Rick Kriseman—the mayor of St. Petersburg, Florida, who, a year ago, signed a proclamation declaring St. Petersburg a pet-friendly city—recounts growing up loving animals, dogs in particular. Mayor Kriseman describes how he and his family got started as puppy...
Dr. David M. Pena-Guzman—a philosopher and assistant professor at San Francisco State University, who wrote a scholarly paper for the journal Animal Sentience, entitled “Can Nonhuman Animals Commit Suicide?”—recounts how he had no pets during his formative years,...
Dr. Frans de Waal—the primatologist, ethologist, and prolific author, most recently of “Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves”—cites some stories from the new book, in response to a question about a hypothetical person who’s heard...
It’s all too rare for “Talking Animals” guests to join me in studio--I typically interview them by phone or, occasionally, via Skype. So it was an uncommon treat to stand across from Nancy Murrah—the CEO of The Raptor Center of Tampa Bay—while we chatted on-air,...
This unusual edition of “Talking Animals” featured the first portion of an interview with Dr. Temple Grandin I conducted Feb. 1 in front of 1200 people at the Paramount Theatre in Austin, TX. Grandin is the professor of animal science at Colorado State University,...
Chris Poole—a Tampa resident best known, as he describes it, being owned by feline phenoms Cole and Marmalade—remembers growing up in Nottingham, England and his family having an array of pets, including his first black cat, Sarah. Poole recalls landing an...
Dr. Toni Frohoff—a wildlife behavioral biologist who has researched the lives and behaviors of elephants and cetaceans for more than 30 years—recalls how, as an aspiring surfer growing up in Southern California, encountering dolphins in the ocean there, spurred her...
Dave Du Toit—founder and co-director of the Vervet Monkey Foundation, a 57-acre sanctuary in South Africa dedicated to the rescue and rehabilitation of not just Vervet Monkeys, but other primates who’ve been orphaned, injured, abused, were used in lab testing, or...
Margaret Winslow—professor emerita of earth sciences at the City College of New York and author, most recently, of “Smart Ass: How a Donkey Challenged Me to Accept His True Nature and Rediscover My Own”—recounts her experiences with animals growing up, where the...
Dr. Nick Pyenson—the curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, and the author of “Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures”—traces his interest in fossils to his...
