Animals & Insects

Animal stage trainer Bill Berloni has 30 years' worth of experience training dogs, pigs, rats, cats and lambs for Broadway productions and Hollywood films.

Where will you find more violence than in an NC-17 movie? More sex than on VH1's reality shows? In the downright wild world of the dung-beetle. Biologist Douglas Emlen explains.

Robert Sullivan's Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants chronicles the year he spent studying alley rats in New York City. He says you'd be surprised at what picky eaters they can be.

Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield are the directors behind the hit nature-documentary series Planet Earth. Their new movie, Earth, uses some of the same footage — but it's "character-based" rather than "habitat based."

Alex the African gray parrot could do more than speak and understand he could also count, identify colors and develop an emotional relationship. When Alex died in September 2007, his last words to scientist Irene Pepperberg were "You be good. I love you."

In her new book, Animals Make Us Human, Temple Grandin examines common notions of animal happiness and concludes that dogs, cats, horses, cows and zoo animals — among other creatures — possess an emotional system akin to that of humans.

During their 30 years together, psychology professor Irene Pepperberg and Alex, her African gray parrot, said "I love you" to each other nearly every day. Pepperberg writes about the extraordinary abilities of her pet in the memoir Alex & Me.

Husband and wife team Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth spent a year in Botswana studying the behavior, vocalizations and social organization of baboons for their book Baboon Metaphysics.

Although his brain was no bigger than a walnut, Alex the African gray parrot could do more than speak and understand — he could also count, identify colors and, according to his owner Irene Pepperberg, develop an emotional relationship.

Dorothy's Toto and Elle's Bruiser have a friend in common: animal trainer Bill Berloni. Berloni has been training stage animals for over 30 years. His new book is Broadway Tails: Heartfelt Stories of Rescued Dogs Who Became Showbiz Superstars.