Ben Hart likes to spin my head around. He is a veterinary behaviorist from the University of California at Davis, and we get together every year at the annual meeting of the International Society for Anthrozoology. Last year in Cambridge he told me about a new research project he was...

I have had two serial killers in my life. The first was a former student. A couple of years after he graduated from my university, he murdered his father, his mother, his younger brother, and the family dog. After he was arrested, the local television station sent a...

Lately, I've been thinking about the moral status of invertebrates. In her book Speciesism, animal rights activist Joan Dunayer argues that a spider has as much right to life as a person. Dunayer is the exception to the general rule that most Americans, including most animal protectionists, don't...

Mr. James Russell of Cashiers, N.C., recently justified meat eating in the Asheville Citizen-Times by explaining that humans are biologically classified as carnivores. His reasoning was simple: The consumption of animal flesh is right because it is natural.

Unfortunately, Mr. Russell got his facts wrong. Zoologists place humans in the...

Occasionally a sentence will change your life. In my case, it was when the doctor looked up from the sonogram screen and said, "Congratulations. You're having twins." After the shock wore off, I realized that twins are a gift to a biological psychologist. I was going to experience the nature-nurture...

Representative Todd Akin of Missouri made two mistakes when he claimed "From what I understand from doctors, it's really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down."

His first mistake was linguistic. The term "legitimate rape"...

According to the National Weather Service, the average American has a 1 in 10,000 chance of being hit by lightning. These odds, however, are of no condolence to my mother, who was struck by lightning while sitting around a campfire, or my friend Rod Baird, who was hit while golfing....

In a previous post , I argued that humans are the only species to keep pets. (Calm down -- I know about Koko's kitten, etc. While long-term odd couple attachments between species are common in homes, wildlife parks, and in captivity, they don't seem to exist in the...

Wild animals don't keep pets.

Oh, I can already hear the howls of objections. What about Koko's Kitten, you ask, referring to the well-known case of the American Sign Language-trained gorilla who fell in love with a kitty cat? What about Owen, the 600 pound baby...

One of my favorite toys from the wunderkinds who gave us Google Earth is Google's Ngram Viewer. Ngram is a free and easy to use graphics program that tracks the ebb and flow of ideas through a culture. At its heart is a massive data set consisting of 500...