empathy.
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Empathy is the mind's ability
to match moods with your companions.
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It's a very useful thing.
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If your companions start to move quickly,
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you have to feel like
you need to hurry up.
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We're all in a hurry now.
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The oldest form of empathy
is contagious fear.
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If your companions suddenly
startle and fly away,
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it does not work very well for you to say,
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"Jeez, I wonder why everybody just left."
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(Laughter)
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Empathy is old, but empathy,
like everything else in life,
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comes on a sliding scale
and has its elaboration.
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So there's basic empathy:
you feel sad, it makes me sad.
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I see you happy, it makes me happy.
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Then there's something
that I call sympathy,
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a little more removed:
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"I'm sorry to hear that your grandmother
has just passed away.
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I don't feel that same grief,
but I get it; I know what you feel
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and it concerns me."
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And then if we're motivated
to act on sympathy,
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I call that compassion.
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Far from being the thing
that makes us human,
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human empathy is far from perfect.
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We round up empathic creatures,
we kill them and we eat them.
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Now, maybe you say OK,
well, those are different species.
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That's just predation,
and humans are predators.
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But we don't treat our own kind
too well either.
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People who seem to know
only one thing about animal behavior
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know that you must never attribute
human thoughts and emotions
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to other species.
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Well, I think that's silly,
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because attributing human thoughts
and emotions to other species
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is the best first guess about what
they're doing and how they're feeling,
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because their brains
are basically the same as ours.
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They have the same structures.
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The same hormones that create
mood and motivation in us
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are in those brains as well.
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It is not scientific to say that they
are hungry when they're hunting
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and they're tired when
their tongues are hanging out,
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and then say when they're playing
with their children
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and acting joyful and happy,
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we have no idea if they can possibly
be experiencing anything.
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That is not scientific.
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So OK, so a reporter said to me,
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"Maybe, but how do you really know
that other animals can think and feel?"
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And I started to rifle
through all the hundreds
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of scientific references
that I put in my book
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and I realized that the answer
was right in the room with me.
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When my dog gets off the rug
and comes over to me --
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not to the couch, to me --
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and she rolls over on her back
and exposes her belly,
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she has had the thought,
"I would like my belly rubbed.
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I know that I can go over to Carl,
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he will understand what I'm asking.
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I know I can trust him
because we're family.
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He'll get the job done
and it will feel good."
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(Laughter)
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She has thought and she has felt,
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and it's really not
more complicated than that.
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But we see other animals
and we say, "Oh look, killer whales,
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wolves, elephants:
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that's not how they see it."
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That tall-finned male is L41.
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He's 38 years old.
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The female right on his left side is L22.
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She's 44.
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They've known each other for decades.
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They know exactly who they are.
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They know who their friends are.
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They know who their rivals are.
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Their life follows the arc of a career.
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They know where they are all the time.
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This is an elephant named Philo.
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He was a young male.
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This is him four days later.
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Humans not only can feel grief,
we create an awful lot of it.
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We want to carve their teeth.
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Why can't we wait for them to die?
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Elephants once ranged from the shores
of the Mediterranean Sea
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all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope.
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In 1980, there were vast
strongholds of elephant range
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in Central and Eastern Africa.
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And now their range is shattered
into little shards.
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This is the geography of an animal
that we are driving to extinction,
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a fellow being, the most
magnificent creature on land.
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Of course, we take much better care
of our wildlife in the United States.
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In Yellowstone National Park,
we killed every single wolf.
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We killed every single wolf
south of the Canadian border, actually.
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But in the park, park rangers
did that in the 1920s,
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and then 60 years later
they had to bring them back,
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because the elk numbers
had gotten out of control.
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And then people came.
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People came by the thousands
to see the wolves,
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the most accessibly
visible wolves in the world.
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And I went there and I watched
this incredible family of wolves.
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A pack is a family.
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It has some breeding adults
and the young of several generations.
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And I watched the most famous, most stable
pack in Yellowstone National Park.
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And then, when they wandered
just outside the border,
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two of their adults were killed,
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including the mother,
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which we sometimes call the alpha female.
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The rest of the family immediately
descended into sibling rivalry.
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Sisters kicked out other sisters.
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That one on the left tried for days
to rejoin her family.
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They wouldn't let her
because they were jealous of her.
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She was getting too much attention
from two new males,
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and she was the precocious one.
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That was too much for them.
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She wound up wandering
outside the park and getting shot.
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The alpha male wound up
being ejected from his own family.
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As winter was coming in,
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he lost his territory,
his hunting support,
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the members of his family and his mate.
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We cause so much pain to them.
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The mystery is, why don't
they hurt us more than they do?
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This whale had just finished eating
part of a grey whale
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with his companions
who had killed that whale.
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Those people in the boat
had nothing at all to fear.
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This whale is T20.
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He had just finished tearing a seal
into three pieces with two companions.
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The seal weighed about as much
as the people in the boat.
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They had nothing to fear.
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They eat seals.
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Why don't they eat us?
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Why can we trust them around our toddlers?
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Why is it that killer whales have returned
to researchers lost in thick fog
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and led them miles until the fog parted
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and the researchers' home
was right there on the shoreline?
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And that's happened more than one time.
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In the Bahamas, there's a woman
named Denise Herzing,
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and she studies spotted dolphins
and they know her.
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She knows them very well.
She knows who they all are.
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They know her.
They recognize the research boat.
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When she shows up,
it's a big happy reunion.
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Except, one time showed up and they
didn't want to come near the boat,
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and that was really strange.
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And they couldn't figure out
what was going on
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until somebody came out on deck
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and announced that one
of the people onboard had died
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during a nap in his bunk.
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How could dolphins know
that one of the human hearts
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had just stopped?
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Why would they care?
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And why would it spook them?
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These mysterious things just hint at
all of the things that are going on
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in the minds that are with us on Earth
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that we almost never think about at all.
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At an aquarium in South Africa
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was a little baby bottle-nosed
dolphin named Dolly.
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She was nursing, and one day
a keeper took a cigarette break
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and he was looking into the window
into their pool, smoking.
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Dolly came over and looked at him,
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went back to her mother,
nursed for a minute or two,
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came back to the window,
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and released a cloud of milk
that enveloped her head like smoke.
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Somehow, this baby bottle-nosed dolphin
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got the idea of using milk
to represent smoke.
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When human beings use one thing
to represent another,
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we call that art.
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(Laughter)
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The things that make us human
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are not the things
that we think make us human.
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What makes us human is that,
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of all these things that our minds
and their minds have,
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we are the most extreme.
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We are the most compassionate,
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most violent, most creative
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and most destructive animal
that has ever been on this planet,
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and we are all of those things
all jumbled up together.
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But love is not the thing
that makes us human.
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It's not special to us.
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We are not the only ones
who care about our mates.
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We are not the only ones
who care about our children.
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Albatrosses frequently fly six,
sometimes ten thousand miles
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over several weeks to deliver
one meal, one big meal,
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to their chick who is waiting for them.
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They nest on the most remote islands
in the oceans of the world,
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and this is what it looks like.
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Passing life from one generation
to the next is the chain of being.
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If that stops, it all goes away.
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If anything is sacred, that is,
and into that sacred relationship
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comes our plastic trash.
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All of these birds
have plastic in them now.
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This is an albatross six months old,
ready to fledge --
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died, packed with red cigarette lighters.
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This is not the relationship
we are supposed to have
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with the rest of the world.
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But we, who have named
ourselves after our brains,
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never think about the consequences.
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When we welcome new
human life into the world,
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we welcome our babies
into the company of other creatures.
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We paint animals on the walls.
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We don't paint cell phones.
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We don't paint work cubicles.
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We paint animals to show them
that we are not alone.
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We have company.
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And every one of those animals
in every painting of Noah's ark,
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deemed worthy of salvation
is in mortal danger now,
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and their flood is us.
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So we started with a question:
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Do they love us?
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We're going to ask another question.
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Are we capable of using what we have
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to care enough to simply
let them continue?
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)