Animals & Insects

Temple Grandin is one of the nation's top designers of livestock facilities. She is also autistic. Grandin's new book is Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior.

Albrecht is a former police officer who used to work with search and rescue dogs. She now searches for lost pets using her specially trained bloodhounds, and a Weimaraner. Along the way she is developing data about how lost animals behave, and how to best find them. Her new book is The Lost Pet Chronicles: Adventures of a K-9 Cop Turned Pet Detective. Albrecht also founded, and is executive director of, the non-profit National Center for Missing Pets in San Jose, Calif.

Sullivan is the author of the critically acclaimed books, The Meadowlands and A Whale Hunt. His new book is Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants. One reviewer writes, "in prose worthy of Joseph Mitchell, a... skittering, scurrying, terrific natural history." Sullivan is a contributing editor to Vogue and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker.

Jon Katz is the author of the book, The New Work of Dogs: Tending to Life, Love, and Family It's about how attached many of us have become to our dogs, treating them more like family members and human surrogates than pets.

His new book is Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind. He’s also the author of The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions, which received the John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing. Quamman is the author of five nonfiction books, and four books of fiction. He’s been honored with the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has written for National Geographic, Outside and Harper’s.

Stephan Bognar is a field agent for the San Francisco-based international non-profit wildlife conservation group, WildAid. Bognar just returned from two months in Baghdad, where he helped with the effort to rescue and rehabilitate the animals at the Baghdad Zoo. When he arrived, only 32 of the 600 animals remained, the rest were stolen or roaming the streets. The ones left at the zoo were suffering from neglect, malnutrition and dehydration. Bognar helped in the efforts to care for the animals, and to find the lost ones.

Author Kevin Conley. His new book is about breeding racehorses. Its called STUD: Adventures in Breeding.(Bloomsbury) STUD explores the process of creating champions, from the farms of Kentucky, where stud fees command a half million a pop, to the horse auctions, where the worlds richest people compete for the top yearlings.

Forensic entomologist M. Lee Goff is the author of the new book “A Fly for the Prosecution: How Insect Evidence Helps Solve Crimes” (Harvard University Press). Goff examines the insect life that inhabits a decomposing corpse, to understand when a person died and other circumstances of death. (THIS INTERVIEW CONTINUES THRU THE END OF THE SHOW).

Legal expert on animal protection law, Steven Wise. He teaches "Animal Rights Law" at Harvard Law School and other colleges, and Is former president of the Animal Legal Defense Fund. In his new book "Rattling the Cage: Towards Legal Rights for Animals" (Perseus Books) he uses scientific research about the Intelligence and emotional capacity of animals to argue for their basic legal rights.

Co-founder of the Siberian Tiger Project Maurice Hornocker and an authority on the great cats. His photographs of Tigers are featured In "Tigers In the Snow" (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux) by Peter Matthiessen about the tigers of Siberia. The Siberian Tiger Project was founded to study and protect these tigers who are threatened with extinction because of poaching and loss of habitat. Hornocker Is also director of the Hornocker Wildlife Institute at the University of Idaho.