Reminded by dolphins
Recently, I read about a Newcastle University study showing that cows given names produce far more milk than unnamed animals. The researchers, who studied 516 cows, found that those cows given personal identities – a name like Daisy, say – produced up to 454 more pints of milk a year than cows that remained anonymous.
This especially interested me, mostly because it seemed to be a revelation to the researchers that cows would be happier and more relaxed when given a little bit more one-to-one attention. It was almost shocking to them that cows would have an interior life
I’ve been watching a series on TV called the Secret Life of Elephants. The show follows groups of elephant families in Northern Kenya at Samburu National Reserve and covers the work of the world-renowned elephant expert Iain Douglas Hamilton and his Save the Elephants team. Most notably, the show allows us to be witness to the emotional and social complexities of an elephant’s world – the breadth of their emotional landscape, the intricacies of family life.
http://theintentionexperiment.com/reminded-by-dolphins.htm
A nice read.