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Susan McCarthy is co-author with Marjorie Ingall of Sorry, Sorry, Sorry: The Case for Good Apologies. Ingall & McCarthy write Sorrywatch.com, a website which analyzes apologies. McCarthy also writes about wildlife and animal behavior. She’s co-author of the international bestseller When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals, and author of Becoming a Tiger: How Baby Animals Learn to Live in the Wild. Not literally raised by wolves, McCarthy lives in San Francisco.

Category: Mimicry

  • Killdeer escape?

      I had been trusted with the task of feeding the killdeer  chicks at the wildlife center. I put trays of food in the shorebird pen. Elaborate trays of shorebird dainties: freshly-thawed tiny invertebrates, insects, duckweed. I was careful to make sure no killdeer got out. It didn't seem hard, since the appalling sight of…

  • Cool hammer. Too bad I’m not a nail.

    A 2008 New Yorker story by Margaret Talbot on Irene Pepperberg's work with parrots and language made brief mention of unsuccessful work with mynahs and language. This was to explain why Pepperberg didn't train her eloquent parrot Alex with classic behaviorist methods of operant conditioning. I recognized the reference. While reading about animal communication for…

  • A Bird for Each Shoulder

    Sometimes people get sentimental about the nobility of animals. But it depends on the animal. Perhaps you saw the story of Yosuke, a pet African Grey parrot in Japan. One day he got out. As parrots do, he flew around for a few days and a few miles before landing and seeking human help. (“Free!…