Imagine the clouds dripping.Dig a hole in your garden to put them in.

"A profusion of recent studies has shown animals to be far closer to us than we previously believed — it turns out that common shore crabs feel and remember pain, zebra finches experience REM sleep, fruit-fly brothers cooperate, dolphins and elephants recognize themselves in mirrors, chimpanzees assist one another without expecting favors in return and dogs really do feel elation in their owners’ presence. In the summer of 2012, an unprecedented document, masterminded by Low — “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Human and Nonhuman Animals” — was signed by a group of leading animal researchers in the presence of Stephen Hawking. It asserted that mammals, birds and other creatures like octopuses possess consciousness and, in all likelihood, emotions and self-awareness.

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I wondered, too, why disorders like phobias, depression and OCD, documented at zoos, don’t appear to have analogues among animals living in the wild. Irene Pepperberg, a comparative psychologist at Harvard who is known for her work with African gray parrots, told me that she thought one reason had to do with survival. “An animal in the wild can’t afford to be depressed,” Pepperberg said. “It will simply be killed or starve, since its environment requires constant vigilance. The situation kind of reminds me of my Jewish grandparents, whose lives were a lot harder than mine. They never seemed depressed, because I don’t think it ever occurred to them.” When I asked Virga how Molly might have fared with an infection or a lost tail in the arid mountains of North Africa, where most aoudads live, he said she would have been eaten by a leopard or a caracal, if not within days, then within weeks. “A lot of people might say that it is part of the natural order that Molly would have been eaten by a leopard, that it’s preferable to her being on display at a zoo,” he said. “Except I think that if you could ask her, Molly would tell you that she prefers not to be a leopard’s meal. I think she prefers it very much.”'


like what my dad says, depression is a luxury some of us just can't afford