Animals

A few years ago, without warning, Mum decided that she no longer felt comfortable killing mice in her own home. Part of this resolve may well have been to do with my then young sister, Lauryn, who begged for a halt in the systematic destruction of mice-kind. A mouse still twitching in the spring-loaded bar trap only served to strengthen Lauryn’s intervention.

Never has an American invention so commended itself to the Australian people. As a child, I knew people who had calluses on their fingers that could be directly linked to the bar of one of those devices. With faux seriousness, my father said other people, who actually were missing fingers, had lost them on account of run-ins with the traps during the setting of the springs.

I couldn’t have known it then, but some of the traps on the market have a force of almost ten newtons, which is almost precisely the same as the pull of gravity on a one kilogram object – enough to drag it to the earth at a rate of 9.8 metres per second squared.

This isn’t quite enough to sever a human finger, but what do young boys know of classical physics?

It remains unknown whether time itself mellowed my mother, or a more nuanced revolution regarding animal care took root in her mind. Simply, one day I noticed that the old traps had been thrown out and new ones had arrived. These ones were little cages that trapped the mice alive. I liked the idea of less suffering in the home, but the logistics had me stumped.

‘I like them, Mum, but they don’t exactly solve the problem,’ I told her one morning in the kitchen. ‘What do you do with the caught mice?’

I have developed a keen sense for when Deb Morton is scheming. There is a faint smile that is crowded out by the shining eyes of a fanatic; the kind of eyes that belong to someone who knows they are right even if they may not be.

‘When I release them, I point them in the direction of the neighbour’s yard,’ she told me, shimmering with pride.

This was a perfect solution, if mice weren’t engineered through millions of years of evolution to simply turn around on a whim. As I understand it, the ability to turn left or right or even 180 degrees forms a major plank of their survival strategy.

‘Mum, they’re just going to come straight back,’ I told her.

Throughout my teenage years, the period of time in which my eyes deteriorated and I was fitted with optical glasses, Mum handled a losing argument with me with a single riposte: ‘Oh whatever, four eyes.’

On this occasion, however, she didn’t admit defeat. She admitted something else instead.

‘They don’t come back,’ she said.

She made it sound sinister, like an old Soviet space director talking about the passenger manifest on the first orbital craft. Indeed, it was uttered as a direction.

‘You couldn’t possibly know,’ I replied, ‘if the mice you catch again are new ones or the same ones!’

Even as I was saying it, I saw her spirit rise and I knew, somehow, that I was wrong.

And so, having beckoned me to follow her, Mum led me down the creaking steps at the back of the house. She was wearing a mismatched ensemble of dressing gown and slippers, each in a state of disrepair such that they gave her the air of somebody who had founded a doomsday prepper cult and then couldn’t make the payments on the bunker.

‘Come here. Look at this,’ she directed when we reached the gate that opened to a path leading underneath the house. The old Queenslander home is raised a level by stumps, but we never had the means to do anything fancy with the concrete expanse below. It became a warehouse for scrap metal, old appliances and spare parts; the sort of place that could give a home stylist an aneurism.

At first, I couldn’t see what Mum was trying to show me. It was just like the rest of the downstairs industrial-asylum aesthetic: empty paint tins, bottles of WD-40 and at least three-quarters of the parts necessary to build a combine harvester.

My eyes had to adjust to the light, certainly, but my brain couldn’t have known what puzzle it was trying to solve. Then Mum pointed specifically at the tiny little paint brushes, all dabbed with colour.

‘Mum,’ I said. ‘No . . .’

She grinned, nodding her head vigorously. ‘I’ve been painting their tails. That way I know if we get any re-runs.’

The scene presented itself in the manner of a mystery-thriller flashback, where the hero has figured it all out and the clues from earlier in the investigation pop into their head like signposts.

And here’s the thing: Mum was right.

We never did get a recurrence of the same mice turning up in the traps with paint-covered tails, rodents with highlights. Unless, of course, they discovered a vat of turpentine and launched an elaborate rebirthing operation the way criminal enterprises launder stolen cars.

I wondered, then, what had happened to them. If we weren’t getting the mice back, were they perhaps turning up in other traps and giving residents across my home town the chance for that sensational jolt of wonder, the kind that only comes when reality departs so severely from expectation.

This is simply a curious tale of rodent painting, in isolation. I learned much later, however, that it was something more akin to a habit.

In his late twenties, my brother, Toby, purchased a domesticated rat that he named Bam Bam. He lived with it in a room at the back of Mum’s house. Nobody else went into the room, but occasionally the rat was brought out for a run in the rest of the house. Mum never warmed to Bam Bam, shuddering at his presence.

And then, as if fate were obsessed with mockery, my brother was sent to jail. His rodent friend was temporarily orphaned and it fell to Mum to care for it. In the fever dream of a mother’s anguish, Deb hit upon the idea of writing a letter to Toby in prison and decorating it with the painted footprints of Bam Bam.

Thus ensued a tiny struggle as Bam Bam was marched through a tray of paint and coaxed to run across the piece of paper on which the family letter to our incarcerated boy had been written. Mum screamed, my sister laughed, the rat developed a deep and enduring faith in reincarnation; the better to believe its next life would be more dignified.

As much as Lauryn and I teased Mum about these vignettes, the truth of it is that I have always admired her sensibility when it comes to animals. Through her, we were taught that animals could love us just as fiercely – and often more consistently – than other human beings could.

Serious people would counsel not to anthropomorphise an animal. Our minds are not their minds. To intuit the emotions of another non-human life was, to these serious people, a folly of cognitive biases.

Still, it never stopped Mum, Lauryn or myself from turning our animals into vehicles for elaborate radio plays, each with their own idiosyncratic style of speaking. Rosie, our miniature fox terrier, had – for reasons that are unclear to me – a speech impediment, while the chickens emerged from our own minds as elderly women in a nursing home. Jack, the blue heeler, was pensive and erudite.

Sparky, our beloved cat, was just a cunt.

When she died, Sparky was eventually replaced with Charlie, the most strikingly beautiful cat I have ever laid eyes on, who became Mum’s favourite immediately. To my sister and me, denied the opportunity to truly bond with him because of his attachment to Mum, he was a male model; a magazine cover star who had made the turn to starring in bad arthouse movies.

While writing this book, it occurred to me that so many of the best elements of my own life were mediated through animals. I wanted to interrogate what it was our pets had done for us as a family but, more broadly, how all animals have enriched us as a species.

I begin by asking Mum about our habit of projecting ourselves on to the animals and, without skipping a beat, and with total earnestness, she asked: ‘Did we give them our personalities or did they already have their own?’

This farce brought us closer to what we imagined were the interior lives of our pets, but it also rendered the entire animal world alive with the possibility of feeling.

In his now famous 1974 paper in The Philosophical Review, Thomas Nagel asked readers to imagine what it is like to be a bat, part of a larger thought experiment to pick apart the intractable problem of consciousness that he called ‘hopeless’.

Bats make for an ‘exceptionally vivid’ problem in this regard because although these mammals are somewhat similar to human beings they nonetheless possess sensory and activity systems – like echolocation – so undeniably strange that it becomes harder to imagine what it might be like to be one.

Even without the guiding light of philosophy, Nagel concedes anyone who has ever been trapped in an ‘enclosed’ space with a hyperactive bat ‘knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life’.

His assertion, with which I happen to agree, is that the bat – or an alien life form humanity may meet in the future – is so fundamentally different to us that we can never hope to really know what it feels like to have the subjective experience of being a bat.

Blind people who manage to develop an imitation of sonar by clicking their tongues to identify objects in their way will come closer to the experience than the rest of us. But neither the blind nor anyone else will get it completely right.

That, however, is no reason, Nagel says, to deny that a bat or alien life form has experience. Similarly, they may not ever be able to get inside our heads either, but we would be offended at the suggestion we have no inner life.

‘To deny the reality or logical significance of what we can never describe or understand is the crudest form of cognitive dissonance,’ Nagel says.

The philosopher was accelerating to a bigger point about consciousness and human experience, but I like to let the fixation on the bat sit with me because it speaks to a core human desire, I think, to wonder what it is we left behind.

If you go back far enough, all animals share a common ancestor, a single-celled organism which, for ease of reading, we will call Barbara. At one point, these lineages branched out this way and that, like spiderweb cracks in a sweeping pane of glass. Not every animal is our direct ancestor, but each one of them was once on the same trunk as us.

Granted, you have to go back a very, very long time to meet Barbara or the other common forebears who existed before yet another split in the family tree. You have to go back, past the moon landing and the Industrial Revolution, the Bronze Age, zip past the Agrarian Revolution (while yelling wrong way, go back) and through the ice ages and beyond the dinosaurs.

The other forms of life and us – intimately connected eons ago but now so isolated – are like former lovers who spent so long together they can never forget what it was like to hold the shape of the other’s body, yet now view the other’s inner life as unfamiliar.

Why were we together in the first place, we can feel ourselves ask. We bask in this strangeness.

After my parents’ divorce, in the late 1990s, my brother, Toby, and I were visiting our father on the sheep station Comarto, slightly more than fifty kilometres west of Wilcannia in the deep reaches of New South Wales.

Here the land is perpetually thirsty, rain so rare it was the perfect climate zone for the movie director George Miller to film the original dystopian Mad Max films in nearby Silverton. When the wet finally came that summer it hit so heavily we ended up having to stay for an extra two weeks.

Something that appeared to my young self to be magic happened in that soaking rain.

The pools of muddy water that sat in the clay pan earth across the station exploded with life forms unlike any I had seen. They were shield shrimp, a desert crustacean that looks like an oblong frisbee with a mesh-like tail that ends in two thin strips that jut out in a V-shape.

I was transfixed.

It would be another twenty-five years before I found out, while researching this book, what they were, so rare are their appearances. The eggs of these creatures can lay dormant in the normally arid soil for up to seven years before bursting to life with the rain that propels them into a hyper-speed life cycle again.

Toby and I studied the hard-headed little things in their ponds. To me they looked just like the extinct trilobites I had read about in the course of my youthful obsession with dinosaurs. In fact, I convinced myself that we had found an ancient form of life long thought to have been lost to human knowledge.

For all the cattle station’s later troubles, and the marker of cataclysm it would become in my own life, my siblings and I were lucky to have our childhood in outback Australia and we were doubly blessed that our mum, Deb, was there to imbue it with a love for the natural way of things that might otherwise have passed us by.

While Toby satisfied himself with the life he could see, I was obsessed with the old and the new. In particular, a few years before my discovery of the shield shrimp, I had been on a serious mission to find a dinosaur. Preferably alive, though I knew to focus my efforts on unearthing a skeleton.

A very big sauropod – a long-necked thumper, if you will – was found on a cattle station called Durham Downs north of Roma in western Queensland in the 1930s. This was a sign that dinosaur hunting was in my blood because it was on this station that my mother met my father, albeit quite a bit later.

This twelve-metre-long beast was given the unfortunate scientific name of Rhoetosaurus brownei and probably died from embarrassment sometime before the onset of the Cretaceous.

I wanted to find my own.

My quest was complicated by a preponderance of bones belonging to the cattle on the station we called home. Further frustrating my efforts was the not insignificant fact that my enthusiasm for discovery outshone any capacity for skeletal identification.

It was in such a state of general ignorance that I would occasionally bring home the femur of a dead cow and present it to Mum with totally unwarranted optimism.

‘Is this a dinosaur bone?’ I would ask her.

‘No, darling, that is the thigh bone of a steer,’ she would respond.

She always encouraged me in the pursuit of the natural sciences, no matter how wrong my avenues of inquiry. I collected bones like an unprepared anatomy professor on his first day of class. If my selection was indiscriminate, it was only because my hopes were sweeping.

What about this? And this? Or that? Mum, could the dinosaur have died so recently that bits of its flesh were still being picked from the bone by meat ants? Why not?

I never did find a dinosaur but, rudely, our next-door neighbour did.

In 2004 the fourteen-year-old son of graziers near Eromanga (which contained our nearest pub and is the farthest town from the sea in Australia) found what he thought to be an interesting-looking rock while mustering cattle. His name was Sandy Mackenzie and the station was Plevna Downs. His family had helped my parents in those horrifying hours in 1994 after my brother was burned on Mount Howitt station but before doctors could arrive. We knew them well. They were good people.

I only learned of Sandy’s discovery when reading the newspaper sometime around 2009.

He’d discovered Cooper, the largest prehistoric giant to ever have risen from the earth in Australia, and several other entirely new species of dinosaur.

Mum could not contain herself.

‘After all those cow bones! Oh, Rick! After all those cow bones!’

But the cruel hits would keep coming. Years later, when I was thirty, I was wandering around a sheep station outside of Barcaldine on assignment with the newspaper I was working for and I noticed the owner had a perfectly preserved jaw bone from an extinct giant kangaroo on a shelf.

I told him the story of my long-ago abandoned attempts at discovery and, thinking he was helping, he barked at his young son.

‘Tom! Go find Rick a fossil,’ he said.

And here’s the thing. Tom did. They had so many sitting in situ on the drought-cracked land that his primary school–aged son could go out blindfolded and pluck one from the dirt.

I was grateful but also on the verge of lodging a police complaint over the unfairness of it all. I thought I was owed a part of this past on account of my interest in it.

The frustration I had was a tiny slice of something more pernicious, a skeletal symptom of our species’ lust for control and ownership over the animal kingdom.

Animals have long captured our imagination. They have comforted us, terrified us, eaten us, performed our work, fed us, infected us, provoked our amusement, carried us and been subjected to our experiments and tests.

As a species, human beings are the confident spruikers in the office project management team who have taken credit for the work of their colleagues at bonus time. To concede late in evolution that we are this far advanced largely on account of the animal kingdom is, for some of us, embarrassing. I’m interested in this idea because I’ve seen firsthand on the cattle station how it feeds a specific, unearned, idea of strength.

Animals lived in our service. The cattle fed and, once sold, clothed us. Working dogs were not to be spoiled. Horses existed to be ridden for mustering or sport. If anyone else, including Mum or myself, dared articulate a view that perhaps we had much to gain from animals beyond mastery, it was dismissed as weakness.

There was – for my father, the jackaroos on the station and also many women who had bent to the harshness of the environment – a refusal to engage on this matter because it required an admission of vulnerability.

Here, strength was defined only through the language of violence, dominion and control. To be vulnerable was the cause of great distress. The closest my father ever came to loving another animal was his working dog Mother, a mean old thing who had a habit of killing her own litter of puppies. He respected her because she was a great working dog. Those that failed to measure up, like my blue heeler Tyson, were shot.

Let’s consider dogs.

Every dog alive today, and modern grey wolves, are descended from an extinct common wolf species that lived around 15,000 to 40,000 years ago. Scientists cannot agree on precisely when we tamed some of these wolves and began the lineage of the modern dog, though estimates from various DNA sequencing studies range from close to that 40,000-year mark to between 14,000 and 6400 years ago.

Anthropologist Brian Hare told the Smithsonian Magazine in 2018: ‘The domestication of dogs was one of the most extraordinary events in human history.’

And how did we repay these dogs?

To redesign them for our aesthetic pleasure by artificially breeding them. We obstructed their airways by flattening their faces, shortened their legs and generally moulded their bodies into shapes uniquely unsuited to the ordinary requirements of being a dog.

Before we managed to go absolutely hog-wild on this type of extreme genetic selection, our ancestors were doing it already, without thinking, and presumably with one of those extinct wolves that was somehow open to being befriended by humans.

Maybe it was injured and needed food and they provided it; maybe it was just an unusually amiable specimen. We do know it happened.

And in that gentle bringing together of two species, once competitors in the same wilderness, a striking change took place. It has become the hallmark of tamed species, first identified though not totally explained by Charles Darwin.

The wolves’ snouts shortened, their ears became floppy and brains shrank an average of 20 per cent. The concentration of certain types of neurotransmitters in dog brains also changed dramatically.

We have been able to watch this in real time with the remarkable study of silver foxes in Russia, which began in 1959 at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk in Siberia.

Researchers led by Dmitri Belyaev and later Lyudmila Trut (who remains in charge today, six decades hence) selected a group of wild silver foxes that seemed, in relation to their peers, to be calm and accepting of human beings. With each new generation of foxes, the researchers chose the top 10 per cent of animals that seemed most tame and bred them, and so on and so on.

As evolutionary biologist Lee Alan Dugatkin noted in the 2018 Evolution: Education and Outreach journal, the effects were almost immediate. Beginning with a population of essentially wild foxes and breeding them for tameness – and only tameness – produced within six generations:

. . . a subset of foxes that licked the hand of experimenters, could be picked up and petted, whined when humans departed, and wagged their tails when humans approached. An astonishingly fast transformation.

The changes kept rolling in. After less than a decade, the newly domesticated foxes developed floppy ears and curly tails. By generation fifteen, stress hormone levels (glucocorticoid) had halved. The adrenal gland, which produces this hormone, had become smaller and smaller. Serotonin levels rose, creating ‘happier’ animals. Over the life of the experiment, the tamed foxes had also developed mottled ‘mutt-like’ fur patterns and ‘they had more juvenilised facial features (shorter, rounder, more dog-like snouts) and body shapes (chunkier, rather than gracile limbs)’.

In short, the animals became cuddlier.

It’s not that we made them cute and baby-like because of our efforts, but rather this was a long-established fact of nature, and humans are instinctively wired to pick up on it. Animals that look fierce, historically speaking, usually are fierce and ought to be avoided. Exaggeratedly round, adorable animals that look stuck in a juvenile phase? Harmless. We are drawn to them as if to light.

There is something about the healing power of connection with species other than our own, even those we imagined.

I know, in some small but tangible way, the chickens Mum bred in our backyard helped her through those first years after our family was split with violent precision. At first there was Hector the rooster and Hessie and Ida and later Sammie and Billy and a cast of others – and a pause after they each passed away.

Deb’s recent decision to raise a new flock of hens immediately struck a hurdle when two of them turned out to be roosters.

‘I have a dilemma,’ Mum texted our family group chat. ‘Gladdie and Dixie might be Glennie and Dickie.’

Mum returned them to the woman who gave them to her and instead inherited a hodgepodge of already fertilised eggs for her only hen, a scrappy little game bird called Pearl who was fiercely on the cluck.

‘At least Pearl likes me,’ Mum lamented during the crisis.

Pearl was still laying her regular eggs when we attempted the switch; she had found a favoured spot under the old Queenslander home. It was an old tub filled halfway with teaspoons that Mum used to collect. Pearl’s nest became one big egg-and-spoon race as Mum fretted about building a new chicken coup for mother and babies when they finally hatched.

For this, she enlisted the help of my brother, Toby, who had, once again, moved back into her house without any discussion. I won’t say he had gone back to his old self because it felt impossible at that stage, but he had stopped using ice in the year or so before and much of his good-natured humour and amiability had returned. Still, he had no job, no house, very few prospects and a mountain of debt.

He had lost none of his skills from his former work as a trained carpenter, however, and was happy to help Mum build the new home for Pearl and her chicks.

Unlike Mum, Toby lacked the natural intuition for a chicken’s needs. When Mum tottered off to work one day, having left him in charge of building a ladder to get hen and brood to the roost, she had more faith in its faultless delivery than was warranted.

What Toby built was indeed a ladder, and a mighty fine one. If you had a leg span of thirty centimetres or more.

‘They’re chicks, Rick!’ Mum said to me down the phone after seeing the ladder. ‘How the hell are they supposed to get up there? They don’t have wings!’

My brother took a while to process the physics of a newly hatched chicken before conceding he might have made the ladder in such a way that a baby bird would simply fall through it.

No one in my family had ever watched Arrested Development but that didn’t stop me from remarking for a week with a borderline psychotic glee: ‘Has anyone in this family ever even seen a chicken?’

It was nice.

Pearl remains unaware of her status as a family mediator but this project, this collective desire to build a home for new life, was such a gentle moment of mother and son bonding. There were no seismic shifts undoing the damage of the past. Just two good people taking steps so small in their capacity to bridge hurt and fear that they might have fallen through that ladder, too. It was enough and it made me glad.

The chicken coup itself is more like a mansion. It may well have been the most significant construction project in Boonah since the global financial crisis, I told Mum, though she demurred.

Chickens are a known quantity. Cattle, for the most part, I can deal with. Dogs have been a feature of my life since the day I was born. Birds are a delight, cats a mysterious binary of pure love and ruthless derision, horses grace.

While childhood gave me a privileged access to the world of animals, it would be some years before I discovered the mind of the cephalopod.

This class of squishy sea creatures – octopuses, squid, cuttlefish and the nautilus, to be precise – are some of the most startling animals ever to have arisen on the planet. Appraising them even momentarily, one is convinced that the cephalopod is an article of tomfoolery. The cephalopod is what happens when evolution develops a gambling addiction, pawns its belongings to make rent and then has to buy back an eclectic mix of odds and ends just to survive.

With the exception of the nautilus, the molluscs all lost their external shell about half a billion years ago, either getting rid of it entirely or internalising it, as in the brittle central bone of the cuttlefish.

They have beaks. And up to eight arms in which, in some species, more than half of all their neural cells are located. In other words, most of their brain can be found in their appendages, which is a state of affairs well known to some human men.

The eye of the cephalopod is very similar to ours, in that it works just like a camera, though these creatures do not have a visual blindspot as humans do. In cuttlefish, the iris is shaped like a W or an old-timey moustache on a cartoon villain. They can tell the difference between an actual object and a photograph of that object, and use the difference in left and right eye visual fields to calculate depth with astonishing accuracy.

Octopuses are such skilled hunters that, as Aristotle observed in the fourth century BC, their very presence in fishing nets could literally scare a crawfish to death.

‘Thus, this animal is so overmastered and cowed by the octopus that it dies of terror if it becomes aware of an octopus in the same net with itself,’ Aristotle wrote in Historia Animalium.

In the 1910 translation of Aristotle’s work, it was noted that Jean ‘Georges’ Cuvier, a renowned French naturalist at the turn of the nineteenth century, said that ‘the octopus is detested by Mediterranean fishermen because of the havoc it works upon the choicest lobsters and crabs’.

In the third century AD, Roman rhetorician Claudius Aelianus wrote in On the Nature of Animals:

If a field, or if trees with fruit upon them are close by the sea, farmers often find that in summer octopuses . . . have emerged from the waves, have crept up the trunks, have enveloped the branches, and are plucking the fruit.

His descriptions fill me with a particular joy.

The octopus feeds first on one thing and then on another, for it is terribly greedy and for ever plotting some evil, the reason being that it is the most omnivorous of all sea-animals.

The proof of this is that, should it fail to catch anything, it eats its own tentacles, and by filling its stomach so, finds a remedy for the lack of prey. Later it renews its missing limb, Nature seeming to provide this as a ready meal in times of famine.

Mischief and craft are plainly seen to be characteristics of this creature.

Imagine the raw cunning of the octopus that men should write about it so.

Little has changed in the hundreds of years since. In December 2020, researchers from Portugal and Germany released a scientific paper in which they observed octopuses punching fish during cooperative hunting in the Red Sea. Usually this was directly linked to the molluscs trying to keep the fish in line – either to remove them from the hunt or make sure they were doing the work needed to catch prey – but on at least two occasions, the study team watched an octopus raise an arm and strike a fish for no apparent reason.

It was this that gave rise to a medley of wonderful headlines such as: ‘Octopuses observed punching fish, perhaps out of spite, scientists say.’

Aristotle might have been kinder if he had known the octopuses were stalking the seafloor and coward-punching unsuspecting fish. The philosopher called them ‘stupid creatures’ because, for the most part, they don’t live much longer than a year and are properly ancient if they make it to two.

One stunning exception is the deep-sea octopus. A single female from the deep-ocean-dwelling Graneledone boreopacifica species was observed from 2007 guarding a clutch of her eggs on an underwater rockface. She stayed in that precise position for four and a half years. No other animal on the planet has brooded on its eggs for longer. It is also not clear that she ate during that time, as she was seen to brush crabs and other potential food sources away when they came too close to her eggs.

When her young hatched, the octopus died.

All this is to say: as a species, human beings should be thankful cephalopods live fast and die young because they are preternaturally intelligent and we are only just beginning to understand how.

Take the blanket octopus. This species appears to be immune to the powerful toxins of the jellyfish-like Portuguese man-o-war, or bluebottle, and has been spotted by researchers tearing the barbs from the floating fortresses and wielding them as spears for defence. Another much rarer species of octopus was caught on camera dragging the entire corpse of an egg-yolk jellyfish around, trailing the stinging tentacles behind it like a deadly cape.

This behaviour is intriguing because it fits with observations cited in a 2019 paper written by Piero Amodio and others from the University of Cambridge, published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

The researchers noted the cartoonish habit of veined octopuses, which collect pairs of coconut shells as a sort of mobile fortress, carrying them around for use in the future, and referred to footage from David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II (2017) that showed a common octopus ambushed by a pyjama shark.

At first, the octopus jams its tentacles into the shark’s gills to stop it breathing, forcing it to let the octopus go, and then something remarkable happens. The cephalopod makes a dash for some rocks on the ocean floor and attaches them one by one to its sucker pads on its arms, then curls into a ball, arraying the stones on the outside as both a disguise and a suit of armour, like a crafty armadillo. The shark is totally outwitted.

Amodio and his colleagues suggest these behaviours are ‘candidates for complex cognition’ because they involve making tools.

‘This rare example of composite tool use in invertebrates might be evidence of complex intelligence for two reasons,’ their journal paper says. First, it might be an example of a behavioural innovation that provides security to the octopuses in environments where rocky shelters are hard to come by. ‘Second, because coconut shells are transported to meet apparent future needs and through considerable costs (eg. conspicuous locomotion), this behaviour might rely on planning capabilities.’

Those words – ‘future needs’ and ‘planning’ – are key because they establish something that is thought to be vanishingly rare in the animal kingdom outside humans: a sense of time.

To imagine a future seems easy for us. We do it even when we don’t wish to. My own anxiety has me in places I’ve never been at times I’ve not yet stepped into, playing out scenarios that might yet happen. I also project into the past, revisiting times I’ve long departed, imagining what might have been. It’s exhausting.

But, to be fair, we wouldn’t be here as a species without it.

Understanding time and that certain beneficial or ruinous things might happen to us at some point in the future has allowed us to break the shackles of evolution and wield tools to enhance our own chances of survival in the right here and now and our anticipated survival just beyond the horizon of our mind.

That cephalopods might join the great apes (not monkeys, though) and ravens on the spectrum of animals that can conceptualise a future moment is a spectacular notion, particularly given that they may well have arrived there independently and with a neural architecture that is at once familiar and altogether other-worldly.

Amodio and his team write in their journal paper that there ought to be a rigorous program of research to study the behavioural flexibility of cephalopods and their cognitive foundation. There may be much more going on here than even we suspect. Is it possible that these animals can attribute mental states to ‘predators, mating rivals, or cooperative hunting fish’? That would be a truly astounding development.

If this turns out to be true – and it seems at least likely that evolution diverged long before the dinosaurs to give us both the cephalopod brain and the human brain – it means the intelligent mind was created independently twice on earth.

I want to spend some time on the cuttlefish, which, to me, is the most remarkable of all the cephalopods, as it illustrates an irresistible beauty and queerness in the animal kingdom.

Cuttlefish are the most skilled animals at camouflage on the planet. They can imitate not only the intricate webs of colour and shading found on the ocean floor, but also the three-dimensional texture of those environments. To do this, they have little muscles under the skin called papillae that can be raised and locked into position to form bumps and spines or that can move to mimic the rolling curves of a bank of seaweed or the pockmarked surface of a coral. They can do this in what seems like an instant, a matter of seconds.

Some species can display two completely different sets of camouflage on their bodies. None has employed this trick quite so deviously as the mourning cuttlefish, named for the tear-like blue tinge at the edge of its eye and common in the waters off Australia’s east coast from Sydney to the northern tip of Queensland.

In 2012, researchers from Macquarie University caught one male specimen on camera in between a female and a rival male. To the female, the cuttlefish beamed a display of his manliness; but on his opposite side, where he might have provoked the competition of the rival, the cuttlefish changed his skin pattern and tone to mimic that of a female. It was Rocky Horror Picture Show meets Finding Nemo, or the Kinks’ song Lola if the titular character was a titillating cuttlefish.

In other words, he had his fake and could eat it, too.

The curious life and minds of cephalopods have been studied well in experiments – they can open jars for food rewards, from the outside or inside, they can complete simple mazes – but often the most telling revelations are those that happen when a cephalopod, especially an octopus, simply does not wish to take part.

‘The most famous octopus tales involve escape and thievery, in which roving aquarium octopuses raid neighboring tanks at night for food,’ Peter Godfrey-Smith writes in his book Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. ‘But here is a behavior I find more intriguing: in at least two aquariums, octopuses have learned to turn off the lights by squirting jets of water at the bulbs and short-circuiting the power supply. At the University of Otago in New Zealand, this game became so expensive that the octopus had to be released back to the wild.’

There are countless other stories like this. Specifically, there are countless stories of octopuses shooting their jets of water at researchers they have taken a dislike to, new people in the labs they don’t yet trust or those in specialised experiments whose job was to scratch the octopuses with a bristly broom while others in identical uniforms gave them food rewards.

You can guess which ones the octopuses singled out for their water torture. Every single time. They can tell the difference between individual humans, a fact made all the more astonishing by the nature of their solitary lives in the ocean: cephalopods are almost uniquely anti-social creatures. They live alone, die alone and, even when mating, risk being eaten alive. Their mind is not like ours, in the sense that it didn’t evolve to deal with complicated social cues and the life-or-death need to belong in a group.

And yet, still, here they are, figuring us out. A totally different species in some form of communion with us.

In her book The Soul of an Octopus, Sy Montgomery recounts how she befriended an octopus called Octavia and marvels at the seeming electricity of the bond between them:

Being friends with an octopus – whatever that friendship meant to her – has shown me that our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom – and is far more vibrant, far more holy, than we could ever imagine.

Our reverence for other creatures need not be confined to an appreciation of their intelligence. There are some noteworthy beings out there that have developed ways of living and, indeed, thriving that deserve contemplation and admiration. The ones that exist when the odds are truly stacked against them are particularly cause for wonder.

Consider the ocean sunfish, for example. An animal with precious little to live for, this giant frisbee of a thing mocks the very idea of evolution. To consider the sunfish is to ponder deep within one’s own mind the necessary conditions for total failure in the animal kingdom.

This animal, the largest boned fish in the world, has no swim bladder and barely formed fins. Its mouth, a sort of beak with fused teeth, is permanently open so that the animal looks very much like it has been told it has only months to live, which it probably does.

Sea lions appear to take delight in playing a sort of underwater football with the ocean sunfish, tearing its fins from its body and biting chunks from the animal before leaving it to either die or eventually recover and look like a cartoon biscuit for the rest of its life.

Just when you think Nature has created a bit of a dud, consider this. We laud the existence of the sunfish today almost entirely because it lays more eggs than any vertebrate on the planet – some 300 million at a time. It is therefore proof that your worst efforts can achieve positive results if only there are a lot of them.

Beautiful, isn’t it?

Of course, there are other stunning creatures. Quite literally, the pistol shrimp which I have come to consider the cowboy of the ocean. There are actually hundreds of such species but all of them are capable of firing underwater ‘bullets’ by cocking their comically oversized claw and snapping it shut so fast that a jet of water is forced out of a pincer, creating a bubble of air that is crushed within milliseconds by the surrounding wall of ocean water. This process creates a sonic shockwave that the shrimp use to stun or even kill prey within range. And get this. The sound is louder than an actual gunshot and the collapse of the bubble briefly creates a heat flash that burns very close to the surface temperature of the sun.

The US navy used these distinctive ambient sounds quite deliberately to conceal its submarines during World War Two. They parked their crafts near pistol shrimp colonies to mask the submarines’ noise, making this perhaps the only time in US history one of its forces was happy for a weaker minority population to be armed.

There are horrifying animals out there, too. I’m thinking of all those parasites that take over their hosts’ minds or, in the case of that river fish in the Amazon, its host’s tongue.

The jewel wasp, by way of nightmare introductions, drugs cockroaches and turns them into puppets of the damned. It first stings the roach in its body to temporarily paralyse its legs – but this is only a set-up for the clincher. The second sting has to be breathtakingly exact – right into a specific section of the roach’s brain – which then disables the victim’s survival instinct to get the fuck out of there (a technical term, as I understand it).

Thus zombified, the wasp then chews off a section of each of the roach’s antennae and effectively uses these as a leash, taking the insect back to its little burrow, as though it were a cavoodle in a gentrified suburb. The wasp then lays its eggs inside the cockroach (which, I must stress, is still very much alive), where the resulting larvae chew their way out within days.

Sleep well, everyone.

When I was a kid I used to love reading about stuff like this, totally enthralled by the brutal, often clinical, efficiency of the natural world. We witnessed much of this on the cattle station and I learned more when my maternal grandmother gave me her collection of 1960s Encyclopaedia Britanica, horribly out of date by the time I got them in the mid-1990s. Entire species of animals had gone extinct during that thirty-year period. I couldn’t have known it, though, turning the pages as a primary schooler a full decade before reliable internet arrived in my area.

I cared deeply about individual animals, as did Mum, but this connection to them never really extended to an overarching understanding of what we do to them so that we might live. While it was considered weak or silly to assume that they ought, at the very least, to be considered sentient, it was a greater mistake to even consider dulling the impact of our own progress so that we might tread less heavily on the earth. This is a phenomenon that extended beyond my own family. Regional Queenslanders in particular, or at least the ones in my general experience, especially loathe environmental protesters. Didn’t they understand we need this dam?

During a brief stint at a pop-culture website in early 2012, I flew to Los Angeles and interviewed the Muppets, Kermit and Miss Piggy, ahead of their latest film release. Entertainment was not my natural set of interests, however, and I spent a great deal of my fifteen-minute one-on-one with Kermit telling him about an Australian species of frog, the wallum sedge frog, which has, at various times in its career as an infrastructure-busting amphibian, been implicated in holding up the completion of the Tugun Bypass, a minor Gold Coast airport landing systems upgrade and a construction project near the Bruce Highway north of Brisbane.

‘Wow,’ Kermit said. ‘That’s an expensive turn of events. Maybe I could stop some bridge-building?’

I went on to quiz him about his sex life with Miss Piggy but am, unfortunately, contractually obliged not to discuss the details.

I’m not sure why I used my brief chat window with a Muppet to grill him about southeast Queensland infrastructure projects but I suspect it has something to do with my training as a news reporter.

We were always taught to frame stories as conflict. This is largely true in other forms of narrative work, but the imperative is many orders of magnitude more compressed and less nuanced in news reporting. Everything must be a battle between two opposing sides.

Could a frog stop a bridge? It could! And that meant the bridge, a thing that was probably useful but certainly not alive, became the automatic underdog, especially in the parochial tabloids of my youth.

It would take the better part of a decade before these deficient paradigms would shift in my own head. It wasn’t malice that kept my thinking in place, just a sort of bumbling intellectual lethargy that I was still trying to shake off in my twenties.

The connection between all that I loved about animals and their place in the world that so controlled, maimed or killed them was a jagged line that made several detours through inscrutability.

Strange, I know, especially when we consider that one of my strongest early memories is being reduced to a sense of doom while watching the 1983 sequel to Dot and the Kangaroo.

The original book that spawned the films carried a dedication in 1899 from its author Ethel Pedley:

To the children of Australia, in the hope of enlisting their sympathies for the many beautiful, amiable and frolicsome creatures of their land; whose extinction, through ruthless destruction, is being surely accomplished.

The films never shy away from this message and in the sequel, in which Dot finds Funny Bunny pretending to be a kangaroo joey lost by the mother kangaroo in the first film, the characters end up on Battle Beach – a stretch of sand filled with corroded US army trucks and the detritus of war. It is a wasteland.

‘They were fighting here, all around here,’ Dot tells Funny Bunny when he asks what it was all for.

‘Why?’ the little bunny asks.

‘I don’t know,’ replies Dot. ‘My father told me but I didn’t understand. I don’t think he did either.’

And then, as Funny Bunny asks what they do in war, the film cuts to real-life footage of atom bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, conducted between 1946 and 1958; the bright flashes are sliced with footage of wildlife and a baby bird left defenceless in a nest.

‘They have guns and bombs,’ Dot says, ‘and they fight each other and they hurt and lots of them are killed. Sometimes women are killed, too. The mothers. And there’s children left behind with no mothers and no fathers, and no one to look after them.’

Funny Bunny begins to sob.

I can’t tell you exactly what four-year-old me was thinking when he saw these images. Certainly I didn’t know much about nuclear fission or its world-ending promise. I can say with some assurance that it hounded the ease from me, the way a bomb’s shockwave strips the ground of anything that dares grow out of it.

There is a lot to be said for children’s films that impart challenging, important lessons. Perhaps we can agree on this: children should be taught about death. One of my favourite poets, Wislawa Szymborska, had this wry observation about death’s far from total dominion:

Many are the caterpillars that have outcrawled it.

I love that line but ultimately, as we know, all that lives must die.

This necessary education does not require children to join a hunt. At least, not anymore. Nor do we need to take our young aside, one by one, and explain to them in explicit detail that their parents will die, and maybe even soon because the universe is capricious like that.

Look, all I’m saying is I was not ready for talks on bilateral denuclearisation from Dot at age four. I was not ready, even, by the time I left high school, because my brain was still largely a mess of poorly arranged wires, like at a construction site that is close to lock-up but where the electrician has suddenly died.

The movie was not so much formative, as it was spiritually ruinous.

I don’t mean to focus just on the nuclear issue, except that it’s one symptom of humankind’s broader instinct to act now and think later, a habit that has been tremendously unkind to the rest of life on earth.

Just a few days before my birthday in 2011, I was at my friend Candice’s house in St Peters, Sydney, when a magnitude-9 earthquake struck off the northeastern coast of Japan’s main island, Honshu. The quake was the largest since Japanese records began in the 1800s and the fourth most powerful ever recorded on earth. It permanently jolted Honshu island 2.4 metres to the east and shifted the planet on its axis anywhere between twenty-five and one hundred centimetres.

Bad news, in other words.

It was early evening in Sydney by the time I arrived at Candice’s house and, rather than indulging in the planned drinking, I watched tsunami waves roll over the Japanese coastline, beamed live around the world by a Japanese news crew in a helicopter. I was transfixed.

Estimates varied, but the wave height was conservatively at least twenty metres in some parts of the country. It crested over the tops of pine trees in fields, surging inland for miles.

Almost 16,000 people died. The damage wrought came in at more than A$300 billion. A nuclear power plant went into meltdown in three of its reactors. A decade later, they are still removing radioactive soil from the region. In stages, the Japanese government has been allowing some 160,000 evacuees to return to areas within an original twenty-kilometre ‘no-go’ zone. Progress is slow.

The nuclear disaster was declared the same day as the earthquake struck, but authorities first revised the evacuation zone from two kilometres to three kilometres. The day after the quake, officials twice shifted the exclusion area – to ten kilometres and then to twenty kilometres within a matter of hours.

In early 2020, as I was preparing my research trip to Japan, a friend told me a tour company was offering semi-sanctioned visits to the radioactive Fukushima zone. When I arrived in late January, the Japanese government was preparing to reopen the rail line from Namie station to Tomioka in the Fukushima prefecture. It had been severed for almost ten years.

I signed up for a tour of the reopened areas – and a very fast drive-by within one kilometre of the crippled power plant itself – which was largely allowed on account of government messaging designed to prove that everything was absolutely fine.

That did not appear to be the case, however.

As my tour bus approached Namie, the local roads became clogged with convoy after convoy of trucks with green or black tarps covering loads of radioactive soil. Indeed, the trucks were the traffic. These streams of vehicles were conveyor belts, which have been operating for more than nine years, removing about 14 million cubic tonnes of contaminated soil and locking them in black plastic wrappers that resembled oversized body bags. This particular clean-up operation, involving 70,000 workers and 355,000 trucks so far, had been billed at almost A$40 billion.

Japan was nearing the end of winter when we were driven through the abandoned countryside, much of which had been turned into fields of these toxic bags piled so high they resembled Mayan temples. These structures rising from their fields were a reminder of what was lost and what still cannot be contained. There was a deep chill in the air, the grass and trees still dry. They had taken on the colour of rust in the freezing temperatures. Together, the elements painted a picture that matched the dystopias in my head from a younger age. Without human intervention, one of the caesium isotopes released into the surrounding ecosystem will haunt the area for at least three centuries.

The Japanese government had yet to find a permanent home for this bagged soil and so, for the time being, it sat there in the open.

My fellow tourists and I were each given dosimeters on this trip – they were yellow and looked much like the Pikachu pet game I had as a kid, which also doubled as a pedometer and allowed me to gamble on virtual slot machines for prizes to feed my Pokemon – and they beeped with a static-like fuzz as they measured the surrounding radiation.

In Namie, where vines had eaten entire homes, the meter held steady at a low reading. Here, it was safe to leave the bus.

We walked through the town, past a school that had been abandoned the moment the evacuation was ordered. The school children had left quickly, wearing only their indoor shoes; their joggers were still waiting untouched in pigeonhole boxes at the main entrance. In a classroom where the kids had been learning English – the alphabet was plastered in big letters on the wall – drawings they had made of themselves and their families were still hanging.

Glassware and crockery remained on tables in local restaurants. Unopened bottles of Asahi beer kept them company. Windows in almost every building in the town were shattered or cracked, and mostly boarded up. Paint had peeled from abandoned apartment complexes.

On our way to nearby Ukedo, on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, I was confused by what looked like a line of silver-white cloud very low to the horizon. It ran in a perfect line across the tops of the tall yellow grass. Everything else was barren. All around were scarred fields of open dirt, the only people the occasional construction crew.

It wasn’t until we were almost at the coastline that I saw that the strange cloud had a recurring octagonal pattern stamped into it.

Then I realised what it was. Not a cloud at all, but a brand new concrete seawall, nine metres high, separating the edge of Japan from the churning ocean on the other side. This was one sparkling new stretch of a A$20-billion project to build 400 kilometres of seawalls following the 2011 tsunami. Despite recent experience, this concrete barricade was about six metres shorter than the wave that rolled through Ukedo and wiped the town there from the face of the earth.

One building survived: the local elementary school, a two-storey concrete fortress that was almost entirely submerged by the mass of water that swept from the coastline, just 200 metres away. A large, radio-controlled clock near the top of the main building froze at 3.38 pm, the moment the tsunami struck. All of the eighty students there that day survived.

Authorities erected giant white pens in the place where Ukedo used to be; inside each of these pens, as big as football fields, was yet more radioactive soil, piled high in black bags.

The closer we ventured to the Fukushima Daiichi (number one) nuclear reactor, the more difficult it became to process the scale of what had happened here. The countryside reeked of misery and death. It was stamped with the futility of human endeavour in the face of overwhelming natural and man-made odds. We passed within one kilometre of the power plant and could see its blown-out roof – a result of a hydrogen explosion – from our bus windows. We could not stop there because the radiation levels were too high and we had no protective clothing. Our dosimeters sparked furiously with high-pitched warning beeps as we drove past, leaping past a reading of 3.8 microsieverts per hour. People naturally take in about two to three millisieverts (2000 to 3000 microsieverts) each year, so it’s not like we were in any danger (I took on more radiation flying to Japan in the first place), but it’s not the kind of place you’d like to hang around.

On this stretch of road there were police patrols and guards vigorously motioning at our bus driver to keep going. A Sega Sonic game centre sat in ruins next to a chicken shop. None of the former residents would be moving back here anytime soon. The land had necessarily been relinquished to the centuries ahead.

I wasn’t there to become a morbid spectator.

My curiosity was piqued when I first heard about a local cattle grazier, Masami Yoshizawa, who refused to leave his farm even as the power plant went into meltdown and orders to evacuate were given.

Yoshizawa, aged in his sixties, had 260 head of cattle on his property – fourteen kilometres away from the Fukushima Daiichi plant – when his world changed forever. As evacuation orders came in, some of his fleeing neighbours left behind their livestock.

Yoshizawa showed our tour pictures of animals that had been abandoned in feedlots, reduced to skeletons held together by decaying skin.

‘Nobody took good care of them. No feed, no water, so they had to die like this,’ he told us through a translator in early February 2020 when we visited him on his farm, now called Ranch of Hope.

In May 2011, two months after the tsunami and subsequent disaster, government orders were given to destroy all remaining livestock on landholdings within twenty kilometres of the plant. Yoshizawa initially fled the disaster but came back for his cattle. He would not be leaving them to die, one way or another.

‘According to the government, you could save your pet such as dogs and cats, you could save that but not the livestock,’ he told us. ‘But I myself didn’t obey the order of the government. I broke the barricade and I came to my house and saw that my cows had survived.

‘I understood that when I came into the restricted zone I would also get radiation. But even though it is a danger to myself, I decided to keep my livestock. I thought about the meaning of taking care of the cows.’

I couldn’t help thinking of Mum’s Dulux mice when I visited the radioactive cattle and this man who, under extraordinary circumstances, had gone from selling them for slaughter to spending a fortune keeping them alive. Granted, Mum was under no such duress when she made the switch from killing mice to setting them free like a pack of writhing Crayolas. But it was a moral reckoning nonetheless.

Yoshizawa didn’t speak much English, but he all but grabbed me as I was leaving and told me in English that he was ‘a cow terrorist’. That made it sound as though he existed purely to torment his cows, but what he meant was that saving those animals had made him a thorn in the side of government and, more specifically, of those who would argue that nuclear power is safe if only we do it well enough.

For years, the Japanese thought they had. The water pumping stations that routinely kept the fuel load of Fukushima Daiichi’s power plant cool were located four metres above sea level and the plant itself ten metres above the ocean. None of this was enough. The tsunami there reached fifteen metres high, submerging the turbine halls under five metres of seawater and disabling multiple supposed fail-safe back-ups, such as diesel generation and the residual heat-removal cooling systems. Even the 125-volt DC back-up batteries failed as a result of being flooded.

Hubris had damned the nation and it had doubly damned the animals who had no control over any of it before or since.

I do not come from animal rights activist stock. Indeed, half of my family have been involved in a cattle station empire that alone would have shipped more than a million beasts off to slaughter over the decades. I tried to imagine what my cattle grazier relations would have done in this position.

Sure, they cared for their animals within the prism of the livestock industry, but theirs was not a gentle love borne of true feeling. It was a requirement of the job: well-fed animals who are not stressed during their lives make better eating. Bad news for the cows, good news for me if anyone were to contemplate frying me on a hot plate – I’ve been very stressed for a long time.

Yoshizawa confronted this system of convenient care, at great risk not only to his livelihood but to his life. He went back for his animals and he stayed, on his own, with little understanding of what that venture might turn into.

I asked him if he was ever lonely.

‘I feed these cows every day and I have a strong feeling they are my friends,’ he said. ‘So my two hundred and sixty cows, they live peacefully and they show what is real peace.’

Then he switched to English: ‘I am cowboy. Resistance. Kamikaze. I am cow Godzilla.’

Godzilla, created in the angst of the threat of nuclear war, is not the villain I once thought he was in the ignorance of my youth. In Japan, he is the king of the monsters, a kind of tough love check against the worst of humanity’s impulses.

In philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s elaborate reckoning with language, he famously remarked: ‘If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.’ It is a small amusement to me that we have spent the seventy years since that line was published wondering what the fuck it actually means.

We know the essential problem: the life of a lion – even if the lion had access to the English language and the ability to communicate with us – is so fundamentally different from that of our own species that its experiences would be incompatible with ours. Even if the lion possessed the right words, it would be next to useless thinking we could fathom from it what it is like to live, feel and be as that animal.

There is a whole school of language and philosophical scholarship that picks apart competing theories about whether Wittgenstein himself was arguing this or something altogether more nuanced. After all, in the paragraph immediately preceeding that famous line, Wittengstein wrote of the same dilemma when travelling to a foreign nation with completely different customs and ways of living. Even ‘given mastery of the nation’s language’, Wittgenstein said, ‘we do not understand the people. We cannot find our feet with them.’

I’m not here to interrogate Wittgenstein, though given half the chance I absolutely would interrogate the lion. And I think the endless theorising about whether we could make sense of the results misses the point.

We may never understand animals as they appear to us, but all this proves is that they have minds unknowable or ungraspable by our own. I might also never understand the meaning of my own life, but there is beauty in the effort.