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Instead, it turned out that my mother had not built the home for the as-yet-unrealized tortoise on her land. A real estate agent came out to see if the adjacent area would appraise out to make it worthwhile to subdivide and noted the error. The enclosure was well within her client’s property line a…

I managed to get the cork out with a screwdriver. It seemed to take me forever. My mother accepted a glass of wine without comment and we resumed talking about the plants she would put in that would provide food and shade for the tortoise. I wondered what she would do when everything was complete a…

We can’t keep pets here. It’s one of the rules and is strictly enforced. No one cares. I mean no one tries to smuggle a pet in. They don’t feel the lease violates their rights. Several years ago there was a tenant with a Great Dane who went off one morning and shot up his nursing class at the unive…

Lana, the joyful, curious chimpanzee who learned how to use the computer to talk to Tim, ended up being kept in the lab at Yerkes and became part of the breeding programme. I recently met a woman who worked with her on that original language study. She had returned to Yerkes and met Lana again, for…

Having read so much about chimpanzees I had to adjust to them as animals when I met them, as flesh and blood rather than abstractions. Study after study presents them as embodiments of data: they are sensitive communicators; they remember sequences of numbers; they get depressed in middle age. The …