Name: 【TEDx】Do animals think and feel? Sy Montgomery at TEDxAmoskeagMillyard
Uploaded: 2016-01-06T05:08:41.000Z
Duration: 20 min 4 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'd like to tell you about someone I met in March, 2011.

Modal verbs - B1

If she stood up, she would have been about five feet tall,

She had a beak like a parrot, and venom like a snake,

and pour her boneless body through an opening the size of a walnut.

and her keeper pulled off the lid to her tank.

She turned red with excitement, and slid over to meet me,

and her eye swiveled in its socket and locked into mine.

I plunged my hands and arms into the 47-degree water,

and her eight arms came boiling up to meet mine.

Now, an octopus can taste with all its skin, including the eyelids,

but this sense is most exquisitely developed in the suckers.

And so, soon, I had the pleasure of having the skin of my hands and arms

covered with dozens of her beautiful, wide, strong suckers,

Later, I realized that not everyone would like this.

If a person had begun tasting me so early in our relationship,

And, boy, it was cold! And yes, it was slimy.

And then, there was the matter of all those hickeys to explain to my husband

But never was I for a moment afraid, and neither was Athena.

and she hadn't let a stranger touch her head before.

And beneath my touch, her skin turned white,

the color, I later learned, of a relaxed octopus.

because, despite all of the millions of years of evolution

despite the fact that she was a marine invertebrate,

I felt very strongly that Athena was just as curious about me as I was about her.

Somehow, across half a billion years of evolution,

Now, speaking about animals of any kind having a mind

makes some philosophers and scientists nervous.

But that's exactly what I want to talk with you about,

the overwhelming evidence that animals across a wide variety of species

do think, and feel, and experience consciousness.

Now, I'm not a scientist or philosopher. I'm a writer.

And I know what I've learned from interviews and from reading

and from fieldwork with animals, both captive and wild.

My first book talks a little about Jane Goodall's work.

She's very famous for her studies of chimpanzees at Gombe,

and today she's the most well-known scientist in the world.

But when she started out, no one wanted to publish her work,

But her findings were too important to be ignored,

and she found that chimpanzees not only have minds,

They develop friendships. They use and make tools.

They even fashion little sticks with which to fish out termites from termite mounds.

They create sponges from leaves which they crumple,

and withdraw liquids that they want to get.

They even make clubs with which to hit other chimpanzees.

The fact that they use and make tools shows also

that chimps aren't just living in the eternal present.

and they also imagine the minds of other chimpanzees.

The fact that their minds are so like ours shouldn't really surprise us,

because we share 99% of our genetic material with a chimpanzee.

You can get a blood transfusion from a chimpanzee.

In fact, even look at chimpanzees and they might remind you,

every once in a while, of that guy you dated in college. (Laughter)

But what about animals that aren't so like us?

Well, anything can be miniaturized. Look at computers.

They used to take up a whole room, and now they fit in your pocket.

Despite what some linguists might tell you,

there are people out there thinking very, very well without words.

And one of them is my friend Temple Grandin.

I wrote a book about her  for young readers.

She's quite famous. You may have heard of her.

She creates humane designs, including pens and even slaughterhouses

that are meant to ease the pain and fear of farm animals

She has authored a dozen books, she has written hundreds of articles,

she's a college professor, but because she has autism,

In fact, she didn't speak until she was aged six,

and to this day, she does not think in words.

She'll tell you, she thinks entirely in pictures.

What about tool use? That was a Rubicon that supposedly animals couldn't cross.

Well, we know that Jane Goodall's chimps crossed that easily,

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【TEDx】Do animals think and feel? Sy Montgomery at TEDxAmoskeagMillyard

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