Vincent J Musi:
So our relationship with animals is constantly evolving. For the longest time
science could just never accept what most pet owners know is that animals think
and feel. But proving that they have thoughts and emotions is a lot of what this
work is about. The question for me next is really about over these 10,000 years
how does an animal that's intended for the dining room, how does it go to the
living room?”
Thank you, you're very kind. It all started for me when I bought a haunted
house. It's true. That's what the neighbors told me, but it was after I bought
the house. Here's a photograph of it. The previous tenants had heard all this
scratching and kicking and rumbling and creaking all around the house, they
thought it was the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe, who lived in the neighborhood,
where I live now. So I did what any sane person would do, I called an exorcist.
His name was Mike Hughes. And he's a trapper and a specialist in nuisance
wildlife. So, he managed to get all the ghosts out of my house, the squirrels,
the opossums, the nine raccoons, the birds, the rats. It was either that or to
designate it a national wildlife refuge. Now Mike had quite a menagerie at his
own home and I was curious, so I photographed him. And some of his animals were
opossums, an albino raccoon, and this iguana.
So I asked around some of my colleagues. A lot of the guys do this. We're trying
to do this eye contact thing, it's simple. We bring an animal, we put it on a
seamless.
I said, "What do we do?"
And they said, “You know, all animals are food motivated. All you have to do is
really kinda provide the set and this is going to work out for you.
I thought, “okay, that's cool.”
Well, mistakes were made. Yeah. The idea here was to photograph these--
Yeah, exactly, these superstars of the animal cognition. These are famous
animals. Years of research had been done with them. Books had been written about
them, scientific careers...And I was going to become the Annie Leibovitz of
animal photographs. And it was going to be all about eye contact and lighting.
Right?
Well, it's hard to do that when an animal won't look at you. And with some
animals, like this lemur, every time I picked up the camera, boom! He was gone.
He'd shoot away. And my career, like the lemur, was vanishing before my eyes.
You don't get a lot of second chances. And I thought, why is this happening? Why
am I being punished here? What have I done wrong?
I went all the way to Austria to photograph this Marmoset. His name is Momo.
He's really smart. Okay, big deal. And he smells really bad. And his head is the
size of a walnut. And he hates me. See, it looks calm to you, doesn't it? No,
it's not. He's peeing on me. He's peeing on my equipment, and he's telling his
Marmoset friends to pee on me and pee on my equipment. And he screamed at me and
he wouldn't stop. And he told his friends to scream at me. And... I began to
think that even fish were screaming at me from under water. This is a Gunnison's
prairie dog, and he screamed at me too. Scientists believe these guys have
language ability, sophisticated stuff, right. It's not like, Aah! Bad things are
happening...It's like, "There's a guy from National Geographic and he's gonna
come here and take our picture."
This guy screamed at me on the phone. And, he... he's a rescued prairie dog
from Phoenix. He was hit by a car and his name is Speed-bump. And he lives in
Wabash, Indiana. It's like I didn't know what to do, I couldn't take it anymore.
I started to scream at him, back at him. And I started to interview him like...
like a press conference, rapid fire. "Mr. Bump, how are the winters in Wabash?
What do you think?" All this kind of stuff, and I sang to him. I did everything
I could, and all of a sudden he just stopped. So, you see, with Speed-bump, I
discovered my inner Doctor Dolittle and I embarked on this new career, if I
could just talk to the animals. Show this respect and patience, things I didn't
have much of to be honest with you, I might find what I was looking for.
Now, this is Kanzi. He was a real test for sure. Does anybody know Kanzi? He's a
Bonobo. He's a pygmy chimpanzee. He understands about 3,000 spoken words. It's
incredible. So, now he communicates with humans using this vocabulary that's
drawn from like 350 symbols. It's lexigrams. And, they're printed on a sort
of like, uh, place mat, laminated thing. He walks around with it and he makes
complex sentences. Kanzi wants this now with this person there. It's not like...
pointing to the thing. And the lexigram for an orange may not look like an
orange. It's real sophisticated stuff. So, I got there and they said, "What...
what... what have you brought for Kanzi?”
I said, "I didn't bring anything. I brought my lights."
So, we have to ask his permission. And we have to ask him what he'd like. And
so they, you know...And Kanzi...And, they interpreted that as Kanzi would
like Starbucks coffee for he and his Bonobo friends. And so I had to send my
assistant back into town to get six grande coffees with the simple syrup, for
him and his Bonobo friends. And, Kanzi every once in a while, will do this sort
of thing where he'll go...And two grown-ups will chase each other through the
halls. And it's his entertainment. We're around for entertainment.
Now you'll notice that he never really quite looked at me. And it was
intentional. No matter what I did, I could never get him to make eye contact.
He is a very, very cool guy and very, very sharp. And I'm glad to have gone and
done it.
On the other extreme of this, this is Whack. She's a New Caledonian Crow, lives
in Oxford, England. When she's not trying to poke the eyes out of visiting
National Geographic photographers, which she did for two days, she excels at
problem solving. Creating tools from materials she's never seen before, to solve
problems she's never been presented before. An example is, they would take a
test-tube and put something that she wanted at the bottom of it, food. And
present her with things that you could make tools from. Now, what they didn't
know to this point, was that these animals can make tools, which is different
than using tools. Chimps do this, humans do this, very few animals possess this
capability. And Whack could take something and fashion a tool from it to reach
into the test-tube and get the thing out of it, that you were looking for from
something she'd never been presented before. It's amazing stuff.
Now, this is Betsy. Betsy is so famous that that's not even her real name. I'm
not kidding. She's a Border Collie living in Vienna. And she has the vocabulary
of a toddler. She can hear a word once or twice, and know that it means
something. She can link photographs with an object in the photograph. An example
would be to show her a photograph of a teddy bear. Let's say it's Randy, right.
And say, "Go find Randy." And send her into another room full of these stuffed
animals. She'll look around and she's got-- she's pretty good, and she'll find
the thing in the photograph, bring it back to you. Two or three times, come back
in six months, she's got it locked in. It... It's an incredible thing.
We put Shanti here, she's a 9,000-pound Asian elephant, we put her on an
enormous white seamless background. You know, they are amongst the most
intelligent animals, they grieve, mimic behavior, they have language abilities,
memory. But then they look in the mirror, they see themselves. And it's a rare
cognitive accomplishment, that we know is only shared by great apes and dolphins
and some humans.
At the Bronx Zoo, elephants were put in front of mirrors. And at first they
treated the mirror as an object as you might imagine. But then, they started to
check themselves out. They'd lift their trunks and they would look at things and
different places. See, for the longest time science could just never accept what
most pet owners know, is that animals think and feel. But proving, proving that
they have thoughts and emotions is a lot of what this work is about. And the
scientists can consider this a collaboration between them and the animals. Their
work teaches us about the boundaries of humanity. It's really exciting stuff
but it's about these characteristics that are distinctly human and things that
aren't.
This is a lemur at Duke. His name is Aristides, and they used to think these
guys were not so smart. They are primates but they are on the lower end. But he
learns like a toddler does. He is learning how to count. He uses a touch screen
with his nose. And all this stuff is food rewards, right? So you do this right,
the sequence...you get something, but they, they have great enthusiasm for it,
so they don't need to be fed. They just like to do it.
And rats, they may or may not have a sense of humor, but they laugh. There's
a guy at Bowling Green, his name is Jaak Panksepp. And they call him the rat
tickler. He takes rats, and he tickles them, and they laugh. So, they are trying
to figure...They play jokes on each other and stuff.
And there's not a day that goes by we don't learn something about honey bees,
right. They are really, highly evolved socially, and they have this complex
behavior of communication and navigation. They learn colors and scents. And they
can map their environment out. All with a brain the size of a milligram. It's a
little, tiny thing. And, and now according to some work we think--we find out
they might have emotions. They might possess pessi-- pessimism.
This is a Scrub Jay called Psychobird. And they plan for the future. They take
these birds, and when they go to sleep at night. And wake up in two different
rooms. And in one room, in the morning they feed them breakfast. And in the
other room, they don't. And after a while they give them the option to feed at
night. And what they do, is they do this thing called caching. They take food,
put it in their mouth, they hide it. And then they can hide it in a certain
place, and come back and get it later. These birds all hid it in the room that
didn't have food in the morning. Because they didn't know if they were going to
wake up in that room. Now the caching thing is extraordinary because they--he
is caching right now, right. And every time I am not looking at him, he'll go
(imitates vomiting) and spit it out. Because he's afraid I'm gonna know where
he is hiding it. So, they'll hide it and then if they think they have been seen
hiding it, they'll be like sneaky and they'll hide it somewhere else.
And, you know, chimps are out closest relatives, right. We got 99 percent of the
same DNA with these guys. We've studied them for a very long time, since the
50's right. Jane Goodall, and they make tools...These guys, they love and trust,
they have morals, they fight, they forgive, they cooperate, they have culture.
And they have these unique ways of doing things. Problem solving, social
responsibility...and it's all spread by learning, mostly by women. Females, like
Georgia here, will pass these culture traditions, cultural traditions on to the
other chimps, and keep this thing going.
These are cichlids and they are really crazy. They have this thing called
transitive inference, right, and it's the same kind of logical reasoning that we
use when we go into a bar. And we don't pick a fight with the tallest guy in the
bar. And these fish, in order to get ahead in their social rank, need to keep
fighting. So they fight a fish, they get their colors, they get ahead in social
standing, then start fighting again. But they know not to pick a fight with the
wrong guy. And it's this, like step on the way to logical reasoning for a fish.
Sheep have facial recognition. They recognize faces of other sheep, up to 50 of
them for like two years. And up to ten humans for two years. It's amazing.
This is Azy, he's a magnificent animal. He comes into the room and he's--Well,
that's actually life-size. Orangutans above all the great apes, find-- they are
contemplative. They make choices that are logical and they're thoughtful, maybe
more than chimpanzees.
This is a Pacific Giant Octopus. They have personalities, they use tools, they
recognize individuals, and they play. David Liittschwager whose photographs
grace the side of the building here told me this story. He said at the Monterey
Aquarium once he was doing a tour with an entourage that included the Dalai
Lama, who was dressed in his robe. And they pass the Giant Octopus who is, as
they often are, way in the back of their tank and he was a mottled tan. And
the octopus saw the Dalai Lama come through the room and leaped to the front
of the tank, put itself on the edge of the tank and changed to the color of the
Dalai Lama's robe. They are pretty sneaky. In Seattle, they had these guys and
at night they'd block the air pressure and they'd blow the tops of their tanks.
They'd sneak off into the other exhibits eat the other fish, go back to their
tanks leaving a trail of water and go, “Hey man, I didn't see nothing."
This is Alex. Alex could use a 100 words and he had the intelligence of a 5-year
old. He could count to seven. He knew 'same' from 'different'. He knew 'larger'
from 'smaller'. He would talk to you. Would you tickle me? And I said,"Sure.
Show me where.” And he put down his head, and he lifted the feathers up on the
crook of his neck. And so I tickled him. And then he said, "Could you tickle
me on the chair?" And we went and sat on the chair. And we had this delightful
afternoon. It's true. He passed away at 31, which is young for a parrot. And
when he died, his obituary was in the New York Times. That's how famous he was.
It's true. It's true.
So our relationship with animals is constantly evolving. It... It's a really
fascinating thing to me, and probably the single most important part of this is
domestication, right. Millions of animals on the planet, right. There's like
14 large mammals that have been domesticated. Nobody knows why, nobody knows
how. All dogs come from wolves. And as a result of all of this evolving over the
years, dogs are changing. It's because domestication didn't just happen, it's
still going on.
So, these researchers at Duke are telling this dog that there is food under both
of those cups, and there isn't. So one of them tells the truth all the time, one
of them doesn't. And the dog is figuring out which one is telling the truth. And
then they mix it up. It's an amazing thing.
So you have these things that happen to an animal, once we've domesticated it,
right. But across the board what we've done is lost all the wild animals. There
are no wild cows anymore, right. Wild aurochs were the originals, right? So
we've lost all of that. And, we have only a few animals that can go back. So,
pigs can go back and be feral. Cats can do it. We think now that the cats may
not be really domesticated. They just might be tolerating us. It's true. They
chose humans.
So, the question for me next is really about over this 10,000 years, how does an
animal that's intended for the dining room, how does it go to the living room?
This is a pot-bellied pig that lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her name is Daisy
Mae and she is blind. And when the owners got it, they almost had to get rid of
her because there was a law in the books that said, you know, cougars, lions,
pot-bellied pigs were vicious animals. And so they changed laws because of this
pig. It's pretty cool.
This whole idea of exotic pets is kinda hot button, everybody is a little bit
conversant in it, We always see something on the news about it. I wanted to do a
piece on the relationship humans had with these animals. What possessed somebody
to want to have one. I didn't want to judge 'em, I wanted to give their piece,
so--
It's a capybara going for his afternoon swim in Texas. He's a jumbo rat, 130-
pound rodent. A pretty cool guy. And this is one of my favorite of all times.
That's Dillie. She is beautiful, isn't she? Born in 2004. So, an Amish breeder
who had an animal that was gonna probably die. And in the middle of the night,
he called up his local veterinarian, Melanie Butera, and he sort of got somebody
to drive him to her and Melanie took care of this animal, brought it back to
life. Over a long period of time. And now Dillie lives in her house. This is on
the second floor of a house. She goes to the bathroom in the kitchen on towels,
eats spaghetti from a plate, goes up and down the set of stairs. And she is the
most wonderful animal, I've ever been around. She really is extraordinary. And,
you know, she has her own webcam. You guys probably have that. There was a point
there where she got a little freaked out because somebody came by with that
Burt's Bees stuff, and she thought it was a bee and so she was afraid. And so,
she slept on the floor in a different place. She wasn't visible on the webcam.
This webcam has a million unique visitors per month. And Melanie got emails from
the International Space Station saying,"Where is the deer?"
This is Albert. Yeah, this is his bedroom. Yup, and this is a 12-foot Burmese
python. Now, he's holding that python for me. I'm going to come clean with you
on that, because his room is full of every one of the most poisonous, venomous,
aggressive snakes on Earth, are all there. So he's got these Egyptian Cobras and
King Cobras and Australian Browns, and on every one of--Looks like the Museum
of Natural History in there, doesn't it? And every one of those cages, these
things has a little thing on it listing what the animal is, and what the anti-
venom is. And on the door, is a list of directions to the hospital that has the
anti-venom. Because he's been bitten 100 times. And so he's like, "You want me
to bring the King Cobra out?"
"No, I don't!"
He feeds, he single-handedly figured out how to deal with this invasive species
thing in Florida. He feeds smaller pythons to the cobras. Chops them up gives
them to the cobras, Here you go. Not this one, but he did that.
One thing I should tell you is that none of these animals are truly wild. These
are captive born animals and they've been very, very far away from any wild
bloodlines. They can't go back to the wild, because they never came from the
wild.
Melanie Typaldos has this big capybara. And she is home every day. He goes for
his swim at four, and she'll feed him in the pool. And his name is Gary, which
is short for Garibaldi Rous. R-O-U-S Rodent Of Unusual Size. He's a 120-pounds,
and he's three years old. And this is her second one. And this is not an animal
that takes, well, kindly, to humans, right. You have to earn trust with this
thing and they have an incredible relationship and Mario Enfante and his cougar,
Sasha. This is his child. I went down, I gotta tell you, I saw it and it was a
real bond. It was not like a trophy for this guy. Because nobody is going to
find him, you know. Really, really an interesting situation.
Now that's cute, a little cat. That's a bobcat. Six weeks old, it's going to
grow up to be a big bobcat. Now, a lot of people raise these things. They have
a huge human imprint on them when they're little. So that, hopefully, when
they get to be bigger, and they go off with somebody, that they'll retain that
and they may not chew their face off, kinda thing. It could be very dangerous
with these animals. I don't want to understate that. But, you know, she raises
them, they follow her around the kitchen, she has him around her dog. And it's-
- at this point where this whole process starts. Some breeders are great, some
breeders are bad, and there's a whole cycle that can go after this, because what
are you gonna do? If it gets too big to handle, people don't know what to do
with these animals. It's across the board with big cats and bears and things
like that, as you'll see.
This is Mike Stapleton, he's in Ohio. He has six, five, six tigers. And he is
suing the state because they've decided that they're going to take all these
laws back a little bit. And you're not going to be allowed to have one of these
animals without huge bonds. So, these are all rescued animals. These were
probably photo tigers, when they were cubs. People had their picture made with
them. Then they get too big. And at a year, they go somewhere else and they are
down this path. Where are they gonna go, they are not going to go to a zoo.
Zoo's won't take them, They don't have room for them. There are only so many
refuges. It's pretty tight.
The one wild animal I did photograph...This is actually a real nuisance gator.
And the guy with it is Bob Freer. He got his first alligator when he was six.
His dad stopped at some roadside place, bought him a gator, threw it in the
back, and said, Here you go. And so he-- he's spent his entire life now. He's
got this place called Everglades outpost and he rehabilitates wildlife. ’Cause
lots of crazy stuff comes into Miami International Airport and he's got, like,
snow monkeys there, and he's got bears. But he loves gators ever since he was a
kid, and so he wrestles gators. He's been an alligator wrestler for 30 years. I
asked the man, "What's the relationship with a gator like? What do they want?"
He said, They want to be left alone.
So, you know, I don't know what an exotic animal owner looks like. I thought,
“what if we took the same animal and we did different owners.” So this is at a
thing called Skunk Fest that was in Ohio too. And we photographed, you know a
little cross section of some of the owners of skunks. This is Travis and he's
a DJ at a strip club. And Nicki is a mother of two. She's got a skunk. And
this is Malena. She's 16, and she dresses up like skunks. And then you've got
Maggie, she's 12, on the left. And Sean’s a technical engineer, with his skunk.
And Cherie's a housewife in Pennsylvania, with her skunk. But I can tell you
honestly the bond is true. I want to leave you with something--A lot of what
these animals have taught me is patience. You need it, 'cause you can't make an
animal do what you want it to do.
So we photographed a hedgehog for the cover in December. And, you know, like the
little Gunnison, you know, I could yell at him. When you do that to a hedgehog.
It turns into a pinecone. And so, any slightest movement and the thing goes back
into a pinecone. So this fellow Brandon Harley is a kid who raises these guys.
We took nine hedgehogs and spent a day photographing them on a seamless to try
to make a picture. And this is a little piece on what we did.
Thank you. That's all I've got.
