Several chapters into Aesop’s Animals: The Science Behind the Fables, zoologist and science writer Jo Wimpenny explains that, as a very young girl, she sometimes wanted to be a dog.

When you’re talking about an animal like Happy, an autonomous elephant, ... Steven Wise, our co-author, and the groundbreaking cases brought by the NhRP resonated with us.

The NhRP knows of a handful of other solitary elephants in the U.S., but Wise says they chose Happy partly because in 2005 she became the first elephant to pass the mirror test for animal ...

For this reason, the elephant is constantly shaking its head around. The lion finds it hard to believe that such a large animal should be afraid of such a small one, and thereby realises its own ...