Chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants — they’ve all demonstrated signs of recognizing individuals. Videos show that their recognition is not mechanical, not a chemical match with a stored memory bank. It is often accompanied by shows of emotion, which proves to me that the experience is felt.

Has the internet widened our understanding of the animal world?

I’d say so. Almost everyone nowadays has a video camera on them all the time, and animal behaviors get recorded that we haven’t seen before. The other day, someone sent me a video where someone was backing up their car and a puppy went behind it. Another dog came streaking out at high speed, snatching the puppy away.

Thanks to the ubiquity of these videos, we’re seeing evidence that the envelope of what animals can do is much bigger than we thought. That leads me to wonder: why, despite increasing evidence, do some people deny that animals have emotions or feel pain?

What’s your guess?

I think it’s because it’s easier to hurt them if you think of them as dumb brutes. Not long ago, I was on a boat with some nice people who spear swordfish for a living. They sneak up to swordfish sleeping near the surface of the water and harpoon them, and then the fish just go crazy and kind of explode. When I asked, “Do the fish feel pain?,” the answer was, “They don’t feel anything.”

Now, it’s been proven experimentally that fish feel pain. I think they feel, at least panic. They clearly are not having a good time when they are hooked. But if you think of yourself as a good person, you don’t want to believe you’re causing suffering. It’s easier to believe that there’s no pain.

As a child, did you have pets?

I did. I spent my first 10 years in Brooklyn, where I had the kind of pets you’d buy in a store — a parakeet, little turtles.

From the time I was 7, I had homing pigeons. I learned about life, with a capital “L,” from them. The pigeons figured out who they were going to mate with. They’d be out flying around during the day and they’d come home, feed their babies and go to sleep. Watching them go about their lives, you saw them do a lot of the things that humans do. It was there right in front of your eyes.