It’s a hard life for the adorable boy and girl cubs who co-star with their mom in Disney’s “Bears.” One falls asleep on a sandbar only to wake up surrounded by water at high tide and is later nearly ...

Take a class in animal behavior and you’ll probably receive a warning: Beware of anthropomorphism. Explaining animals in terms of human motivations, emotions, or mental characteristics invites ...

It is a universal tendency to assign or impute human emotional, cognitive, and behavioral qualities to nonhuman creatures and things. Owls are “wise.” Swollen rivers are “raging” and “angry.” ...

As someone who has studied and written about the cognitive and emotional lives of nonhuman animals (animals) for many decades, I've read various accounts about the good, the bad, and the ugly of ...

After remaining closed for nearly two years, Houghton Library premiered its exhibition “Animals Are Us” — which explores the use of animal anthropomorphism in literature — to the public this semester.

Listen to more stories on the Noa app. At the start of Elizabeth Hobson’s career as an ecologist, she knew to stick to one rule: Never anthropomorphize the animals you study. For plenty of people, ...

Autumn begins tomorrow. Suffused already with a seasonal nostalgia, I'm replaying scenes of summer in my head. Among them is sitting in a dark theatre, watching apes clamber across San Francisco's ...