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The Science Pawdcast
The Science Pawdcast breaks down the latest science happening in the human world AND the pet world.
Each episode will also bring you a guest to enthral you with their area of knowledge.
You'll learn, be captivated, and laugh along with host Jason Zackowski.
Pets and Science, it's the pawfect mix.
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SciChat has an interview and Q+A with a scientist, while PetChat is a live community gathering for games and stories about pets!
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The Science Pawdcast
Season 6 Episode 27: From Spacecraft Safety, Money and Dogs to Author Brandon Keim
What happens when a spacecraft designed for human travel can't safely carry its crew? Today, we unravel the latest updates on the Boeing Starliner and the safety decisions reshaping the missions of astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. Stranded on the ISS until February 2025, they'll make their return on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. With historical nods to the Challenger disaster, we reflect on NASA's enduring commitment to astronaut safety and the current status of the Starliner as it preps for a crucial uncrewed landing.
Ever thought about how your neighborhood might influence your decision to get a dog? We share our personal journey from financially struggling students in a small trailer to stable dog owners in a rural setting, closely examining a 2021 study from Denmark. Discover how neighborhood wealth, more than income or education, plays a pivotal role in dog ownership and hear how our own experiences align with these findings. From companionship to physical exercise, dogs provide immense emotional benefits, and our discussion highlights how these factors resonate across different socioeconomic statuses.
Join us for a heartfelt conversation with Brandon Keim, author of "Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-Than-Human World." Brandon offers fascinating insights into animal intelligence and personhood, enriched by stories of animal behavior and ecological impact.
From the individuality within animal species to the impressive engineering feats of beavers, we delve into the heartwarming and thought-provoking tales of animal companions and bird migration. With a special spotlight on Norbert the beaver and emotional pet stories, this episode is a rich tapestry of science, nature, and the profound bonds between humans and animals.
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Hello science enthusiasts. My name is Jason Zukoski. I'm a high school chemistry teacher and a science communicator, but I'm also the dog dad of Bunsen and Beaker, the science dogs on social media. If you love science and you love pets, you've come to the right place. Put on your lab coat, put on your safety glasses and hold on to your tail. This is the Science Podcast. Hi everybody, and welcome back to the Science Podcast. We hope you're happy and healthy out there.
Speaker 1:This is episode 27 of season 6. We have some good news about Bunsen in the family section. So people have been asking on social media. Some of it's neutral, not good, not bad, and Chris and I are back at school. So this week has been a bit of a show and the podcast is out late because Wednesday and Thursday we were destroyed and had no energy in the night to record it. So hey, it's Friday, we're recording, it's all good, it's a great show. So hey, it's Friday, we're recording, it's all good, it's a great show.
Speaker 1:In science news, chris and I are breaking down the topical drama llama of Starliner and its woes and how it's coming back to Earth, literally in a couple hours of me recording this so you can get caught up in all of that. In pet science we look at a study from Denmark that had some interesting things to say about socioeconomic status and dog ownership. Interesting. Our guest in Ask an Expert is Brandon Keim, whose book Meet the Neighbors Animal Minds and Life in a More-Than-Human World is so wholesome and his interview is so good. It's fuzzy and warm and the book just hits you right in the heart. So we talk about his book and all about animals and nature. It's a really great interview.
Speaker 1:Okay, space puns. I know we gravitate towards really good puns here on the science podcast. First off, what is money in space? Called? Well, starbucks, and I like this one. What do you say if you want to start a fight in space? Comment, comment, comment me, bro, comment. Okay, it's bad On with the show because there's no time like science time. This week in science news, chris and I are going to break down a topical space news item Now, before we get to the drama llama, chris, what would you say to me if I said, hey, let's take a romantic trip to Calgary. It's just a city south of us. Would you want to come? Would you like to go to Calgary with me?
Speaker 2:Of course I would always love to go anywhere with you, but what's in Calgary?
Speaker 1:I don't know. We could go out for a nice supper, have a romantic night. Does that sound?
Speaker 2:good. What if we get stuck in Calgary?
Speaker 1:See, that's where I was going with this. If we went to Calgary using the analogy that I'm coming up with here, we would get stuck in Calgary in a hotel room till February or later, and I don't know if that would be super romantic. I think we would miss the dogs, we would start to get a little antsy, and that's a long time to be stuck in a tiny room. Let's move to the actual story.
Speaker 2:There's been a decision made on Starliner, so Starliner is going to return to Earth without the astronauts on it. So there was a concern that I know that you're going to talk about with the hardware, but Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams will not be on board. This will allow NASA and Boeing to gather further testing data on Starliner and minimizing that risk to the crew.
Speaker 1:So before I talk about the technical problems, because that's where most of my research lies Butch and Suni. Their current mission was to go to the International Space Station and they got there in June. They were part of the Boeing crew flight test, so Starliner's first flight with folks inside astronauts. They were the two. I guess you could call them test pilots. While they were on the ISS for their normal mission time they would be doing station research, helping with maintenance and testing and analyzing the Starliner systems. But it's a little bit dangerous to be a test pilot in the maiden voyage of new technology.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. Bill Nelson is the NASA administrator and he emphasized that spaceflight inherently carries those risks, and the test flights are especially uncertain and definitely risky. But Nelson did highlight NASA's commitment to safety and stated that the decision to keep the astronauts on the ISS reflects their dedication to their core value of safety and protecting the astronauts.
Speaker 1:Now you and I are old enough. Do you remember the Challenger disaster?
Speaker 2:I do. It's making me emotional just thinking about it, because we were just so excited for that space flight to take place and then when it exploded in the sky, that was just devastating.
Speaker 1:And if you go into the history that has come out after that, there is some blame with some folks with NASA that maybe didn't listen to some of the safety risks. And the new version of NASA from those disasters Challenger wasn't the only disaster they're definitely more focused on safety and everything has to be as safe as possible without any issues before they risk astronaut lives 100%, and so what this means for Wilmore and Williams is they get an extended stay.
Speaker 2:They're going to continue their work as part of the Expedition 71-72 crew until February 2025. And the plan is that they're going to return to Earth aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft with two other crew members from the Crew-9 mission.
Speaker 4:Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:So, as of us recording this, it's currently September 6th, it's a Friday and we're recording this at 7 pm. Starliner should be touching down if all things go to plan, I think 10 pm our time. So three hours, chris. It's already detached from the ISS and it's moving towards some pretty complicated, uncrewed maneuvers to get it safely back. Boeing's had a rough go with Starliner Actually, we could extrapolate to that. Boeing's had a rough go in general with like aircraft on earth and aircraft in outer space.
Speaker 1:There were helium leaks that stopped the launch to start with and it was delayed, and the idea of what happened was on the way to docking with the ISS. Starliner got to outer space as it started to dock. There are these reaction control thrusters and a couple of them failed or were sluggish or weren't properly listening to command, which could be catastrophic. Right, the last thing you want is a capsule smashing into the ISS or the capsule missing the ISS completely and having no thruster control to come back. That's a nightmare.
Speaker 1:The idea that the engineers with NASA have is that when the craft is pointed at the sun and the thrusters are going, there's so much heat that causes some of them not all of them failed, but the ones that failed. They overheated and stopped working. The astronauts that are stuck up there they're going to review a lot of the data and the flight teams down below are running tests to try and figure out what's going on with their propulsion. It's all because of this that NASA couldn't in good conscience risk having those two astronauts come back to earth and a spacecraft which has been proved to be faulty.
Speaker 2:That's absolutely correct. And so the astronauts were reassigned to the crew nine mission. And so Starliner must return before crew nine launches launches, because that will free up a docking port on the ISS. And Crew-9 mission, which was originally planned for four crew members, is set to launch no earlier than September 24th. So, working together, nasa and SpaceX are coordinating and making adjustments to the Crew Dragon spacecraft, which will include refiguring seats and preparing to carry that additional cargo and additional spacesuits for Wilmore and Williams.
Speaker 1:So, as we wrap up, the number that's the most shocking is the mission in June for this Starliner crew, these two astronauts. It was only supposed to be eight days. They were supposed to dock high five. The astronauts currently on the ISS do some science and hop back in and burn back home. That was in June and they're not coming home till February, so that eight days became months and months of time and space.
Speaker 2:It reminds me of Matt Damon on Mars.
Speaker 1:I know I was just going to say, but I don't think they have to grow potatoes in Martian soil fertilized with human poo, though.
Speaker 2:No, probably not, but at least they are going to come home safely.
Speaker 1:That's right. A good quote that Dr DeGrace Tyson has said and I tell it to kids is space is hard. It is so hard to get things into outer space and it is so hard to get people into outer space. Everything about outer space is inhospitable to humans. Our astronauts are really well-trained, they're amazing people and I get why NASA wants to keep them safe. That's science news for this week. This week in pet science, chris and I are going to look at a study that linked socioeconomic positions to dog ownership, and this is coming from Denmark. Now, where we are in our life right now, chris is not where we were in our early 20s. We were living in a small little trailer with barely enough money to get by every single week. We were just scraping by for probably a couple years. It was pretty dicey.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like to liken ourselves to starving students eating ramen and craft dinner.
Speaker 1:Plain spaghetti. We lived a part of our life where we had to make food decisions based on finances and during that time we didn't have pets, we didn't have a dog.
Speaker 2:But, jason, I liked eating spaghetti.
Speaker 1:I know you love that carby food, but not for me, please. But the point is that time the last thing on our minds was getting a pet. We couldn't afford it. There's no, we didn't even afford. We could barely afford food for ourselves, let alone food for a pet. But I really love dogs and we waited until there was a point where we were pretty stable, and that's when we got Callan, which is our journey towards having dogs as a family. All right. So what's going on with this study, chris?
Speaker 2:Dog ownership and socioeconomic position and those connections between those two factors are not well understood. So the study examined the association between family and neighborhood socioeconomic position and dog ownership. They also looked at acquisition factors, so the purchase price of a dog, and breed characteristics, and they also looked at purposes for owning a dog. It's a recent study, it comes out from 2021, and they used a sample of 2,112 participants aged 18 to 89. So they were asking people, not the dog.
Speaker 1:Denmark's a pretty good example of a country where there's a lot of dog ownership. 20% of all families in Denmark own a dog, but it's nothing compared to the United States. Guess what the percentage roughly is in the United States of households that have a dog. It's between 40 and 45% of households in the United States have a dog. So Denmark is a pretty good example. 20% of families, that's one in five. That's a lot. And what they found within the study broadly was that dog ownership was not significantly linked to high income or education or occupation. Neighborhoods that had high SEP SEP is socioeconomic position, yes, quite bluntly, rich neighborhoods. So if you got some money, those neighborhoods were linked to more frequent ownership of expensive dogs. I don't know what an expensive dog is, chris, do you know? Like those French Bulldogs, I think they run thousands and thousands of dollars.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I seem to think during COVID, when supply and demand and everybody was wanting a dog there were dogs that were going for $4,000 or more.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess it comes as no surprise that if your neighborhood has a lot of money, you're more likely to have expensive dogs and if your neighborhood is low income, the dogs that you have are probably on the cheaper side. Maybe they're from rescue, so they're more likely to own a mixed breed. So, like, purebred dogs are linked to higher income individuals and I guess that makes sense, like if you have a purebred Tibetan Mastiff I remember I was talking to a guest about that they can run like $8,000 to $10,000.
Speaker 2:That's right, and all dogs are good dogs. They are.
Speaker 3:They are, but there's are good dogs.
Speaker 2:They are. They are, but there's different reasons for owning a dog. There's many reasons that were found for owning a dog in this study. In higher SEP neighborhoods, acquiring dogs for physical exercise was more common than in lower SEP neighborhoods, than in lower SEP neighborhoods, and the study also looked at education levels and higher education levels correlated with owning dogs for companionship, while lower education levels were associated with instrumental reasons or social support. Instrumental reasons can include protection or working dogs and hunting too.
Speaker 1:Oh, and hunting too. Yeah, addition, and hunting too, and hunting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's absolutely correct. And those with lower education, who frequently experienced involuntary isolation, so they weren't actively seeking to be isolated. They were more likely to own a dog for social support.
Speaker 1:Sickness, illness, something like that Interesting. One of the things that was cool about the study is they looked at some of the data from the United States and the United Kingdom and Brazil and the data in SEP neighborhoods was really weird and varied. So it wasn't, it didn't correlate to the study at all. It was different and it depended on the neighborhood. So some neighborhoods that are really high SEP, so the richy, rich neighborhoods in the United States some of those neighborhoods everybody has a dog and some of those neighborhoods nobody has a dog. So across the demographic it was hard for them to make comparisons, which I thought was interesting.
Speaker 1:And maybe everybody's like working really hard and nobody's home because you're having holidays in Hawaii so you don't need to have it. I don't know. That's fascinating to me that it's super varied in the United States in the high SEP neighborhoods.
Speaker 2:And dog ownership is definitely influenced by demographics and lifestyle factors, like you were saying, and other things could be age, family composition, housing and population density.
Speaker 1:One of the things the study found was that in Denmark, dog ownership was way more common in families with children, and it became the highest among middle-aged individuals. Also, if you live rurally and you have a home, it's positively associated with dog ownership. Man, they got us pegged, Chris. We are middle-aged, we live in the middle of nowhere and we have a house. Maybe that's why we have three dogs.
Speaker 2:We have three dogs now.
Speaker 1:I guess in the end from this study, the reasons for having a dog are definitely influenced by socioeconomic status and the type of dog that you get. At least in this Denmark study, a theme that was really heartwarming was that, no matter the high, richy, rich neighborhoods, the middle class or those on the lower end but still have a dog, their dogs played an emotional and mental health role in making their lives better. And that's Pet Science for this week. Hello everybody, here's some ways you can keep the science podcast free. Number one in our show notes sign up to be a member of our Paw Pack Plus community. It's an amazing community of folks who love pets and folks who love science. We have tons of bonus Bunsen and Beaker content there and we have live streams every Sunday with our community. It's tons of fun. Also, think about checking out our merch store. We've got the Bunsen stuffy, the Beaker stuffy and now the Ginger stuffy. That's right, ginger, the science cat, has a little replica. It's adorable. It's so soft, with the giant fluffy tail, safety glasses and a lab coat. And number three if you're listening to the podcast on any place that rates podcasts, give us a great rating and tell your family and friends to listen too. Okay, on with the show.
Speaker 1:Back to the interviews. It's time for Ask an Expert on the Science Podcast, and I'm delighted to have our guest today, brandon Keim, freelance journalist and author of the book Meet the Neighbors. Brandon, how are you doing today? I'm doing great, jason. How are you? I'm doing great. I'm excellent. I'm excellent. Where are you in the world? Where are you calling into the show from?
Speaker 3:I am calling to you from Bangor, maine, up here in the Northeast, specifically at the edge of a forest, beside a stream, where it meets the field, and it's just a beautiful summer day. What about you?
Speaker 1:Nice. Oh, I live, as people who follow the podcast know, Red Deer, Alberta, Canada. Awesome Go.
Speaker 3:Oilers Alberta, Canada. Awesome Go Oilers, go Flames, which one.
Speaker 1:The Oilers almost got the cup this year, so that was very exciting. Ironically enough, I'm not a big hockey fan, so I was, I'm excited for I was excited for any of the Alberta teams to win, so I don't have a. I'm a bandwagon jumper. I guess, right on, I'm a bandwagon jumper. I guess, right on, we'll get to your book in a second. Meet the Neighbors, animal Minds and Life in a More-Than-Human World. I introduced you as a journalist. What set you down that path? How did you get to there in your life?
Speaker 3:So there's a very long answer to that question that starts all the way back when I was like four years old. Very long answer to that question that starts all the way back when I was like four years old and I can even remember back even then just describing the world in this sort of like third person ongoing monologue. But the shorter story is one of my first jobs out of college was working for this progressive bioethics think tank that was called the Council for Responsible Genetics and they're not around anymore. They were just a really interesting group. If anybody wants to go down the memory hole, you can Google that name. This is like back in the day when I could use Microsoft Word and Photoshop and I'd once written an op-ed. So they were like you're our communications director, but it was such a great education on the fly because they were active in so many, really ahead of their time in so many ways.
Speaker 3:This is back in the early to mid 2000s. They were doing work on genetic privacy and the importance of intellectual property in debates around biotechnology and who benefits from that research and looking at reproductive biotechnology through a feminist lens. They were just such a cool group. So I did that for a while and after that I wanted to get away from advocacy and just working by definition on one side or another. And then I went into journalism and from journalism I gravitated to science journalism over time, because of course science is just a way of asking questions. Right, I could write about anything I was interested in through the lens of science, and I was interested in everything. And then over time it really the subjects I love most nature and animals really became the subjects of my work and that's what I concentrate on now.
Speaker 1:Awesome, you were a free. Sorry, let me start that again. As a freelance journalist, were you like a hired gun. You did work for different publications or your own stuff and your own blogs doing daily science, writing for them from about.
Speaker 3:I think it was probably around 2007, 2008 on through 2015. That whole time I was technically a freelancer, as happens in this world of ours, but then after that I went full-time freelance, really as a true hired gun, and in that time I've written for a great many publications, big and small, and had an anthology of my work published and then, most recently, meet the Neighbors.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know what? I had a subscription to Wired. I probably read some of your stuff from that time period. I should say I was on the online side.
Speaker 3:This was back on the online side and the magazine side. There were two different things. I think there was a little bit of a rivalry. I think they thought that we were just cranking it out, not true artists, Whereas I'm over there on the online side being like, whatever, you're all soft, we go hard. But it was a really great education, right Just doing, because if you're writing an article a day, you just have your ear to the ground all the time and you talk to so many interesting people and and you just learn to ask questions and it was such a great. It was such a great education for me.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. And and that leads up to your book Meet the Neighbors, a cool title, very interesting in what it's, what's covered in this book, and like, in short, what's it about? What? Sorry, in short, what's it about? If you could describe it to people what's the book about?
Speaker 3:The not even the elevator pitch like the half of an elevator ride pitch would just be to say it's about animal personhood in nature, right, the science of animal intelligence and what it means to think of wild animals as fellow thinking, feeling beings, as persons. And it actually grew back during the 2010s. Then onwards, I was writing a lot about animal intelligence and it was or I should say, the scientific study of animal intelligence, and it was, and still is, just really this extraordinary time for research into the minds of other animals. And that, originally, is what the book was going to be about just a straightforward book about the research. But over time, I became equally interested in the question what it is that we do with this knowledge.
Speaker 3:We have all of these new insights into the minds of other creatures, and not all of them are brand new. Many of them are supporting things that great many people have thought all along, and now there's scientific support for that and I just got interested in. So what do we do with that? Where do we go with this knowledge? And a premise of my book is that these conversations about what it means to think of other animals this way, they've happened for animals who we use for food or in research, and our companion animals, of course. But when it comes to nature and how we think about wild animals, those conversations really aren't quite so well developed and these ideas are percolating a little bit later, but they're going out there, they're happening on the landscape, and that's what the book is about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's so interesting because that point is brought home the podcast Science Podcast we look primarily at the science that's going on with pets and it's intriguing to think that we know so much more usually about our companion animals and the animals we use for food than generally. The animals are in the wild because they just have a more intimate relationship with us. Therefore the training goes or the science expertise gets put into that. Um, your point about animal intelligence is also well taken. For the longest time, I believe, the animal was based upon the fact, like if you showed it a mirror it would be able to identify itself, or if you put a mark on it or something, it would know itself as being different. So all of these animals were like totally discounted as being dumb. But that's been flipped on its head in recent time, so that's very cool.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's actually one of my favorite lines of research, and one of the things that really sunk in in the course of writing this book is that, as you say, for a while, or since the mid to late 1970s, the gold standard for thinking about self-awareness, the gold standard for measuring self-awareness in other species, was the mirror self-recognition test. Right, will you use a mirror to investigate a mark on the back of your head or some part of your body that you can't otherwise see? And if an animal does that, then you can infer that they have a mental self-image that doesn't correspond with the image in the mirror and that's how they're self-aware. And so I think it's bottlenose dolphins, asian elephants, orangutans, chimpanzees, humans, of course, manta rays, cleaner wrasse fish, depending, be that you just have this tiny little handful of species who are self-aware and no other animals in the world, right? Which is just, it's completely ridiculous. It's just so difficult to even imagine, right, and knowing that you are you and having a sense of yourself is such an integral part of the human experience, like you really cannot even conceive being in the world without that.
Speaker 3:And so in the last few years, there's really been sort of two big trends within that space where one is the development of variations of the mirror test that just don't rely on sight as its privileged mode of perception. And famously, alexandra Horowitz and her use of kind of this olfactory self-recognition to test in dogs and of course dogs recognize their own odor. Maybe their sense of self is actually almost more of a self-scent rather than a self-image, which is just super cool. But then there's this other parallel track of thinking, which is that, instead of thinking of self-awareness as either you have this human-style version, which is very complicated and specific, or you don't have any self-awareness at all, it's oh no, actually, maybe self-awareness is something that exists on a spectrum, and there's a great many different forms of it, depending on what sort of capacities of memory and what have you have.
Speaker 3:But at the heart of those is just this sense of yourself as yourself, bodily self-awareness as it's called, and it's actually not so complicated, right, like it's just what is generated in a brain when you're combining, when you have a body and some sort of perceptual information coming in, and you need to reconcile the information that's coming in with your movement in the world and a sense of self is what comes out of that. And that's really all vertebrates, probably most invertebrate. It's such a having some sense of self seems to be or some people say, and I agree is truly universal seems to be or some people say, and I agree is truly universal.
Speaker 1:I love that. We broke down a study a year ago with dogs and paws. They had some kind of treat on a blanket but they had to not be stepping on the blanket to get at the treat. And the dogs were like, oh, my paws are on the blanket, it's me, I am the problem. This is the reason why we can't get the treat is because I am the problem, it is me, my paws. And that just goes back to your spectrum, right, that is, on that spectrum of sense of self.
Speaker 3:They know where they are in 3D yeah. Oh, I love it Very cool. When we're done, you'll have to send me that study.
Speaker 1:I want to look that up. Sure, yeah, I'll see if I can find it. You bet it sounds like this is a.
Speaker 3:it's like we're melding philosophy and science together in this discussion and in your book Very much, and some of the philosophy that I get into is also just like how do we think about nature, what is nature, and that? That is something that didn't start being interesting to me when I began the book, but I got to dive into it much more and really came to appreciate how all of these ways that I was socialized to see nature, like in terms of beauty or ideas of wildness and wilderness and biodiversity and conservation, biology, and just like all of the sort of different frameworks that we have for how we relate to the natural world, like they really very rarely included a sense of other animals as intelligent beings who are like every one of whom was someone. And that's what I'm trying to get at with Meet the Neighbors, too, is just getting that social construction of nature out into the open and saying what does it mean to think about nature as having non-human people in it?
Speaker 1:I love that All the animals are people too, in their own people-y way.
Speaker 3:In their own people-y way. And just as an anecdote for this, one of the early revelations I had involved sandpipers. I was living in New York City and I used to love to go to these. Even in New York City there's still these little pockets of wildness that you get, and I was out there in Jamaica Bay one day and for the first time I saw semi-palmated sandpipers, just these incredibly adorable little shorebirds who run along the edge of the tide line and the waves come in and they run up on the beach and then the wave goes out and they run back down in search for crustaceans.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's mesmerizing. But what I realized as I was looking at them and I looked up the species in my book and figured out what they were and all that but I realized that I was really thinking about those animals as emblems of a species. Right, it's like almost like this is like an illustration and a field guide brought to life as opposed to an animal, who's just like living in the world in the first person, and for me that was really a story.
Speaker 1:I've talked to other scientists about the individualisticness within a species too. Like you see all the science, you see all those sandpipers and they're all doing similar things. But when you study them on a behavior case by case level, they're all individuals. Like they do things completely different. They're more brave, they're more timid, they're more outgoing, and this scientist was studying like little tiny fish. There was individualism within this school of fish. They could actually statistically show it behavior wise, which is wild, and they were trying to determine if there's a genetic component to that with the fish that were more brave or more timid or more outgoing, and that's just so interesting to think about. You could obviously adapt that to the sandpipers scurrying back and forth to get their little crustaceans.
Speaker 3:And I love that so much. Right, and it's such a like when you think about it, like personality, personality back 20, 25 years ago, when the personality research was just in its infancy. I still remember when personality was almost like a controversial idea and yet it seems self-evident now. It's like, wait a second. We all personality varies from individual to individual. Why wouldn't it do so in animals as well? And because it makes good evolutionary sense, right, if every individual in the group is going to do the exact same thing, the exact same way, that group is not going to succeed as well over evolutionary time. It's when you have a variety of behaviors that will be useful at certain times and not at others.
Speaker 3:And one of the lines of research I talk about in my book that I just love comes from a group up here at the University of Maine that was led by Alessandro Mortoliti and no, I'm sorry and a number of his postdocs over the years, including Alison Brames, the name of the postdoc who took me out for the first time and so they've been studying the distribution of personalities in small rodents in the forest and primarily voles and squirrels and what have you, and how the personalities differ within these species and then also how they differ depending on the type of forest. It is. So if you've got like old growth forest, then the small rodents will tend to have a certain type of person. There'll be more bold rodents than there are shy rodents, let's say.
Speaker 3:Or maybe it's mice, whatever it is, and then in new growth it's been recently logged it'll be a different personality distribution and then, depending on the distribution of personalities within those rodents, the way that they cache seeds will be different, the way they get predated upon will be different, the way they predate upon seedlings will be different and all of it interacts, like the personality, and interacts with the ecology to create the forest. And it just blows me away that kind of the. I think we're all accustomed to thinking about how animal activity shapes ecosystems and shapes the world. But part of animal activity is their minds, right, and it's like the intelligence of animals is part of our ecological webs of life and is helping to shape the world. And it just blows me away just how complicated and beautiful it is.
Speaker 1:Oh, you don't have to convince me. The big development in our lives the last year is a beaver. A beaver moved into our creek and has totally revitalized this spring fed creek that dries out by the end of June into an ecological paradise.
Speaker 2:And like I, don't know.
Speaker 1:We always are down there. What is this thing doing? What is it thinking? And it knows. It knows how to do whatever it's doing. So the beaver Norbert. The internet has named this beaver Norbert as a big popular thing with our social media. In fact, we just got art from our cartoonist drawing Norbert today. I totally hear you that. It's a different type of intelligence, far exceeding whatever I could think about doing something to a river way to change it.
Speaker 3:Oh, I love that and I love that you call him Norbert. That is super cool he was.
Speaker 1:It was voted. We had a great big um. It was called beaver 16. So our fans we have a very large social media account on Twitter, um, and they voted 16 different beaver names and norbert won. Um, my dark horse favorite that I'm sad lost was chucky trees.
Speaker 3:Um, but yeah, there's a lot of really good ones, but chucky trees lost early and norbert won yeah, I I actually I gotta say I think that is is just a delightful example of the way that people really are relating to wild animals as individuals, more and more right, because underlying the naming of Norbert the beaver is implicitly this sense of kinship and empathy.
Speaker 1:Oh, we love this beaver. You have no idea how much our family loves this. Maybe it's a girl we don't know, but yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off, brandon. We're just very excited about the beaver that lives in our creek.
Speaker 3:Oh no, not at least You'll have to keep me. If these groups are accessible to the public, I would love to learn to follow along Norbert's life and learn how to do it, you betcha.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll send you some links. Yeah, we have three different trail cameras up that capture Norbert's shenanigans and there's moose that live down there now and he's made friends with ducks and it's just, it's a whole shenanigans, it's a whole. It's like a Disney movie that's happening, Like very Canadian Disney movie that's happening on our property. So anyways, I do have oh go ahead.
Speaker 3:Sorry. Oh, I was going to say I would actually like to toss a question up to you. So, as I was saying, I think that's just this adorable, beautiful example of animal personhood, right there on the landscape where you are, and I'm curious, so something. So it's for me, the groundhogs in my life, rather than the beavers, are animals. I have names for lots of affection for them. But one of the difficult things is that predation is a fact of life and I have to make peace with the fact that groundhogs are food for foxes and other predators. And I'm just curious whether you have had to deal with the ethical conundrum of caring for Norbert as a person but also, you know, facing up to the reality of life in the wild.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, nobody's ever asked this question, but my wife and I were talking the other day that we've gone through stages of grief, like when there's no activity down there. We're like, oh no, norbert died or something got him or her right. And then a week later another tree is 10 trees are chopped down. He's made another huge construction that would rival the aqueducts of the roman roman empire. He was just taking a union break or something like that. Right, yeah, but that's it, norbert lives. We actually that's in our book coming out.
Speaker 1:There's a little that's so funny. You said that that's actually a section, a little vignette in our book that's coming out Norbert Lives Because during the winter nothing happened, because it was very cold where I live and the whole thing froze over and nothing happened every because it's very cold where I live and the whole thing froze over and we thought he had died because there's no activity for about three weeks. And then we were down there down walking through the creek with the dogs and he had ate a hole through the solid ice to go get more trees and he had was pulling one down and it froze like a flagpole through his hole. We're like, okay, he's still alive, norbert lives. Oh, I love it.
Speaker 1:So, luckily, beavers are enormous, like they're huge. Unless you've seen one, you don't know how big they are. They're like they don't have a lot of predators, like the only thing that could kill Norbert is a human, a bear or a wolf, and two, one of the three of those things is the only thing that's around.
Speaker 3:Well, may Norbert live a long and happy life.
Speaker 1:I know we hope he's found in Norberta and they have little babies, because then we get to name them too. Sorry, I didn't mean to go off on a beaver tangent. My wife and I will just talk to anybody about the beaver that lives in. There's two animals I talk about.
Speaker 3:One is an elephant named Happy and a lawsuit filed on her behalf by a group called the Non-Human Rights Project, who were seeking for her to be recognized as a legal person.
Speaker 3:But then I also talk about a lineage of beavers who live in the wetlands here in Bangor, maine, and with them I'm talking about the idea of personhood outside of legal contexts.
Speaker 3:And Kathy Pollard, who's the wonderful naturalist and woman who introduced me to those beavers, had discovered that there's about this 8 or 10 acre area of willows that the beavers have coppiced right, so they're shorn around the bottoms and then, after that pruning, the willows grow back even more densely, and so then the beavers can just keep on harvesting the willows that they need and even more will replenish them.
Speaker 3:And coppice is actually a word that I think comes from Western Europe, where it is a common mode of tree maintenance, tree production, and Kathy is convinced that for those beavers, this is something they know what they're doing right. This is their farming, and it has enabled them, instead of having to go onto land and find new trees and then continually have to go farther and farther from the water and ultimately overshoot whatever the tree population is around them. She is really convinced that these beavers understand this system of willow production that they have going on, and it's the kind of thing that would be. I don't know how you would go about testing that empirically, but it's just so interesting to me and it's just so cool to me to think that these beavers have developed this whole system and and maybe they even have cultural knowledge of, like, how best to harvest willow and tend it across time. And it's yeah, beavers, they're amazing.
Speaker 1:I can just imagine an old wise beaver teaching the young whippersnappers in the den. All about fluid dynamics and willow ecology. Totally right, they're pretty smart all about fluid dynamics and willow ecology, totally right. They're pretty smart. How come there's people who listen to the show that work for Disney? Give Brandon a call. Give us a call. We could get some ideas about a really cool beaver show or something like that.
Speaker 3:Oh my God, I want the Disney beaver civilization movie. This would be amazing.
Speaker 1:So we went off on a tangent. But I do have a couple questions remaining about your book. One is when you were doing the research for meet the neighbors and you were writing it, was there anything that stood out as being shocking or weird about the, the human, the sorry, the personhood of animals and the whole themes within the book?
Speaker 3:um, I would say there were two things that there would almost rise to the level of definitely weird, maybe even shocking. One of them is just like, like it was. I think it was in. So I'm gonna say it was in the late 1970s when donald griffin, who was the guy who originally discovered echolocation in bats, and he proposed he proposed or I think he articulated the idea that other animals could think in complicated ways, they weren't just behave BF Skinner style stimulus response machines, and in many parts of the scientific world this was just really considered a really conventional wisdom, challenging statement.
Speaker 3:Right, the science in the 20th century, or the science of animal behavior in the 20th century. You've probably come across Morgan's Canon, which is a statement that was made in the late 1890s and eventually became canonical, as it were, which said that any animal behavior should not be interpreted as evidence of a higher psychological faculty if it could conceivably be interpreted as arising from a quote-unquote lower psychological faculty. And so the idea is that no matter how intelligent that animal seems, you just assume that they're stupid, you just assume that nothing special is going on until every possible explanation can be ruled out. And arguably that's just a way of being very rigorous about the science but the way that it took on a life of its own so that really animal unintelligence was a default position. And looking at that now, and it is just so ridiculous, it's so arbitrary and nonsensical and it's almost like wacky Victorian ideas about women's anatomy had somehow survived until late into the 20th century and were just considered scientific, like sensible, good, sensible science, a good starting place, like it just boggles my mind that that's what was considered serious grown-up knowledge, whereas thinking of animals as thinking and feeling could be just dismissed as anthropomorphism, being soft-hearted. So I think just that dynamic is deeply weird when one thinks upon it, just that dynamic is deeply weird when one thinks upon it.
Speaker 3:And then also there was this episode around early in the 20th century that's mostly forgotten now, but it's known as the nature of fakerist controversy and the broad outlines of it were that there had been towards the latter half of the 19th century there had been this momentary turn in the science where more and more scientists were embracing the idea of other animals as sharing faculties of mind with us as well as anatomical similarities, and Charles Darwin was very much a part of that. And so in the late 19th, early 20th centuries, you get this wave of naturalist authors who were writing about nature, writing about wild animals and talking about wild animals in, quote unquote, anthropomorphic ways and, to be clear, they definitely crossed the line too much. There were things that were described that I think are very difficult to countenance, but, that being said, they were wildly popular, and this so ground the gears of the more serious-minded natural historians, including among them was President Theodore Roosevelt, who, even while he was in office, was in the middle of this fight, writing essays and national publications and getting on in there.
Speaker 3:And this more serious, science-minded side, these authors. They called them nature fakers. They were faking nature, hence the name of the controversy and they were saying you know, animals are not intelligent, they can't reason. All these things that are being described are ridiculous and unscientific and I would argue that if the quote unquote, nature fakers were too credulous, the anti-nature fakers were just engaged in denial. I think they went much further wrong in the other direction, but they won right and that really, I would argue that was one of the various ways we see nature that helped shape it, that took a sense of wild animals as fellow persons and pushed it off to the side. It was never going to be fully extinguished, but it became something that belonged to children's stories and fictions and things that weren't considered serious knowledge. And that episode is, I think, very important, a very important part of the history of how we think about nature and animals and, if not shocking, also definitely weird.
Speaker 1:I had no idea about that, that all that drama was happening.
Speaker 3:Such drama.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of drama llama there. Even a president was weighing in. Roosevelt was the president that was big into the parks in the States, right, like I'm a Canadian, so we don't study American presidents, is that true? Am I remembering this correctly? You are? He made a bunch? Yeah.
Speaker 3:He's responsible for our natural park system and I'm not throwing shade on Teddy here. The national parks and the idea of, you know, preserving big, continuous areas of habitat with nature in mind, that's awesome. I'm really glad you did but I also like so. A friend of mine's brother used to work for the museum of natural history in new york and and one day I got his brother just took us on this after hours behind the scenes tour of the museum which was just like a dream come true. It was incredible.
Speaker 1:It was every, it was everything you could. You had a night at the museum I had a night at the movie. Essentially it was freaking, amazing name what's the guy's name in the movie? Oh man, he was in dodgeball. I'm just forget the guy's name.
Speaker 3:Not bad, but anyways not one of the like. One of the things we were showed was just this like room on top of the museum full of elephant skulls, of elephants, teddy, roosevelt and shot. They're just like they have. So many elephant skulls were had at the time and nothing to do with them, like the dude would just go out there, shoot everything he came across and then pack it back to the museum of natural history being like, hey, I got you something.
Speaker 3:And so that was his way of relating to the natural world where, yeah, so long as you protect the habitat, so long as the animals aren't going extinct, there really doesn't need to be much of an ethic that takes the individual into account, and he famously did. The reason why teddy bears are called teddy bears is because he refused to shoot a bear who was tied to a tree and couldn't escape. That was really as far as the ethic got right. It was fine to shoot a bear you didn't need to shoot so long as the bear had a chance to get away, but you couldn't just shoot one that was tied to a tree. But behind that there just wasn't any real sense of the animals as somebodies and no real grappling with what it means to know them as individuals. And and yeah, so Ted, Teddy Roosevelt, complicated individual but thank goodness for National, that's that's what.
Speaker 1:what an interesting tidbit of history. I love that, brennan, Thank you. So this book is amazing. Where can people pick it up, like, where could people find Meet the Neighbors?
Speaker 3:At your favorite bookseller or your local public library. Ask them if they have it.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's nice. Okay, so, just so everybody knows the library is a great choice. Thanks for bringing up the public libraries. We can support them, obviously, and if you want a copy, I'll leave a couple links in the show notes. I'm assuming it's on amazon, is that? Could people get it there? Oh for sure, yeah, okay, perfect. And before we move on to our other questions, brandon, you've written some other books. What are they? What are the names of them?
Speaker 3:yeah. So I've done three what are called in the trade bookazines single-issue magazines for National Geographic, and one was called Inside Animal Minds and another the Genius of Dogs. And then there was also Secrets of Animal Communication, and I'm actually really proud of Secrets of Animal Communication because what fuels it is a definition of communication that isn't just about talking and language but really is about exchanging information, which is a subtle point. But when you think about communication as encompassing not only language but any sort of information exchange, then the world is alive with communication. And then there was a first book of mine called the Eye of the Sandpiper, per the Sandpiper story we shared earlier, and that was an anthology of earlier published work of mine that also got into evolution and ecological dynamics and animal intelligence and these ideas of wilderness and wildness. That would all come to mature form in Meet the Neighbors.
Speaker 1:Awesome. So again, we'll have a link to your website, brandon, and people can check out those publications there. And I believe we have your Secrets of Animal Communication, nat Geo. I think we have that one. It's a standalone Nat Geo magazine, is that correct?
Speaker 3:Yeah, oh, I'm so glad you have that. Thanks, man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think my wife picked it up from the supermarket. Yeah, it's upstairs. That's wild. I'm so sorry I didn't know that was you. That's wild. Okay, very cool anyway. So we'll have some. We'll have some links in our show notes, everybody, so you can check out brandon's work there. Before we close, we have two standard questions that we asked our guests for, that we ask every guest that we interview, and one is if you could share a pet story with us from your life.
Speaker 3:Sure. So I wanted to talk a little bit about Comet, who was my dog companion when I was a boy and a young man, and so I don't have one I don't, there isn't one specific comet story that is so extraordinary or more special than everybody else's own dog stories, but we were just so close right and the moment my family started packing the car to go on a trip, I remember how she would just get out there and sit right in the back seat like six or eight hours ahead of time, because she knew what was coming up and she wouldn't be left behind. But other times, when my parents were fighting and I could hear them through the walls and it was difficult, then Comet would hop up on the bed with me and reassure me. But eventually, when I went away to college, or to university, as it were, and then I would come back in the summertime and ride around and she'd have her head on my shoulder the whole time in the car, I didn't even need to see my friends at the time. I'm just like, whatever, I'm home, I'm hanging out with my dog while I can, and I think, like one hears so much these days, like there's these tropes of using AI to decode animal communication. And oh, if only we could understand our dogs.
Speaker 3:And I do think it is very cool to use AI tools to study animal communication. I think that's fascinating. But sometimes the way that gets framed is that we don't already understand and communicate in such rich ways. And with Kopit and I no, she did not possess a language of her own, she only knew a few of my words, but it really was immaterial the ways that we communicated through gesture and eye contact and touch, those are equally powerful forms of communication.
Speaker 3:Maybe they're not the forms of communication you use to build a global society, but they're the forms of communication we use with build a global society, but they're the forms of communication we use with one another and the relationships that matter most to us. And I think that's just something that's important to understand. And there's actually an essay by the anthropologist, barbara Smuts called Encounters with Animal Minds and she writes about the time she spent living with a community of baboons in Africa and also about a dog who was her dear friend and really gave her insights into the minds of dogs. And she talks about these themes in that article, in that essay, and it's just a beautiful piece and I really recommend that to anybody who's interested in this stuff.
Speaker 1:Oh, what a touching story. I've said this before. Like I've posted it before, the best conversation I've had today was the one hour I sat with my dog on the couch in complete silence, absolutely. Yeah, now I'm getting all choked up for real. That's some really good food for thought. Brandon, thank you for sharing your pet story.
Speaker 3:All right.
Speaker 1:Very wonderful. And the last standard question is we challenge our guests to give us a super fact in closing. It's something that you know that when you tell people it blows their mind a bit.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you have one in the tank for us, I do, and so I know this. I have this fact at my own disposal because the research itself was done by an ecologist named kiran donjal adams and I hope I'm not mispronouncing the name, but um. So kiran studies a species of bird called European bee-eaters, and they're just, they're beautiful is like 8,000, 9,000 miles round trip between Europe and Central Asia and then Sub-Saharan Africa in their wintering grounds. So they're traveling 9,000 miles in a group and what Karan did is to attach very lightweight, non-invasive trackers to them so that she could track their movements during this migration. And what she found is that the groups made this journey together and these individuals were with one another on their breeding grounds and their wintering grounds and on the flight in between, and sometimes they would get separated and one could end up a thousand miles away from the others, but eventually they would find each other and just that sense.
Speaker 3:So I've always understood migration, or thought about migration, just in terms of like. What an incredible physiological and navigational feat. It is right. Like for those birds to get from Europe to Africa and back.
Speaker 3:You know, 9,000 miles is mind blowing, and it's even more mind blowing when you add in that they're doing this in a community and in what is probably a tight-knit community. It's not like Karan was also studying their serotonin levels along the way and that sort of thing. But, as she said, and it really stands to reason that you would have emotional bonds and interpersonal relationships that are keeping this group together across those distances and that form as a consequence of that proximity. And to add that social and emotional dimension to what is already such an incredible journey just makes it even more resonant for me. And now when the warblers arrive in the spring or I see birds migrating and I can just appreciate the sociality of it as well, yeah, it's even more beautiful. And the fact that those bee eaters do this like even when they're flying 4,500 miles each way, or translate that into kilometers for me I'm sorry I forgot that I'm talking to a Canadian.
Speaker 1:Oh no, it's okay About 1.35. What a journey. That's a ways, and they seem to get along. I don't know if you've ever been on a road trip with anybody. That's an eight hour drive. Some nerves are frayed by the end of that.
Speaker 3:A fun study would be what are the different personalities of these birds, and is there like an optimum personality mix for being able to go on a 4,500 mile road trip without everybody strangling each other along the way?
Speaker 1:It's probably a couple of birds that just hate each other. Oh man, bruce, what a D word, what an A word that guy Shut up.
Speaker 3:Bruce. That's why you need the atomic bird who lightens the mood at certain moments.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's the bird that's not in charge of anything, he just makes wisecracks. Exactly that's that would be me. I would be that bird in the flock, brandon. We're at the end of our interview. Thank you so much for giving up your time to talk about your book, and again, that is, meet the Neighbors, animal Minds and Life in a More Than Human World. Pick it up anywhere books are sold, or check it out at the library, or check out the show notes for a one-click stop to get that book. And the other question I have for you, brandon, are you on social media? Can people follow you on the socials there?
Speaker 3:Yes, they can. I have a Substack newsletter, the Catbird Seat, and then Instagram and Mastodon, and I'm still on Twitter which I refuse to call X.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, we don't call it Twitter either. Ok, we'll make sure some of your socials are on or in the show notes, and I'm going to subscribe to your Substack. We have a Subst stack that goes out every week as well. I love that writing platform.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it is. I wish I got on it earlier, but better late than never, yeah exactly, brandon.
Speaker 1:Best of luck in the future. Thank you for giving up your time to talk to us about animals in such a personal way. I think there's good evidence that the more we empathize with nature, the more we care about saving it, and, as things are in the world, empathy to nature is a big deal for going forward. So thank you.
Speaker 3:Amen to that and thanks for having me on. I really enjoyed talking to you, Jason.
Speaker 4:Okay, it is time for story time with me, adam. If you don't know what story time is, story time is when we talk about stories that have happened within the past one or two weeks. I'll tell my story. My story is about Bunsen and Bernoulli, so we've talked before on the podcast about how Bunsen and Bernoulli are different in terms of like personality.
Speaker 4:Bernoulli's a funny guy, but Bernoulli, we think, is getting curly hair, so he might be a curly haired burner and, like his white chest floof is pretty curly. Other parts of his hair are curly and he's very fluffy because he's still a puppy's. He's very cute, very cute and fluffy, um, whereas Bunsen, uh, doesn't have curly hair, um, but was was just as fluffy when he was. He was a puppy, and it makes me wonder if, if Bernoulli is going to be be bigger than Bunsen Cause I, like he's, he's still growing and I don't know Bunsen and Bernoulli at this stage of where they're at. I think they were pretty close in terms of size. Bernoulli had bigger paws as a puppy and but a smaller head, a smaller face yes, bunsen has a huge head since that is massive.
Speaker 4:Um, but yeah, I just I wonder. I wonder how different they're going to be in terms of size and what they're going to. I just wonder what they're going to be like, because we can already see some differences between them. They're both funny guys. Bernoulli's a little big guy and Bunsen is a big little guy. Bigger is small. For a golden retriever she's just a little puppy. She's funny. They've been getting jealous of each other a lot more. That's what I've found. They don't like it when, especially when I'm leaving for school. Beaker has gotten back into her Last year. She gets really sad when I leave. Bunsen and Bernoulli now also get really sad when I leave, and Bunsen and Bernoulli now also get really sad when I leave. It's hard to leave, but that's my story. Mom, do you have a story?
Speaker 2:I sure do. My story is heartwarming. Bernoulli has been going to doggy daycare as part of a way for us to maintain our sanity during the day. For us to maintain our sanity during the day because it's hard for me to leave halfway through the day to let him out of his crate at work, because we're back at work now and I don't think it's fair to keep him in his crate for an extended period of time. So the solution is doggy daycare and he loves it there. He has so many besties and he's so full of mischief and he is in cahoots and um likes to play and he's found um friends with the same kind of play style. He just loves Milo. And.
Speaker 2:But my story has to do with uh pickup. The other day so I was picking them up and it's always so good to hear Like I remember picking up our kids from daycare or from day home and it's like how was their day? What did they do? And it's always so heartwarming to hear wonderful things about your, your pets or your children. And I heard a wonderful thing about Bernoulli. So a new staff member who started in the summer is neurodivergent, she has autism and she's doing great, but every time she sees Bernoulli's name, she's so happy when his name is by his hook because they get along so great. She just loves Bernoulli.
Speaker 2:And Char, the owner of Waggles, was telling me this story. But also Bernoulli reciprocates and he goes over to her, he pads over to her, he sits on her, he looks up at her, he leans into her. He just knows, he just knows. And so I was crying in the waiting area of waggles and because I just was overcome with emotion, because I love our dog, I love all our dogs, I love our cat, I love our kids, I love all our everything. But it just was so wonderful to hear this story and I couldn't wait to tell Jason. But he was busy in town at his workout and I was just like I just need to tell him this wonderful story. And then I did and you enjoyed the story very much.
Speaker 1:I did. I turned it into a post on social media that many, many people thought was just as heartwarming as you said, and I had tears come to my eyes easily from that yeah, and that's my story dad, do you have a story?
Speaker 1:my story is, uh, twofold. A lot of people are going to be wondering, um, about bunsen. We had, uh, his appointment is checkup, his after operation checkup. There's a little bit of good news and and neutral news, I guess. The good news is that he's doing great. They said that he's healing perfectly. His staples were removed and the vet tech and the vet that gave him the once over cleared him for increased activity. So so he is. So he is.
Speaker 1:Bunsen is back on, slowly increasing his walks. Our hope is in about two weeks to have him back doing creek walks with us. So that's awesome. Now the neutral news is that we were so hopeful that the biopsy results would be back and you know we had the vet came and told us, no, they're not back yet. That's why Dr Keys isn't coming to speak with you, so we'll just have to let you know when they're in.
Speaker 1:And they said sometimes these things take a while. And we're like, okay, it's not your guys' fault, you sent it away the day after surgery. It takes what it takes, I guess. And it was an abnormally giant growth, that's weird. So maybe it takes a bit longer. I normally giant growth, that's weird, so maybe it takes a bit longer. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Um, chris had a really good idea that we make a care package and she, she, I don't know why she didn't say that story, but, um, she went all around Red Deer gathering up treats for the, the vet clinic for Cedarwood. Um, she got these yummy cookies from a place called crumble, and some chocolate bars and um, and then we threw, we put a buns and stuffy in there, cause the idea is that if we get food it's only like hot food. Only the people there at that time can eat it, and it was really everybody that was helping Bunsen. So we wanted to reward the whole staff for just watching over our dog and saving his life.
Speaker 1:Now, just quickly as I wrap my end, bernoulli and Beaker are taking adventures together now with me. Chris actually came today and we went all the way down through the creek. Bernoulli is now off leash adventuring with Beaker until we get close to where Norbert lives, then they're all. Obviously they're both on leashes at that point. But Bernoulli's recall is at a point that we're we're pretty certain he, he's okay, like he comes when we call him and he doesn't stray too far away. Plus, he's got Beaker there who kind of shows them the ropes. And it's been really cool to see Beaker, who maybe you know she hangs out with Bernoulli but they kind of pick at each other sometimes. It's cool to see her in a different light, outside, as being the leader and Bernoulli happily to follow, and that's my story.
Speaker 4:That's it for story time. Thank you so much for listening to my section of the podcast. Thanks for sticking around to the end. I hope to see y'all on the next podcast episode. Bye-bye.
Speaker 1:That's it for this week's show. Thanks for coming back every week to listen to us on the Science Podcast. We'd love your support by becoming a PawPak member. Check the link in the description or just keep listening and sharing the content with five other people that you think might like the show. Special thanks to Bren Kime, our guest this week. Check the links in the show notes. And, chris, let's give a shout out to the top dogs on our Paw Pack community.
Speaker 2:Bianca Hyde, mary Ryder, tracy Domingue, susan Wagner, andrew Lin, helen Chin, Tracy Halberg, amy C, jennifer Smathers, laura Stephenson, holly Burge, brenda Clark, Anne Uchida, peggy McKeel, terry Adam, debbie Anderson, sandy Breimer, tracy Leinbaugh, marianne McNally, fun Lisa, Shelley Smith, julie Smith, diane Allen, brianne Haas, linda Sherry Carol McDonald, anne Allen, Brianne Haas, linda Sherry Carol McDonald, catherine Jordan, courtney Proven, donna Craig, Wendy Diane Mason and Luke Liz Button, kathy Zerker and Ben Rathart.
Speaker 1:For science, empathy and cuteness.