The animals we share the planet with — wildlife, livestock and pets alike — have more depth and personality than they are often given credit for. Joining me this week to speak about what he’s learned about animal intelligence is Brandon Keim, the author of “Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-than-Human World.”
Brandon is originally from Maine and where he returned after some time living in Bethesda, Maryland, and New York City. Brandon is a contributing editor at Nautilus, and his first book, “The Eye of the Sandpiper,” was published in 2017. He’s written three issue-length treatments for National Geographic: “Inside Animal Minds,” “Secrets of Animal Communication” and “The Genius of Dogs.” His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic and WIRED.
Brandon Keim, a science journalist and the author of “Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-than-Human World.”
Photo Courtesy of Brandon Keim
He has been a science journalist for nearly two decades. “It let me pursue my curiosities anywhere I wanted to go,” he says. “… Science isn’t any one topic. It’s just a way of looking at the world.”
Brandon gravitated toward writing about nature and animals, and in the early 2010s he began writing a lot about animal intelligence. “I just really, really enjoy thinking about how other animals experience the world,” he says.
He wanted to write a book about animal intelligence back then, but Carl Safina had just published “Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel.” Publishers Brandon spoke to said he couldn’t do an animal intelligence book because it has already been done — but they weren’t right about that. There have been several great books on the topic.
Brandon considered how he could move the conversation forward. In his reporting job, he had been talking to the people doing the work in the animal intelligence field. He spoke to the people who were looking at the science but also people “thinking about how we think about animals and the history of our relations to them, our philosophies and ethics and the way those play out in the world.”
He realized he wanted to do a book not just on animal intelligence but what people can do with a deeper awareness of animal intelligence. He explains that we could gain insights into the minds of other creatures and just consider them cool facts. The challenge, he says, is to explore “what does this mean for how we are in the world?”
Brandon points out that the conversations about animal intelligence in working animals, companion animals, livestock, and animals used in experiments are well developed. “The applications of those conversations are very uneven, but at least they’re happening,” he says. “But when it comes to wild animals in nature, that sort of thinking was just much less developed.”
Sustainability, conservation biology and other frameworks for relating to the living world have a blindspot when it comes to thinking about animals as “fellow persons,” Brandon says.
Brandon Keim’s new book, “Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-than-Human World.”
Photo Courtesy of Brandon Keim
Encounters With Animal Minds
Anthropologist Barbara Smuts, who wrote the epigraph in “Meet the Neighbors:,” wrote the 2001 scientific journal article “Encounters With Animal Minds” about her experience getting to know baboons and how it changed her perspective. She lived with baboons for months and gained an appreciation for the role of friendship in baboon lives.
“Being with the baboons had kind of opened her eyes and made her more sensitive to the richness of experience that could be found in other animals,” Brandon says.
When she returned home from Africa, the first animal she had the opportunity to become very close with was her dog, Safi. She writes about her relationship with Safi and the communications they had, and how that informed her thinking.
In her journal article, Smuts wrote about animals as individuals:
“Although animals had always fascinated me, my time with baboons and chimps in Africa greatly enhanced my awareness of the individuality of each animal I encounter. Before Africa, if I were walking in the woods and came across a squirrel, I would enjoy its presence, but I would experience it as a member of a class, ‘squirrel’. Now, I experience every squirrel I encounter as a small, fuzzy-tailed, person-like creature. Even though I usually don’t know this squirrel from another, I know that if I tried, I would, and that once I did, this squirrel would reveal itself as an utterly unique being, different in temperament and behaviour from every other squirrel in the world.”
We may see a squirrel and only see any old squirrel, but if you get to know a squirrel, you just might begin to see it as an individual.
Photo Credit: Amy Prentice
Sharing a Landscape
Brandon says when he lived for a long time in New York City, he came to appreciate how much nonhuman life could flourish in a dense urban matrix.
When he lived in Bethesda, a suburban environment, he saw more animals in his daily life than he sees now in Maine. He recalls a stormwater retention pond that the same flock of birds visited every morning. They had a morning ritual just like him, he realized.
“They were not intruders into a human space, per se, nor was I an intruder into a wild space. We were both just members of a community and sharing a landscape,” Brandon says.
Co-existing with wildlife is one of the great joys in life.
Photo Credit: Amy Prentice
Unwelcome Animals Don’t Get Credit for Their Intelligence
“Meet the Neighbors” starts off with a touching story about a gardener befriending a bumblebee. Bumblebees are charismatic animals with lots of fans, but Brandon also writes about rats, snakes and coyotes — animals that many people want nothing to do with. Sometimes, animals considered a nuisance are unsung heroes that, if we knew more about them, we’d look at differently.
Empathy, often considered a uniquely human trait, exists in animals, even rats, according to Brandon. Rats also have the ability to “mental time travel,” which is being able to reflect on one’s past or envision one’s future. Garter snakes show preferences for some individuals over others — which is, in other words, friendship.
“People really don’t give reptiles enough credit for their intelligence,” Brandon says.
I’ll add that most snakes you will encounter are nonvenomous. Snakes like to overwinter in my compost piles because they generate warmth as organic material decomposes, and I welcome the snakes. Snakes are not “guilty” just because they are snakes.
Coyotes, Brandon says, are an example of how the population size and range of certain species is determined not by biological carrying capacity or habitat, but by how much humans will tolerate them.
A snake in my compost bin.
Kindness Toward Animals Is Largely a New Concept
“Most of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass on earth are factory-farmed animals who live some or much of their lives in conditions that, if we encountered those animals ourselves, we’d be moved to try to help them or to care for them, or at least, feel sympathetic and feel outrage at what’s done to them,” Brandon says. “And then most of us keep eating them because life is really complicated and messy.”
Until recently, in the big picture going back centuries, people did not treat animals kindly at all. In fact, many times they were just obstacles or were perceived as not having any feelings, Brandon says. There was no compassion for them.
He notes that René Descartes (1596-1650), a French scientist and mathematician who was a father of modern science and philosophy, likened animals to wind-up toys, which give the illusion of being truly alive and conscious.
Many famous thinkers in history shared Descartes’ belief that animals are unintelligent. And there was not a consistent upward trajectory in human understanding of animal sentience. The winning philosophy of the day has gone back and forth over the centuries, like a swinging pendulum.
Why Do We Extend Compassion Too?
One of the most profound moral questions of the human condition, Brandon says, is, who do we extend respect, consideration and compassion to?
We inherited wildly arbitrary and unequal ethical frameworks for seeing other animals, he says, and it’s on us now to think those through again and say, “In light of what we do know, what are the boundaries we should draw?”
Garter snakes are nonvenomous and they control pests. When we treat them with compassion, we benefit.
Photo Credit: Amy Prentice
Share the Same Space
For the last seven years, Brandon has had the joy of having a groundhog, which he named Juliet, make her burrow under his deck each spring. She has raised seven litters there. “Every morning when I wake up, there they are rolling around on the deck and going about their lives,” he says.
Though he has come to care about these groundhogs, he knows that groundhogs are not necessarily welcome in gardens. He doesn’t tell anyone to share their garden with groundhogs. But rather than shooting an unwelcome groundhog, he suggests building a better fence.
“Try to find ways that make it possible for you and them to share the same space. And I think a lot of the ethical regard that I would like to see in the world is really just about that. It’s on us to find ways of coexisting.”
Brandon notes that Rebecca Dmytryk, the CEO of Humane Wildlife Control and a leading authority on wildlife capture, has developed a fencing system that rodents can’t climb. The simple but ingenious fence is named the Rodent Exclusion Barrier System, or REBS.
Juliet is a groundhog who raises a litter in a den under Brandon’s deck each year.
Photo Courtesy of Brandon Keim
Nonhuman Rights
“Technically, there are no animal rights in the United States, which is to say there are no animals who are legally considered persons,” Brandon says.
“Even things like animal cruelty lawsuits don’t technically give animals rights. They’re just sort of more about controlling human behavior and they reflect human norms.”
Animal law attorney and legal scholar Steven Wise, who died last year, came to see the absence of legal rights for animals as a great impediment toward progress in our relations to animals, Brandon says. “He made it his life’s work to change that.”
Wise and others founded the Nonhuman Rights Project to pursue that goal.
“They came up with just a brilliant legal argument, which was saying, listen, here’s all of the philosophical and legal justifications for why human beings have rights, as stated in the case law — because we are autonomous, because we can make plans for the future, because we have meaningful social relations, all of these things.
“He said, ‘So what is the basis of our having rights? Is it all of these human capacities, or is it just the fact that we happen to be Homo sapiens?’”
Brandon says in the Western legal tradition, our rights as human beings are grounded in who human beings are, not just the “what” of our species. Wise applied that in legal arguments on behalf of chimpanzees and, later, elephants, specifically the Asian elephant named Happy, who still lives at the Bronx Zoo.
This was not about human rights for animals, such as a right to health care or right to an education, Brandon says. It was much more narrow than that. What Wise did argue is that Happy is a person, with a right to be free and not arbitrarily held captive.
Though the Nonhuman Rights Project was not successful in arguing for Happy’s freedom, Brandon says the attention that they drew to this and the tools that the project gave people to think about these things are still very powerful.
“Even if people aren’t winning in courts of law, every one of us can still do things in our own lives that are profoundly important,” he says. “And this is actually why I think gardening, to me, is both so interesting and so important and really so empowering.”
The relations you live out in your garden shape the lives of the animals around you, and that matters a great deal, he says. If you add up all the gardeners in the world, that is enormously important.
“The world can seem like such a dark and discouraging place, and there’s something incredibly, empowering and reviving around just making a difference in the world around you — and a garden is a perfect place to do that,” he says.
Coexisting With Coyotes
“It is possible to coexist with coyotes, and you see that happening in cities in ways that you don’t always in the country,” Brandon says.
For most of human history, humans and other carnivores coexisted on the landscape and were not fearful of one another, he says.
In Maine, where coyotes have been persecuted, every coyote he has encountered has turned and run. But in San Francisco or Point Reyes National Seashore, a coyote that encounters a human will just keep going about his business.
In a lot of urban and suburban areas, coyotes are the apex predator on the landscape by default.
“They are helping to keep natural processes in equilibrium,” Brandon says. “So much of the world, for now and into the indefinite future, are going to be these heavily or moderately developed human places, and what sort of ecosystems exist within them are very much a consequence of the choices that we make.”
Accepting coyotes in these places makes those ecosystems richer and healthier in the long run, he says.
Scout is a female coyote observed for many years in San Francisco by Janet Kessler, who runs the blog Coyote Yipps.
Scout fled her father and family as quickly as she could then found a spot where there were no other coyotes and plenty of food to hunt. She had about a year alone as a “teenager” and delighted onlookers when she played with sticks, balls and a bicycle tire rim she had found.
Brandon says we tend to think about the lives of wild animals as only involving privation, suffering, disease and hardship. “And no, it’s the full spectrum of life, and that also means moments of beauty and joy and connection.”
If there is one takeaway that people can glean from “Meet the Neighbors,” Brandon says it’s that “only good can come of trying to be more thoughtful and considerate.”
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Brandon Keim on animal intelligence. If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so now by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
Have you encountered unexpected animal intelligence? Let us know in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Some product links in this guide are affiliate links. See full disclosure below.
Episode 227: The Humane Gardener-How to Nurture a Backyard Habitat for Wildlife
Episode 408: Road Ecology: Wildlife Crossings Protect Biodiversity
joegardener Online Gardening Academy™: Popular courses on gardening fundamentals; managing pests, diseases & weeds; seed starting and more.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Organic Vegetable Gardening: My new premium online course. The course is designed to be a comprehensive guide to starting, growing, nurturing and harvesting your favorite vegetables, no matter what you love to eat, no matter where you live, no matter your level of gardening experience.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Seed Starting: Everything you need to know to start your own plants from seed — indoors and out.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Beginning Gardener Fundamentals: Essential principles to know to create a thriving garden.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Growing Epic Tomatoes: Learn how to grow epic tomatoes with Joe Lamp’l and Craig LeHoullier.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Pests, Diseases & Weeds: Learn the proactive steps to take to manage pests, diseases and weeds for a more successful garden with a lot less frustration. Just $47 for lifetime access!
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Perfect Soil Recipe Master Class: Learn how to create the perfect soil environment for thriving plants.
“Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-than-Human World” by Brandon Keim
“The Eye of the Sandpiper” by Brandon Keim
Brandon Keim on Substack | The Catbird Seat
Brandon Keim on Instagram | @brandon9keim
“Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel” by Carl Safina
“Encounters With Animal Minds” by Barbara Smuts
Soil3 – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Proven Winners ColorChoice – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Milorganite® – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Disclosure: Some product links in this guide are affiliate links, which means we get a commission if you purchase. However, none of the prices of these resources have been increased to compensate us, and compensation is not an influencing factor on their inclusion here. The selection of all items featured in this post and podcast was based solely on merit and in no way influenced by any affiliate or financial incentive, or contractual relationship. At the time of this writing, Joe Lamp’l has professional relationships with the following companies who may have products included in this post and podcast: Corona Tools, Milorganite, Soil3, Territorial Seed Company, Earth’s Ally, Proven Winners ColorChoice, Farmer’s Defense, Heirloom Roses and Dramm. These companies are either Brand Partners of joegardener.com and/or advertise on our website. However, we receive no additional compensation from the sales or promotion of their product through this guide. The inclusion of any products mentioned within this post is entirely independent and exclusive of any relationship.
