Sy says: “I never thought I’d attain the literary distinction of being featured in France’s top magazine for chicken lovers, Poulettes! Though I majored in French in college, I cheated: my answers were translated from the English.”
New Hampshire magazine talks to Sy about hens and other critters:
Sy: This is a book about how to enjoy the company of chickens and really appreciate them for who they are, not just what they can give us in terms of eggs or meat.
New Hampshire magazine: It does seem like people automatically say: What can the chicken give me?
Sy: I think sometimes society makes us look at our relationships with others in a transactional way. I’ve written 38 books about animals, and one of the questions I often get is: What is this animal good for? And I’m always flabbergasted by that question. They are for the same thing we are for: loving this life, enjoying this life, hopefully adding some beauty and drama to this life. But animals exist for their own sake, not for our sake, but because we’re all part of the natural world, we do all need each other.
Read the rest of the short interview here.
What the Chicken Knows is #5 on the Portland Press Herald’s bestseller list for the week ending January 5 and #6 for the Boston Globe’s list for the same week.
Do insects, crabs, and lobsters feel pain? Indeed, they do. This excellent story by Shayla Love in the January 5 issue of The New Yorker quotes Sy in the second paragraph. She is proud to be in good company. Here’s the opening two paragraphs of “Do Insects Feel Pain?”
One of the stranger effects of Brexit was that, after the United Kingdom left the European Union, in 2020, it no longer recognized animals as “sentient beings.” When the U.K. was an E.U. member state, it was bound by European laws, including the Lisbon Treaty, which invoked sentience in order to shield animals from sensations such as pain, hunger, and fear. But, after Brexit, the U.K. was no longer subject to the treaty. Numerous advocacy groups demanded a replacement animal-sentience law. Twenty-nine leading veterinarians, who treated cattle, birds, fish, dogs, and other animals, sent a letter to the Daily Telegraph. “Scientific evidence demonstrates the ability of animals across a range of species to have feelings,” they wrote. “We have fought for legislation that places a duty on the state to recognise this.”
In 2021, the U.K. government introduced a bill that covered only vertebrates—animals with backbones. More protests followed. Ninety-seven per cent of animals—think clams, crabs, cicadas—are invertebrates. An octopus does not have a backbone, but in the Netflix documentary “My Octopus Teacher,” from 2020, we see one that appears curious, uses shells as body armor, and seems to bond and play with a person. In the naturalist Sy Montgomery’s nonfiction book “The Soul of an Octopus,” she visits an octopus and observes that the animal “had not only remembered us and recognized us; she had wanted to touch us again.” And whatever happened to considering the lobster?
Turtles are coming to Taiwan. In March, Of Time and Turtles will be published in Taiwan .