Episode Transcript
[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out Temperate zones and tropic climbs and run through currents and thriving seas, the winds blowing through breathing trees and strong ozone, safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Hello, KSQUID listeners, It's every other Sunday again and you're listening to Sustainability now, a bi weekly casequid radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. Frequent listeners to Sustainability now know that from time to time, interviews focus on animals, mostly from the perspective of animal rights and whether animals are people, too. My guest today, Sy Montgomery, has been engaging with and writing about animals since the 1980s, asking questions such as, what do chickens know? Does an octopus have a soul? And is it really turtles? All the way down. Her 2023 Book of Time and Turtles was a New York Times bestseller. And her new book, what the Chicken Knows, has just been published by Atria Press. She's the author of more than 38 nonfiction books for adults and children and has garnered numerous awards for them.
[00:01:32] Speaker C: Simon Montgomery, welcome to Sustainability Now.
[00:01:35] Speaker D: Thanks so much for having me.
[00:01:37] Speaker C: Before we continue, I have to read the blurb from your online bio. I think this is on your website to research books, films and articles. Sy Montgomery has been chased by an angry silverback gorilla in Zaire and bitten by a vampire bat in Costa Rica, worked in a pit crawling with 18,000 snakes in Manitoba, and handled a wild tarantula in French Guiana. She has been deftly undressed by an orangutan in Borneo, hunted by a tiger in India, and swum with piranhas, electric eels and dolphins in the Amazon. She searched the Altai Mountains of Mongolia's Gobi for snow leopards, hiked into the trackless cloud forest of Papua New guinea to radio collar tree kangaroos, and learned to scuba dive in order to commune with octopuses. I mean, you've really been busy, you know, I guess you just love them. So the obvious place to start with is how do you get did you get into this business? You. I saw you have a triple major in magazine journalism, communications and French language and literature. And there's really no obvious connection between those degrees and the subjects of your book and your, you know, occupation, avocation. And as Joe, Joe Heller once wrote, something happens. But what was that?
[00:02:58] Speaker D: Well, I actually, I would have liked a fourth major in biology, and I took a lot of biology in college, but the university had never had a triple major before, so they weren't about to give me a quadruple but that's all right. I mean, it's been kind of a life off the beaten path. So how do you get from being a writer to being like this jungle explorer and adventurer?
Well, I knew writing for newspapers and covering environment and science was going to help me. And so I worked for five years right out of college at a newspaper. And after my first year, where you're assigned to whatever, but after one year, I got the beat that I wanted, and that was science, medicine and the environment. That was fabulous. And then after five years of work, my father, ever my champion, gave me the gift of tickets to a place I'd always wanted to go. Australia. And I'd wanted to go to Australia because of all the interesting animals there. You know, they have marsupials and monotremes, you know, things like kangaroos and koalas and wombats and egg laying mammals like platypus and echidna. So I didn't just want to visit, I wanted to learn and I wanted to give back. So I joined an organization called Earth Watch, which pairs pang laymen with scientific projects around the world. And to make a long story short, I loved this project. I went on studying the southern hairy nosed wombat out in the field in the outback. And the principal investigator, Dr. Pamela Parker, said, you know, I wish I could pay you to come back. I wish I could give you a ticket to come back and you could study anything you wanted. I can see you're on fire, but I can't. But if you ever did want to come back, you would stay at my camp and I would give you food. So I went home and quit my job and got a tent and moved to the outback and began studying emus. And I was working without a net, you know, no health insurance, no income. Meanwhile, my husband, who I hadn't married yet, but who was still hard in my heart, he too was working as a full time freelance writer. And everyone thought that we were crazy because weren't. We weren't making any money. And after five years out of school, you didn't have enormous savings. But it was the smartest thing I ever did. I came back after six months of living in a tent.
I had discovered all kinds of really fascinating things about emus. I mean, nothing earth shattering like they weren't using tools. It wasn't like Jane Goodall's astonishing discovery or anything like that. But of my discoveries, perhaps the most significant to me was that I did not want to be putting on pantyhose and showing up in an office and Working for someone else. I had loved my years at the newspaper, but now it was time for to be on my own and write only the stories that I wanted. And the stories I wanted to tell were all about animals. And I've been doing that ever since.
[00:06:14] Speaker C: Well, you know, you've pursued many different animals, as the blurb revealed. How do you decide which ones to pursue? You might want to also list the animals that you've written about for our listeners. But I'm curious, you know, how do you decide what the next book is going to be about?
[00:06:35] Speaker D: Well, in the beginning, it was pretty systematic. My first book, I wanted it to be an homage to three women whose work had inspired me as I was growing up. Jane Goodall, who went into the field in 1960 to study the chimpanzees.
Diane Fossey, who studied mountain gorillas in Zaire, in Rwanda. And the third Trimate, who studied the third species of great ape. I know we're leaving out bonobos, but all three of these women were proteges of Louis Leakey. And the third was Berute Galdicos. He studied orangutans in Indonesian Borneo. So this book was an homage to them. It wasn't a triple biography. It was a biography of their relationships with their study animals, which turned out to be the key to how they transformed the study of animals forever, by recognizing that each is an individual. And that was something that previous scientists had systematically avoided. But they allowed themselves to fall in love with their study animals and used not just their intellect, but also their intuition and their emotion as tools of inquiry. So that book was pretty easy to figure out. And then after that, you know, I wanted to continue to examine relationships between people and animals. And I thought, well, let's pick a different kind of relationship.
You know, the great apes are so closely related to us that you can get a blood transfusion from a chimp. But what about someone else? And someone else who we fear and tend to try to eradicate? Well, that would include predators. And I decided on tigers as the, er, predator. And then I found this one place in the world where tigers routinely swim out after your boat and eat you. They live in a mangrove swamp, the only mangrove swamp with tigers. And the people there do not try to eradicate the tigers, even though they eat hundreds of people a year, these people worship the tigers. So I wanted to write about that.
[00:08:38] Speaker C: Well, where is that?
[00:08:40] Speaker D: Just, this is along the Bay of Bengal between India and Bangladesh. So I went to both of those countries. Okay, so while I was there, I saw these river dolphins in the Ganges. And I was fascinated by them and discovered that there were also river dolphins in the Amazon. So my next book was about pink Amazon river dolphins and the stories that the people tell about them. Because when I was in West Bengal and in Bangladesh, I found that the local people would tell these stories that sounded like tall tales, but they were true. They sounded impossible, but they were actually excellent natural history observations. And it was there that I really learned what you can learn when you are willing to listen for truth to the people who live close to the earth. So that was the third book, and I've written 38 books. So one book kind of leads to the other. Sometimes you're giving a presentation on one book and you meet someone at your talk who's doing a fascinating study and you want to do a book on their work. I write for adults and for children. I've done picture books, and I've also done pretty sophisticated chapter books.
So I basically am trying to write for anyone who wants to join me on this journey to understand how thrilling, how different and same, how intelligent, how emotional animals really are. Because they are our neighbors and we need to reconnect with them. I think part of the problem that we all are having all around the world is that we feel separated from the rest of animate creation and that all of these animals are our brothers and sisters. And almost every religious tradition states that, that we all have the same father or mother or origin.
And science tells us that too. Because even if you go to octopuses, we share a common ancestor with octopuses, it was half a billion years ago, but we share a common ancestor, every living thing.
[00:11:02] Speaker C: Just to go back to something you said, science tries to make generalizations across broad categories. Right. In order to demonstrate truths. Right. So getting emotionally involved, I don't know if it's considered bad science or an error. I've always thought that the people love the animals that they study. It's interesting to talk about the emotional connection. So what kind of connection could you establish with person eating tigers?
[00:11:34] Speaker D: Well, I got to tell you, in the whole time that I. On all of my visits to West Bengal, only once did I see a tiger, although plenty of times tigers saw me. So I didn't have a personal relationship with any of those tigers. And I. I don't think many people had a personal relationship and certainly not a friendship with any of the tigers, but they had a relationship the same way we have a relationship with our president or with our God.
So the tiger was a manifestation of a tiger God. Called Doc and Roy.
And Doc and Roy worked with the forest goddess Bono Bibi to keep the world whole and safe. And whenever there was a transgression, Doc and Roy would manifest as a man eating tiger and come and eat the offender. And it turns out, you know that sounds crazy, right? But I'm listening to these people and they've lived with tigers for generations and generations and generations. And I just showed up. So I'm not thinking, boy, are they stupid. I'm not thinking they don't know anything. I'm not thinking, you know, oh, ignorant little brown people. I'm thinking, these are my teachers. How can I learn from them? And it turns out they were completely right. When people are killed, I looked at where and when people were killed by Tigers. And 90% of the time when people were killed by tigers, they had committed a transgression. And that transgression was crossing the line into an area that had been declared a sanctuary. And it was declared a sanctuary by rule of law. But also it was understood that Bono Bibi, the forest goddess, looked after all of those creatures. And why did people transgress? Why did they go into that area? They went in because they were going to harvest wild bee honey where they should not. They were going to cut down wood in an area that needed to regenerate and a place that the baby fishes needed to go hide in the mangrove forest. They were messing with the sanctuary. They were violating the rules that the whole community knew about. It was not just codified into West Bengal's laws, it was the people's own laws. And so people didn't get mad at the tiger.
They knew that they owed their lives to the tiger God and the forest goddess. So they understood that we need predators to make our world whole. And this is something that a lot of us educated people in the west seem to have forgotten.
[00:14:26] Speaker C: You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipchitz, and my guest today is Cy Montgomery, who has written 38 books, non fiction books primarily or all about the animals with which she has interacted. And we were just talking about person eating tigers. I'm trying to be gender neutral there.
[00:14:46] Speaker D: However, they mostly did eat men because the women stayed home where they were eaten by crocodiles.
[00:14:51] Speaker C: I see.
[00:14:51] Speaker D: Okay, well, so I'm not being sexist.
[00:14:54] Speaker C: That that makes sense. I was sent a pre publication edition of what the Chicken Knows, which is coming out very soon. But then I went out and bought three others of your books. And I was sort of. I was interested in maybe spending some Time on each of them. So why don't we start with what the chicken knows? What made it motivated you to write about chickens?
[00:15:16] Speaker D: Well, one, it was an homage to the individuals in my flock who I loved. I no longer have chickens on our property, but what they taught me stays with me forever. But also, why now is that so many people during the pandemic got chickens and got roosters. So there's a lot. There's a lot of chicken fans out there. But then when people went back to work, an alarming number of them got rid of their chickens and sometimes just dumped them and the roosters in the woods. As a result, all kinds of rescues around the world are being inundated with chickens, and we owe chickens more than that. And another reason is that here is the world's most easily recognized bird. I mean, there's people who can't identify a robin and who don't know what a crow looks like, but everyone knows what a chicken looks like because he looks like the COVID of the, you know, Kellogg's Corn Flakes box. Right?
Everyone can identify chicken, but almost everything we think we know about these familiar birds is actually dead wrong. And I felt I needed to clear that up.
[00:16:27] Speaker C: Well, so why don't you tell us what. What chickens know, how they communicate among themselves and with humans. And I was sort of interested in pecking orders, you know, and why they exist among chickens, who presumably are being fed regularly.
And you don't have to compete very hard for food.
[00:16:46] Speaker D: Well, neither do we, right? And yet in our human societies, we have all kinds of hierarchies. We have plenty of food. We have so much food, obesity. It's like our major health problem. So food isn't everything to any animal, really. I mean, of course it's important, but to a chicken, probably the most important thing, particularly given that their food is out there, is their social relationships. And this is important to humans, too. Of course. We care about our friends, our family, our community, and so do chickens. So the pecking order is really far more about order than it is about pecking. It's about knowing what's your role in the community. And not everyone wants to be the leader of the community, but the leader of the community isn't necessarily the. The one individual who's going to steal all the best food. Right? I mean, I can think of certain presidencies in which that might have been the case, but it's not typical.
Being a leader means watching out for your community. And when there is a rooster in your flock, you have got Someone really watching out for danger. Someone who will literally give their lives to protect you, and who also, when they find a delicious piece of food. This is what a rooster does. He says, oh, my gosh, I found a big mess of worms. This is fantastic. He calls over his flock and then he steps back and lets them enjoy it before he even takes a bite. So, you know, with great power comes great responsibility.
Often the leader is the one who will break up squabbles. Now, how can we tell who is the leader? Well, sometimes we can tell if it's all hens. Frequently the top hen will, in fact, end up eventually with the choice morsel that everyone is fighting over. But that is really kind of a very little consequence compared to all the other services that that lead chicken performs for her group.
[00:18:48] Speaker C: Then how do they communicate with their people? Because you write about that at some length.
[00:18:53] Speaker D: Yeah.
Within their flock, they've identified at least. I mean, humans have identified at least 24 different, very distinct calls for different things.
But for people, in my case, I kind of became an honorary chicken after my first flock. I started raising baby chicks in my office. So they pretty much thought I was just a really enormous, probably very ugly chicken and I.
[00:19:24] Speaker C: Were they. Were they imprinting on you? I mean, did you.
[00:19:27] Speaker D: Yes, they totally did. They totally imprinted on me. Because, as you know, you know, chickens belong. There's. There's two strategies that birds use with their young. One is the altricial strategy. And these are for songbirds, for example, and hummingbirds. And the little birds, the little babies are naked and their eyes aren't open at first, and they're just these, like, peeping mouths saying, feed me, feed me, feed me. And they can't do a thing. Then there's other birds, precocial birds, and you've heard of precocious children. So these are precocious birds who. Yeah, right out of the egg. They're like, I can run around, I can see, I can think about stuff. Oh, my gosh. But I'm very little. I better follow the first thing I see that's moving, which certainly is going to be my mother most of the time. Throughout evolutionary history, the first thing they saw moving was their mother. So in my case, I turned out to be their mother in their minds. Yeah.
[00:20:22] Speaker C: I mean, chickens are interesting in the sense that they've been. They were domesticated, I suppose, thousands of years ago. And so they're very much a product of human action on them. Right. Selection. And so it's interesting that these survival instincts continue even after They've been bred for so long. I mean, I don't know if you have anything to say about that. I just find it interesting to think about that.
[00:20:50] Speaker D: I am fascinated by instinct. And of course, humans have instincts as well. And sometimes we would be wise to follow our instincts instead of following what we call reasoning. I mean, what are instincts? Instincts basically, are our ancestors giving us answers that worked for them for millions of years, answers that are encoded in our genes. Right? So, you know, sure, we can learn, we can remember things, we can anticipate the future, and so can chickens. But sometimes you don't have time to do that. Sometimes you've got to just do what your gut tells you to do. And a lot of the time, that's the right answer.
[00:21:38] Speaker C: How do you feel about eating chickens?
[00:21:40] Speaker D: Well, I quit eating meat over 40 years ago. I read a book called Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. And when I closed the pages, I was appalled. I had no idea back in the 80s that factory farms even existed. I thought a farm was, you know, like the farms my mother grew up on in Arkansas, and that there were, you know, happy animals living out in the sunshine in the pasture, and that meat animals had a great life until one day they were shot in the head. And this is not what happens in factory farms at all. I was appalled. And I. Back in the 80s, you know, we had no money. I graduated from college in 1979, and I couldn't afford to donate large sums to animal organizations because I didn't have those large sums. But I was going to be damned if I was going to give my food dollar to people who were torturing animals and forcing me to eat diseased, insane creatures. So I realized that today there are other options and that if you eat meat, you don't have to eat meat that comes from a factory farm. But by now, you know, I've lived all these years healthy and strong, eating my vegetarian diet, and it suits me just fine. But, you know, I'm not. I don't want to be one of those people that judges others because I think we all try to be compassionate in our behavior, and we choose the ways in which we feel we can afford to be kind to the earth and to animals and to each other. And so being vegetarian was one of the choices I made. And, you know, there's other choices. I've got a. Got a hybrid vehicle to try to cut down on global warming. And we chose not to have children because of human overpopulation.
And I spend my life writing about animals and so on, and so forth. But notice I haven't given away everything I own, and I still get on airplanes and travel around polluting the world so I can talk to people about animals. So just by being here, we're, we're all drawing on the earth's resources. I'm just always looking for more ways that I, it works for me to give back.
[00:24:06] Speaker C: There's something interesting about, about all of that that relates this earlier idea about having relationships with animals. You had a relationship with your chickens? Most of us don't have relationships with the chickens in factory farms. There's statistics and, you know, again, the fact that they're treated so poorly always does come as a surprise. But does that mean that free range chickens are okay as, as food?
[00:24:36] Speaker D: Well, interestingly, there's several grades at least I know with eggs there's organic free range and pasture raised. And it turns out you can have a chicken egg and I assume meat because I don't even visit the meat aisle. But you can be labeled organic. And that just means that they are fed organic food. They can be, you know, in a tiny cage eating organic food. So that's, that's no good.
You're not eating a bunch of chemicals, but you are eating that bird's pain and fear and loneliness and insanity. You don't want that, and you don't want your money to reward those people. Then there are free range now, free range, to me, you would think that just means that they can come and go as they please, as did my hens. They could range wherever they wanted all over our eight acres. And later they annexed our neighbor's yard as well. But free range technically doesn't mean that. It just means that there is a door that is sometimes opened that they could go through if they wanted to at that moment. And a lot of times they don't want to go through at that moment because they're too scared. Pasture raised means that they are out in the grass in the sunshine and they're eating bugs and they have space enough to live a normal chicken life. So those animals have had a good life until they are slaughtered. And if I ate meat, that would be the meat that I would want and I wouldn't want anything to do with the others ever. But I'm living pretty healthy and happy at 66, having for these past 40 years not eaten any animals at all. And boy, I tell you right now, it's so much easier than it used to be. Was a real pain back in the 80s. You had to just chop vegetables up into smaller and Smaller things and then try to make them taste like something else.
[00:26:35] Speaker C: I mean, there's some interesting political philosophy involved in what you were just talking about, you know, about freedom for chickens. And we don't have to get into that. Well, let's turn to another book of time and turtles. It's an interesting. And again, a very personal story about your relationships to a vast number of turtles and their long lives. So how did you get into turtles and turtle rescue and rehabilitation? And why are they so vulnerable? And here, especially the human incense, Sensitivity and indifference. So it's not so much about cars as about. And I guess it has to do with chickens, too. It's about how people who adopt them as pets end up being kind of indifferent and insensitive to them.
[00:27:22] Speaker D: Turtles came about because the previous really big book that I had done, a book that I devoted years to, as opposed to, you know, months, was about octopuses and consciousness. And consciousness is one of the two hard problems in philosophy.
[00:27:39] Speaker C: We're going to come back to them. Okay?
[00:27:41] Speaker D: Oh, okay, okay. But having examined that, I wanted to tackle the second big problem in philosophy, and that is time. What is it? Is it real? Do we flow through time, or does it flow through us? Who experiences time? What's it feel like? And having turned 60, I was more interested in time than ever before. And I thought, who better to accompany me on this journey into understanding time than these wonderful reptiles? Everyone can recognize who arose with the dinosaurs and yet are with us still, and who lived to great long ages. And I had no idea, when I was researching this book on time, of course, that the pandemic was coming and it was going to stop time. It stopped the clock. It stopped the calendar. No longer were we gathering for weddings and funerals and graduations. No longer was nine to five even a thing. We weren't going to the office. We weren't going to school. But what hanging out with the turtles allowed me to do was discover another kind of time. And at a moment when our country was just riven with strife and environmental disaster was breaking out everywhere, and the world felt shattered, it was wonderful to be working at a turtle hospital, literally mending the world shell by shattered shell, which is the subtitle of the book. And it gave me a chance to champion underappreciated animals, which I like to do.
Everyone can identify a turtle, but we don't know so many things about turtles. We don't realize because they are reptiles. We don't realize again that they remember the past and anticipate the future. We don't see their emotions on their faces like we can with fellow mammals. You know, you can look at your dog wagging his tail and his ears in that happy position and, you know, the big smile. We can, we can look at a horse and their ears are forward and, you know, but if their ears are back, you better watch out. We can read other animals pretty well, except reptiles are harder to read. And it's partially because they tend to be on a different time scale than we are. Turtles do everything slowly, and sometimes that makes their actions almost imperceptible to us. But it takes a certain kind of patience to get to know a turtle. But it is patience that is well rewarded.
[00:30:23] Speaker C: You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is Sy Montgomery, author of 38 nonfiction books about animals. And we've just been talking about her love affair with turtles, which I gather was partly a response to the COVID pandemic. One of the questions that I was asking before, I mean, because there is this gap called a time, emotional time gap between how humans experience time and turtles experience time, why do we adopt them as pets?
[00:30:59] Speaker D: I mean, I know turtles. I mean, they don't have the bad rep that some reptiles do. Most turtles don't bite. Most turtles, at least when they're young, will easily fit in a child's hand. And you look like you might be of my vintage. And those of your listeners who were born in the 50s, I mean, we were all practically issued a little baby red eared turtle when we were six, but we were given these horrible little plastic containers to keep them in with the palm tree, remember?
[00:31:35] Speaker C: Right, right.
[00:31:35] Speaker D: And we were not told that they need a UV light and we were given improper food. And so our pets, most of them, their shells got soft and they died. And our mothers flushed them and then rushed back to Woolworths to get another one for us and hoped we wouldn't know the difference. A few of those turtles, though, did grow up. And Sylvester Stallone, who was Rocky, you know, in the movies, he still has his little red eared turtles from his childhood, and they're called Cuff and Link.
So these animals can live for decades and decades and decades, but people did not know how to care for them. We weren't provided with the right instructions. And I'm sure that every child wanted their baby turtle to thrive. You know, every child would have been delighted to get a UV and heat lamp for their turtle and would have been happy to have the right food. And all of us Were devastated when our little turtle shells got soft and they died.
[00:32:38] Speaker C: Well, I guess I was deprived because I never had a red eared slider as a pet. But I know that people eventually release them into the wild. And in California now, they're a threat to the indigenous turtles. And, you know, there are actually people who go around and basically kill off the red eared sliders.
[00:33:00] Speaker D: I know, which is such a shame because they make great pets. If they would go back into captivity, someone would want them, someone would love them, and that would keep someone from rushing out and taking an adult turtle, a native turtle, out of the wild to be their pet. And this is the other thing. People who love turtles, you want to discourage them from looking at nature as their free pet store. Instead, get a nice red ear who otherwise is going to be killed. Every turtle who survives to adulthood in the wild is a miracle. And I did not realize this until I started this. I was working with this wonderful man who's the artist, Matt Patterson. He's a wildlife artist and he knows a ton about turtles. He illustrated that book and he is a major character in it. But he's one of the people who taught me just how few turtle eggs even hatch and just how few of those lucky hatchlings ever make it to adulthood. So taking an adult turtle out of the wild is, is catastrophic because so many others, you would not believe how unlikely it is for any turtle egg to ever hatch.
First of all, everyone eats turtle eggs. Everyone digs them up and eats them. Humans eat them. Raccoons eat them.
Skunks eat them. Dogs eat them. Ants eat them. Trees will send their roots into turtle eggs to suck the moisture during drought.
So, I mean, it's a miracle that any turtle egg ever hatches. So then it hatches. The animal is the size of a coin, and this brave little creature has to run a gauntlet. If it's a sea turtle, it has to run out of the beach, figure out that, you know, the moon is really over here and all the porch lights are over there, which a lot of turtles get confused. If it's one of our land or pond turtles.
Their, their, their nest is usually not near the pond that they want to go to or the woods that they want to go to, because they're typically laid in sandy areas. And they have to find their way, never having seen this place, to the nearest wetland or forest. And along the way, everyone wants to eat them. And once they get there, everyone wants to eat them. I have been releasing hatchling turtles into a pond, and I have had frogs jump into my palm to eat the baby turtle in my pond.
Fish will eat them, birds will eat them.
Every. Everything that creepeth upon the earth wants to eat a baby turtle. And when they get big enough, if we didn't have cars, if we didn't have poachers, of which there are many, and if we weren't ruining their habitat and destroying the climate, an adult turtle would probably be just fine because of that wonderful shell.
But once they finally make it to adulthood and they finally are able to make more turtles, now our cards are smushing them. Poachers are taking them to sell them for pets, for their shells, for food, and for fake medicines that don't work.
And they're vulnerable to climate change. Few people realize that the temperature of many species of turtles eggs is what determines what sex they are. So if the temperature goes up, you're going to get all males or all females, and that's no good. And beyond that, you've got cooked eggs, and that's really no good. So climate change is really bad. Plus gets rid of all the beaches because the, you know, the sea is rising, rising, rising. So it's really bad, really, really bad for turtles. Roads are bad for every animal. As you know, there was a report I read, I was astonished, that showed that during the pandemic, the fact that there were fewer cars on the road saved more animals than any action ever taken by the US government since the creation of the national parks.
Just by failing to hit these animals and turtles, because of something called flicker fusion ratio, they probably can't even see the car racing towards them on the highway. They can't process it the same way that you and I when we look at television. I don't know about hdtv, but for a long time, television used to be a series of still images that were run so fast, our brains saw it as a blur, whereas our dogs and cats would look at the television and they would see individual still pictures.
So for a turtle, they just saw, they just see a blur. And even if they could run, and some turtles can go pretty fast if they need to, they don't even see the car that hit them. All those millions of years of evolution did not prepare them for our roads and our cars.
[00:38:20] Speaker C: Well, I'm not sure it prepared us either.
Do you want to tell us a brief story about one of the turtles in your book?
[00:38:28] Speaker D: Oh, yeah, gosh, okay. I will tell you about the resurrection of Monet.
One of the things I got to do was raise baby turtles for release.
And I had Four painted turtles who were named Monet, Manette, Bonard, and Surat.
And every day, I would look in on them, feed them, check them out. One day in February, I saw Manet and I saw Bonard and I saw Seurat, but Monet was missing.
And I looked under the floating dock and he had drowned. His little neck was all flaccid and his eyes were shut and he wasn't breathing, and it was horrible. And I screamed, and my husband came running down.
I tried to call Matt, but freakishly, his phone was off. But then I remembered something that I had seen at Turtle Survival alliance and at Turtle Rescue League. It had been pioneered on giant sea turtles who weigh like 500 pounds, and little Monet was the size of a quarter, but it was turtle cpr.
I took Monet's arms and legs and moved them back and forth and back and forth, and I did it for 45 minutes. And Monet came back to life. Life. And that spring, I released him with the other three. And he is now, for all I know, living wild and free in a beautiful place where his mother and father.
[00:40:03] Speaker C: Well, that's quite a story.
I imagine it's because their metabolisms are much slower than humans. And so, you know, the damage from lack of oxygen takes longer, but that's not really here or there. You're listening to Sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is Cy Montgomery, author of many, many books about animals for adults and children. And we were just talking about turtles, but now I want to turn to your two books about octopuses. I did read the Soul of an Octopus, and I then saw that you had just recently published Secrets of the Octopus. From our rather speciest perspective, the octopus is one of the stranger cohabitants on the planet. And they're very intelligent. They have eight arms and multiple brains. So maybe you can talk about their souls and secrets.
[00:41:00] Speaker D: Oh, yeah. Love to.
Octopuses are separated from humans by half a billion years of evolution. So it is really no wonder that you'd have to go to outer space or science fiction to find someone less like us. But what I found after making friends with my first octopus, Athena, at New England Aquarium was that you can be friends with somebody very, very different from yourself and that often you can find common ground, something that the two of you enjoy.
And this first happened when I met my first giant Pacific octopus, Athena.
And I didn't know what to expect that day when I went to New England Aquarium and asked to meet her. I was working on a Magazine article and Scott Dowd, who ran the freshwater gallery actually down the hall, opens the tank and I saw this beautiful huge animal who each arm was maybe four feet long. She maybe weighed 40 pounds.
She emerged from her lair and turned bright red with excitement.
And then her arms came reaching up through the water as if she was reaching for me. And I asked Scott, can I touch her? Because she obviously wanted to touch me. And he said sure. So I plunged my hands and arms into this freezing cold salt water and instantly my skin is covered with all these soft questing suckers. And they can taste with all of their skin, not just their suckers, but it's most exquisitely concentrated the sense of taste in their suckers. So she's tasting me and feeling me at the same time.
And she's very strong. I can feel that I'm going to have hickeys to explain to my husband when I get home, but happily they're on my arms and I see her eyes swivel in its socket and look into my face and it's obvious that this animal is just as curious about me, me as I am about her. And that was when this years long quest began for me to come to know who are these creatures? I really wanted to know someone, well, who was an octopus.
And I made friendships that I will treasure for the rest of my life.
[00:43:34] Speaker C: Well, maybe you could talk about the kinds of interactions that you have and this question about octopus intelligence, I mean, I know there is speculation that they are comparable in intelligence to human beings. Well, possibly, but constrained by a number of physical factors we might say. So you know, how do you, how do you sort of identify or determine that question of, of intelligence?
[00:44:07] Speaker D: Well, that's funny because we're now having trouble redefining it in humans. You know, it used to be like what was your SAT score? Right. Well, and when you are trying to interrogate an animal about its intelligence, you need to ask the question in a way that they have some motive to bother to answer. And this has confused researchers for a long, long time. For a long time people thought that, you know, chimps were really smart because they put the round peg in the round hole and gorillas would do it too. But you give it to an orangutan and they do not see a problem to solve there. They're just scanning for fruit. I mean, they don't think that you need to do this. So you got to find some biologically relevant way to ask that question.
With octopuses, we know that they like to solve puzzles, for example, they like to open jars to get to food. They like to navigate mazes. They enjoy playing with the same toys some of our children play with, like Mr. Potato Head. And they like Legos. They like building and taking apart things, mostly taking apart, but sometimes they will build things.
The more we find out how to ask questions of animals, the more we're astonished.
One of the experiments that I mentioned in my second octopus book, the Secrets of the Octopus, this experiment was done by an Australian researcher with cuttlefish. And she basically modified the famous marshmallow test that has been used on children to do it with cuttlefish, who are very closely related to octopus. Do you know the marshmallow test?
[00:45:55] Speaker C: I don't think so.
[00:45:57] Speaker D: Well, it was a test to see if children could put off a quick reward now for a bigger reward later, and if this correlated years later with academic and adult success, which it did.
So being able to put something off at first shows that you anticipate the future.
It also shows you remember the past. And so the marshmallow test was the researcher would tell a little kid, like, there's one marshmallow right here, right in front of you, but if you can wait, you know, one minute or five minutes, I'll give you two marshmallows.
And a lot of kids couldn't do it. They just couldn't resist temptation.
Well, the ones that could, though, were showing self control, which proved to be very helpful as they grew up later. And of course, with every experiment, there's people who later criticize it and say, oh, you know, you were just testing privileged white children or something. And this doesn't apply to everybody, and I'm not going to discuss that. But how do you do marshmallow test for a cuttlefish, for a cephalopod, like an octopus? They don't like marshmallows. They don't use our language. But she figured out a way that the, the animal had to understand that if it didn't eat, like the frozen bit of fish that was being offered now, in a minute they would get their favorite thing, like a live. A live shrimp. Yum, yum, yum. Everyone likes that. And what was adorable, I think, was that the cuttlefish used a lot of the same techniques that the children did to resist temptation. A lot of the children who were successfully resisting that first marshmallow, they would cover their little eyes with their hands so they didn't have to look at that marshmallow.
Pretty much, the cuttlefish knew, like, oh, my gosh, I can't just look at this delicious piece of fish. But I really want the even more delicious shrimp so they'd avert their eyes so that they wouldn't look at it. I just think that is so great. So you know, and this is an animal that's been separated from us by half a billion years. I was astonished at the many things that behavioral traits that we can share with animals who are arranged so different from us. They have blue blood, they have three hearts, they taste with all of their skin, they shoot ink, they're all venomous, they have a mouth in their armpits that's shaped like the beak of a parrot. Who would think that we would have so many points on which we agree, such as I like to play with toys. Oh, you like to play with toys. Or I like gentle touch. You like gentle touch, I'll pet you.
And these are the sort of things that I would do with my octopus friends. And I know they looked forward to my visits and I know that they recognize me. There have been experiments showing that if you dress people identically that octopuses will recognize your face as they look up through the water. And I have 000 doubt because of the way that these octopuses behaved. Sometimes I would bring a friend with me the octopus didn't know and sometimes the octopus just did not want to meet that person. Usually if you know, oh, they're with me it was okay, but sometimes not. And my best friend Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who's a best selling author, she came along. She's a pack a day smoker and this octopus wanted nothing to do with her. Probably because she tasted like nicotine and invertebrates hate nicotine.
[00:49:45] Speaker C: Well that's, that's again that's quite interesting. Most of us don't have those kinds of experiences and nature, there are aliens amongst us I guess. Right. I mean from our very self centered perspective since octopuses. Sorry are so different. So different.
Well, you don't really anthropomorphize the animals with whom you have relationships, although you attribute all kinds of intentionality, emotions, personalities and communications to them. So here's the sort of philosophical question. Are animals people?
[00:50:27] Speaker D: No. I mean we're different species, but animals are perhaps persons.
[00:50:32] Speaker C: Okay, all right.
[00:50:33] Speaker D: The difference is Persona, person.
That word in Latin I believe means mask of God.
So I feel that all of animate creation is a different manifestation of whatever you want to call primal urge or God or. You know, there's a saying from attributed to Thales of Miletus, the pre Socratic Greek philosopher. That kind of names the way I feel about the universe.
And it is the universe is alive and has fire in it and is full of gods.
And to me, that says that the world is far more vibrantly alive, it is brilliant with life, and that all of it is holy.
[00:51:45] Speaker C: Okay, well, we're just about out of time, but what's your next book going to be about?
[00:51:51] Speaker D: Well, the next book coming out in 2025 is going to be about Fire Chief, a 42 pound giant snapping turtle who lives about a mile away from me.
And it's a picture book with beautiful art, not like cute kids art, but gorgeous realistic art by Matt Patterson. And I'm working on two other books at the same time, one with Joel Sartori, the National Geographic photographer who has taken all these gorgeous portraits of endangered animals. And gosh, can you hear Thurber barking? He really wants to get in on this.
[00:52:34] Speaker C: We're almost done. You can. That's fine. Don't worry.
[00:52:37] Speaker D: Okay, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. He has something to say.
And I just got back from scuba diving in Ecuador with giant manta rays. And that's going to be a new book as well.
[00:52:49] Speaker C: Wow.
Well, Simon Montgomery, thank you so much for being my guest on sustainability Now.
[00:52:57] Speaker D: Thanks so much. It was my pleasure.
[00:52:59] Speaker B: You've been listening to a Sustainability now interview with Cy Montgomery, author of 38 nonfiction books about animals with which she has been involved. Her latest book, what the Chicken Knows, has just been published by Atria Press.
[00:53:13] Speaker C: If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find them at ksquid.org sustainabilitynow and Spotify, YouTube and Pocketcasts, among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make KSQUID your community radio station and keep it going. And so, until next every other Sunday, sustainability now.
[00:53:42] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find now.
Not through currents and thriving seas.
Winds blowing through breathing trees Strong o z sun shine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
