Barbara J. King
is a contributor to the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos & Culture. She is a Chancellor Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary. With a long-standing research interest in primate behavior and human evolution, King has studied baboon foraging in Kenya and gorilla and bonobo communication at captive facilities in the United States.
Recently, she has taken up writing about animal emotion and cognition more broadly, including in bison, farm animals, elephants and domestic pets, as well as primates.
King's most recent book is How Animals Grieve (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Her article "When Animals Mourn" in the July 2013 Scientific American has been chosen for inclusion in the 2014 anthology The Best American Science and Nature Writing. King reviews non-fiction for the Times Literary Supplement(London) and is at work on a new book about the choices we make in eating other animals. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work in 2002.
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Food writer Mark Bittman is advocating what he calls part-time veganism, selling it as good for you, good for animals and good for the Earth. Commentator, and admitted pescatarian, Barbara King cottons to his cause and wishes everyone a bountiful autumn. -
If you had a traumatic memory lodged in your brain, would you zap it away if you could? In the wake of last week's news that false memories were implanted in laboratory mice, commentator Barbara J. King considers the potential effects of intervening with memory formation in our own brains. -
Do dogs live entirely in the present, acting on instinct rather than thinking? Commentator Barbara J. King challenges a skeptic who insists that it's folly to claim that dogs think, and interviews a dog expert who offers a balanced view of the matter. -
New research reveals that about 1/3 of children with food allergies are bullied specifically because of those allergies. Commentator Barbara J. King checks in with a pediatric allergist on this topic, as well as a mother and daughter who, together, have coped with food bullying.
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Ivan spent decades confined within a small department store display, until activists won the gorilla's transfer to a zoo. Anthropologist and ape observer Barbara J. King remembers Ivan and considers the intense impact — positive and negative — that human actions have on individual animals' lives. -
When our pets pass on, should their obituaries appear in the newspaper? Or is it an offensive practice to memorialize feline Fluffy right next to Grandpa Fred? Commentator Barbara J. King considers these questions, and recalls writing an obit for an ape.
