Orangutans

What can the world's most extraordinary animals teach us about the natural world? And what do we stand to lose if they disappear? Today's episode is from our recent live event with bestselling author Catherine Rundle, whose writing celebrates the wonders of the animal kingdom and the urgent need to protect its most vulnerable inhabitants.

Following the success of The Golden Mole, Rundle joined us at Conway Hall to discuss her new book, Napoleon's Orangutan, which introduces 12 remarkable creatures and explores the surprising stories behind them.

From Napoleon's pet orangutan to pigs that can distinguish between bark and a brass band, Rundle reveals the intelligence, strangeness and beauty of the animals we share our planet with and why their survival matters.

Let's join our host Shahid Abari now with more.

And Catherine's one of those writers, as I imagine lots of you know, having read her work.

She has a particular gift for introducing us to creatures that sound as though they've wandered out of a fairy tale or a myth, only for us to learn that they are really quite real and that the world would be immeasurably poorer without them, actually.

In her book, The Golden Mole, The Modern Bestiary, she gave us a kind of literary menagerie.

Pangolins, wombats, lemurs, seahorses and other extraordinary animals, each with their own peculiar, particular beauty and often an improbable story.

And I wanted to mention, too, you've actually written several books about your experiences and your conservation work and stuff like that, including one.

It's titled Orangutans, My Cousins, My Friends, and Finding Our Humanity.

And in them, you've explored our relationship with other animals.

We've talked a little bit about this.

Gran Turismo.

I think Clive the Orangutan gives as good a performance.

Clive is amazing.

What my point is, is, yeah, I can kind of...

No,

no,

no. Orangutan.

Orangutan.

You realized that might not be a good thing.

And then an orangutan sanctuary?

Orangutan sanctuary.

Oh, the dream's still out there.

Oh, 100%.

We can learn from them, Tony.

Now, you've answered this question to me before in private, but I love this question to wrap us up.

Of everything this fire took from you and your community, Tony Hocking, Mr. Orangutan lover, Mr.

Okay.

And Orangutan.

Okay.

That's pretty rad.

Orangutan mothers arrange play dates for their infants in order to invest in their social development.

You're turning the patient into a collaborator for training the neural network, for training the machine learning model.

This is so good.

As always, we're going to talk about the science from the ground up today because this is From First Principles.

The headline here is irresistible.

Orangutan mothers arrange play dates... for their infants in order to invest in their social development.

I mean, as soon as I saw this, I was like, we got to cover it.

Okay.