What Animal Caregiving Reveals About Us

KQED's Forum

KQED

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 4 May 2026

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A blue whale mother that fasts for months while her calf puts on close to 250 pounds a day. A male hamster who acts as a midwife while his partner gives birth. Healthy bird parents that lurch along the ground, feigning injury to keep predators away from their nest. These are some of the remarkable examples of animal caregiving that science journalist Elizabeth Preston says can hold up “uncanny mirrors to the human experience and the puzzle of why and how we’ve evolved to pour our resources into our children.” We talk to Preston about her new book, “The Creatures’ Guide to Caring.” What have you noticed about the animal caregivers around you? Guests: Elizabeth Preston, science journalist; author, "The Creatures' Guide to Caring: How Animal Parents Teach Us That Humans Were Born to Care" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:14.7	Support for KQED podcasts comes from Stanford's Master of Liberal Arts, inviting students on a journey of ideas, culminating in a Stanford graduate degree,
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0:31.2	From KQED.
0:34.4	Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.
0:36.5	When science journalist Elizabeth Preston had a child of her own,
0:40.4	some of the more familiar, even mundane animal caregiving behaviors, or robin stuffing food into a baby
0:45.7	bird's beak, a bat with a baby clinging to her fur, became relatable and remarkable. When we look at how
0:52.2	different creatures take care of their young, the wall
0:55.2	between humans and the rest of the animals reveals itself to be flimsy at best, Preston
1:00.4	writes in her new book, The Creatures Guide to Caring, How Animal Parents Teach Us, that
1:05.9	humans were born to care. Listeners, what remarkable animal caregiving examples have you seen or heard about?
1:13.0	Preston contributes to the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic, and other
1:16.7	publications, and joins me now.
1:18.9	Welcome to Forum, Elizabeth.
1:21.0	Hi, thank you so much for having me.
1:22.6	Well, thank you so much for coming on.
1:24.0	So what was your experience of having a baby like that made you want to understand
1:28.7	more about animal, Carrie? Oh gosh, the experience of having a baby is so overwhelming because
1:34.7	it changes really your whole world. And what made me feel compelled to write this book was after
1:42.0	becoming a parent and becoming aware of the whole universe of parenting books
	...

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