JAD ABUMRAD: Hey. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Our topic today is ...

ROBERT: Who are you, is what we're asking.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: We're asking it in as fundamental a way as we can: who are you?

JAD: You may call it knowing the other.

ROBERT: Pretty good! Very nice!

JAD: I know, but it sounded so anthropological or something.

ROBERT: It could be a scholar journal thing. All right, let's make it less anthropological because we're gonna throw away the 'anthro' part.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: So instead of asking it of another person, which we did in the previous section ...

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: Let's ask it—just to make things more interesting, let's ask it of an individual from another species.

JAD: Yes. That's where this whole knowing another being's mind question gets way trickier, especially with primates.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: This next story comes from a reporter, Ben Calhoun.

BEN CALHOUN: Hello?

JAD: And grew out of a conversation that he had with a—well, just listen.

JERRY STONES: Okay. You can start any time you want.

BEN CALHOUN: All right. Thank you very much, sir.

JERRY STONES: You ready to go, are you?

BEN CALHOUN: Yeah, absolutely. Jerry, you ready?

JERRY STONES: Yes, sir. Whenever you are.

BEN CALHOUN: Let's just start with having you introduce yourself.

JERRY STONES: Well, I'm Jerry Stones. I'm the facilities director at the Gladys Porter Zoo.

BEN CALHOUN: That's where Jerry is now. But he told me this story. He was working at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Nebraska, and he was working with this orangutan named Fu Manchu.

JERRY STONES: I call him Fu. Everybody that loved that old boy referred to him as Fu or Phooey.

ROBERT: Wait, let me just set the scene. So we're in the Nebraska zoo. Where in Nebraska is this?

BEN CALHOUN: In Omaha.

ROBERT: Oh, in Omaha. Okay.

BEN CALHOUN: So in the Omaha Zoo. It's fall.

JERRY STONES: 1967, late '66 or '67.

BEN CALHOUN: Kind of cold. The leaves have fallen off the trees. Jerry Stones is just going about his daily business.

ROBERT: What is his daily business?

BEN CALHOUN: Being in charge of the zookeepers. So he's kind of the top dog among the crew of zookeepers there. And he's up at the office.

JERRY STONES: And all of a sudden, here come a couple of the keepers running up over this hill. They say, "Jerry. Jerry, Jerry. The orangutans are in the trees by the elephant building." The line went dead for a minute because I couldn't figure out what the blazes they were talking about. And I said, "What?" And they said, "The 'rangs are in the trees by the elephant building."

ROBERT: So the orangutans are no longer in their assigned area?

BEN CALHOUN: Yes.

JERRY STONES: So I took off with them and we ran down there. And sure enough, there was this grove of elm trees on this hill overlooking the elephant building, and there up in the top of these trees were all the orangutans.

ROBERT: Oh, God.

BEN CALHOUN: Yeah.

JERRY STONES: And there was Fu Manchu and his female Tondelayo, and an old female named Sophia, a big heavy set girl, and Toba, a young female, and Dennis, a young male. And they were all up in the trees.

BEN CALHOUN: Five of them.

JERRY STONES: Five of them up there, you know? Looked like these huge red clumps of grapes.

ROBERT: [laughs]

BEN CALHOUN: At this point, Jerry's a young guy, so he went Tarzan on them.

JERRY STONES: Back in those days, I didn't think anything about going to the top of a tree and grabbing an 'orang by the hand and leading them back out of the trees, even though a couple of them had already bit me.

BEN CALHOUN: So he gets them all back in the exhibit, and they didn't know how the orangutans had gotten out.

JERRY STONES: No. I'm questioning everybody and not listening. I have a tendency to do that, you know? Anyway, I can get them down to the building. We put them away in the cage, and we go out to see what was going on. And in the exhibit itself, there's moats on each side of this exhibit.

BEN CALHOUN: You know, like a zoo moat? You've got the exhibit and then you've got where people look from. And in between there's a moat.

ROBERT: Right.

BEN CALHOUN: Well, down at the bottom of this moat, there was a door to a furnace room.

JERRY STONES: Big metal door that had just a regular lock and everything on it.

BEN CALHOUN: It was always shut.

JERRY STONES: Kept locked all the time.

BEN CALHOUN: That door was open.

JERRY STONES: What had happened is the 'orangs had climbed down in the moat, went into the furnace room, which was in the basement, up a ladder to the janitor's closet on the first floor.

BEN CALHOUN: One, two, three, four, five. They all emerge from this janitor's closet.

JERRY STONES: And then just pushed the big glass doors open and went out into the park. I figured somebody had not locked the door shut.

ROBERT: Oh, right. Okay.

BEN CALHOUN: So Jerry Stones gathers his zookeepers around and he says ...

JERRY STONES: Basically, we needed to be more careful. Somebody evidently went out in that moat to do something, and when they came back in they did not lock the door. A mistake, and it should not happen again. And everybody vowed that this would not happen again. And it didn't. It didn't happen again for about a week.

BEN CALHOUN: Few days go by.

JERRY STONES: I can't remember where I was at.

BEN CALHOUN: And again.

JERRY STONES: "The orangutans, they're in the trees by elephant building. And Jerry, we—we—the door was locked, Jerry. We didn't do it. We didn't do it," you know, on and on and on.

BEN CALHOUN: So they take them all back into the building.

JERRY STONES: Same thing. I get there, go down to the moat.

BEN CALHOUN: That furnace room door is open again.

JERRY STONES: I was convinced that these people were not smart enough to tie their shoes, you know? And—and—and they said, "But Jerry, we don't go down there." Well, somebody screwed up. So I'm discussing with these keepers what's gonna happen to them in their short lives. Now I swore to God, I said, "Dude, look, next time this happens, somebody's being fired." A few days later ...

BEN CALHOUN: Somebody runs up to him.

JERRY STONES: "Jerry, come."

BEN CALHOUN: "You gotta come see this."

JERRY STONES: I go, "No, not now."

BEN CALHOUN: They ran out into the zoo, and they went to this hill that's near the exhibit, peeked over the top of it, commando style. Down at the bottom of the moat, Fu Manchu was messing with that furnace room door.

JAD: What was he doing?

BEN CALHOUN: They couldn't exactly see what he was doing because of how far away they were, but he was fiddling with the lock. And he's fiddling and he's fiddling. And then ...

JERRY STONES: All of a sudden the door opened.

BEN CALHOUN: ... bam!

JERRY STONES: It just popped open and we went bowling down the hill and we caught him before he could do any damage.

ROBERT: You mean the orangutan seemed to be opening the door?

BEN CALHOUN: Yes.

JERRY STONES: You know, I had realized now it wasn't their fault. And, you know, I ate the crow that I had to eat. And we still didn't know exactly how he did it. And we went out there and we looked around and there was a few little sticks and stuff laying around. We thought, "Well, he must be using this stuff to pry the door open or do something," you know?

BEN CALHOUN: So Jerry figured, easy solution: clean the exhibit every day.

JERRY STONES: I said, "Look, from now on, we need to go out in this yard every day before we put the 'rangs out and search that place over and again. You know, make sure there's no sticks or anything out there, because I don't know how he did it, but he did it." You know, we knew what the problem was and we knew how to deal with it. Went along like that for a week or two, and then here come the keepers. "Jerry, the orangutans are in—in the trees by the elephant building. And we checked it, Jerry. We did everything we were supposed to." You know, they're—they're bound and determined they didn't do anything wrong. So we went out.

BEN CALHOUN: So—so they had been searching this exhibit every day to make sure that he didn't have anything.

JERRY STONES: Yes. There was no—we walked that exhibit. We cleaned them all. We did everything. There was no sticks, no anything we could find that he used to pry the darn door open.

BEN CALHOUN: No tools?

JERRY STONES: No tools, no nothing.

ROBERT: Wait, aren't we now like, how can this be? How can this be?

BEN CALHOUN: How can this be? So he's ushering Fu Manchu through the building. They've got all the orangutans, they're moving them. And all of a sudden he sees in the corner of Fu Manchu's mouth.

JERRY STONES: I saw this little blink of light.

BEN CALHOUN: Just a little glimmer of light.

ROBERT: Like a silver filling or something?

BEN CALHOUN: Yeah.

JERRY STONES: A little shiny thing at the corner of his mouth.

BEN CALHOUN: He walks over, pulls down Fu Manchu's lip. And in there ...

JERRY STONES: Lo and behold, there was a piece of wire about four inches long that he had bent into a horseshoe to fit inside his lower lip and around his gum.

BEN CALHOUN: And he's had it there for so long ...

JERRY STONES: That it was just polished, shiny.

ROBERT: Suggesting what? That this animal has been secreting his actual key all this time?

BEN CALHOUN: Yeah.

JERRY STONES: All this stuff that we're picking up and hauling away to keep him from opening the door was of no use because he was carrying his own key with him all the time.

BEN CALHOUN: What he had done was stick the wire into the space between the door jam and the door, wrap it around the latch and pull it back. It's like the credit card trick, you know?

ROBERT: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

JERRY STONES: Nobody taught him this. Nobody ever did anything like that around him. Not only did he make the tool, but he put it in a place where I couldn't find it. He was smart enough to know that if I found it, I'd take it away from him. The Locksmith Union of the United States gave him an honorary membership, and the zoo in Omaha had that hanging on their wall for years. I don't know if they still have it or not.

ROBERT: Well, this has been very interesting. It is a really great story.

BEN CALHOUN: Oh, thanks. [laughs]

ROBERT: Very nice. But—but I don't quite understand, like what—what exactly was—why are you telling it to me? What is the reason for this?

BEN CALHOUN: Well, you know, there's a lot of stories of orangutans using tools right?

ROBERT: Yeah.

BEN CALHOUN: But even though this is a funny story, there's actually a really serious question at the heart of it about deception.

ROBERT: Why? What's so important about it?

BEN CALHOUN: Well, deception is special. It requires that the deceiver get into the mind of the person who they're deceiving. And nobody has been able to prove that animals can actually do this, know a human being's thoughts intimately enough, get inside their heads and, you know, consciously deceive them. So I took the Fu Manchu story to a scientist, a primatologist named Rob Shumaker.

ROB SHUMAKER: Hello, Rob Shumaker.

BEN CALHOUN: Hey, Rob. It's Ben. Am I catching you at a good time?

BEN CALHOUN: He's at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa.

ROB SHUMAKER: And I study the behavior and cognition of orangutans.

BEN CALHOUN: And he says the Fu Manchu story doesn't prove that animals are capable of doing this.

ROB SHUMAKER: Well, in—in this particular case, I can't prove it one way or another. There's always a question of whether or not it was really happening.

BEN CALHOUN: But, when I really pushed him ...

BEN CALHOUN: I'm just wondering, like, personally, do you believe in his case that it was?

BEN CALHOUN: He said ...

ROB SHUMAKER: You know, if I had to just give an opinion about this ...

BEN CALHOUN: ... that deep down ...

ROB SHUMAKER: ... I have no doubt at all. I one hundred percent believe it was deception. Keeping a tool concealed over a whole number of days and timing his escapes so that no one was around to see him, I think the evidence is just absolutely compelling to suggest that Fu Manchu was able to deceive and was deceiving. And if someone really has that much trouble believing it, I think then maybe they ought to question, "Is it because I don't believe what I'm hearing, or I don't want to believe it because it's an orangutan?" If they don't want to believe it because it's an orangutan, that's no excuse.

JERRY STONES: It was like who taught him? I just—I couldn't figure out—I mean, when you think you're so smart that all the other animals are way below you, and all of a sudden you find this animal that does these sort of things and you know people that couldn't open the door with a key, right there, you—you know, you have to be in awe. I've been around a lot of other orangutans in my almost 45 years in this business, and the next time you go to a zoo and you're around one, you just look at their face and you look at their eyes, and you can see in there there's this—these wheels turning, trying to figure you out.

JAD: Thanks to reporter Ben Calhoun. Okay, to keep things moving, you could say that the last story we heard, you know, that—that was sort of a formal relationship because you had an orangutan and a zookeeper, and they were separated by bars.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: But how about this? For this next segment, let's remove the bars, collapse the space, and make it more of a family thing.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: More intimate.

ROBERT: So this time, the human will be our producer, Lulu Miller. And this is a tale which leaves Lulu wondering—something happened to her dog, and the question for her is: can she ever know what happened in her dog's mind? And more important in this case, does she want to know?

LULU MILLER: On most of his birthdays, Maureen would give Charlie a sweater. Maureen was my dad's coworker, Charlie was my dog. He was a little white terrier, a very active little guy, always snuffling around at something, barking, growling if you took his spot on the couch. But when we'd zip him into that year's sweater, he'd go completely still. Every time. Almost like it was an instinct. He'd get that same stillness when my sisters and I would sit in a circle around him, coloring on his white fur with magic markers. I used to think he was still like that because he was happy, content to be our little dog. But now I don't know.

LULU: Wildness glimmered up in him, though, from time to time. We'd be sitting in the living room, Charlie and I, all quiet, late afternoon. I'd be reading a calculus book—or staring at it, kind of. He'd be gazing out the window, fixed, when suddenly without warning he'd tear off to the front hallway barking and literally slamming his body against the door, not even bothering to scratch. And this urgency was so refreshing, so reassuring, that I'd let him out. And into the street he'd fly into our neighbor's yard, chasing after a squirrel. He'd make it to the base of a far-off tree in five seconds flat, though he never caught a squirrel or a chipmunk or anything. Not once. In those moments, though, you could see the wolf inside him springing to life, this ghost of what he once was. It's just that he was generations out of practice.

LULU: And this wildness would get misdirected at non-wild things, too. He'd chase after vacuum cleaners, growl at bongo drums and suspiciously eye the dishwasher. He was part of our family, though, and if I make him sound growly and awful, he wasn't. He was quiet, mostly. Stoic. A good listener. My dad's only friend through long stretches. My dad's a guy prone to the nostalgic and swoops of sadness, and I'd stumble in on him on early mornings in tender conversation with Charlie, testing ideas out on him. "What do you think, big guy?" he'd say. "What do you think?" I imagined he was very lonely—Charlie, that is. Lost in a purgatory where he didn't belong.

LULU: Okay, congratulations. You've made it this far in someone else's pet story. I promise things are about to change, because it's shortly after his 13th birthday—Maureen, I think, got him a little blue jean jacket with a sheepskin inside, and Levi buttons—that Charlie got eaten by a pack of wild coyotes. Let me back up just a step or two. This all happened on Cape Cod, the easternmost tail of Massachusetts, where you can find beachgoers in the summer, Kennedys, I think, if you know where to look, and very few predators—a couple hawks, the occasional fox. But other than that, as the local fauna goes, it's pretty much Snow White land: chipmunks, bunnies, skunks.

LULU: Until the coyotes came. I was about 15 when we first started hearing about them, and for us East Coasters, it made no sense. Coyotes were symbols of the West, somewhere far, far away from Massachusetts, somewhere where the land was orange and wide and open. At that point, the only coyotes I'd ever seen were the ones on ladies vests in the stores my mom liked. So I looked into it, and it turns out that for a long time it was that way. Coyotes, like big states and cheerful personalities, was a strictly Western thing. But in the 1920s, people started spotting coyotes in New York, and by the late '50s they'd made it up to Massachusetts—only they couldn't quite get out to Cape Cod. See, Cape Cod is literally cut off from the rest of Massachusetts by a canal that's almost two football fields wide.

LULU: So for decades, the coyotes were kept on the mainland. Until one night, sometime in the late '70s according to naturalists, a pack of coyotes decided to do what the rest of us do: they gathered up their kids together for a road trip and crossed the bridge. Or possibly, some speculate, swam across the canal. But I think it's a far better image to picture them as silhouettes walking in single file across the bridge with a big white moon behind them. [howls]

LULU: So suddenly, they were there. And they started multiplying. More and more sightings of them in backyards and on runners' routes. The local press started running articles, "Keep Your Pets in After Dark." A cave was found, local lore has it, with hundreds of collars. In 1998, a three-year-old boy was bitten, and then my sister found a goose completely slaughtered down on a dock by the pond. It was surrounded by a splatter painting of feces strewn so wide she deemed it the [bleep] of terror.

LULU: Now it turns out my family came to Cape Cod right around the same time as the coyotes. In the late '70s, my parents bought a cabin in the woods that overlooked a purple marsh. The cabin had a deck, and that's where we spent most of our time. We'd sit out there late into the night watching birds and stars. And that's where Charlie was the happiest, on the deck. He'd pace around occasionally, nails scraping the wood, but mostly he just flopped down with a sigh, a literal human sigh, and gaze out along with us.

LULU: We never needed a fence because he simply never left. When the coyotes first showed up, I used to like hearing them. You'd hear it as you lay awake in bed, the howl sometimes far off, sometimes right up close. It felt thrilling to know that things were happening, life cycles and grisly nature predators prey right outside the walls. It used to make me feel like part of the Earth.

LULU: So here's how it happened from my perspective. It's late August. Sun is setting. We pull into the driveway, but we don't see Charlie on the deck. Immediately I knew something was wrong. My dad said, "No way, everything's fine." But then we heard a whimper off in the woods. My mom and sisters and I jumped into action. We called for him, shone flashlights, "Charlie!"

But the woods had gone quiet.

LULU: And I remember this part very clearly. We were all standing out on the deck, craning our necks, listening for something. And just as my dad was forming the words, "Look, there's nothing to worry about. He'll turn up in the morning," we heard the yelp. So Charlie, that same noise he'd make when you stepped on his tail, followed immediately by the howls. I ran into a closet to hide from the sound.

LULU: The next morning, there was nothing. Not a shred, not a collar, not a bone, not a piece of hair. They say one way the coyotes do it, especially with other dogs, is that a lone coyote comes up to the dog and starts playing with it. Eventually they go off together, and after just a few paces, the pack descends. Or a slight variation: a coyote pretends to be hurt. It whimpers and cries and calls out for help. I can only imagine Charlie in that moment. There he is, standing face to face with his past self. At long last, one of his own has come over to him. I imagine his head looked up a bit, his chest swelled, his ears perked up and he stepped off the deck.

LULU: It's right around then that we would have come home. He would have heard us roll into the driveway, seen our flashlights, heard our calls, and for once ignored us. He was off to help his brother. I wonder how fast it happened. I wonder if he even knew. I imagine he did. I imagine he saw the eyes suddenly, all at once, realizing he was surrounded and thought, "I've been had. Well played, my brothers. Well played." And I like to imagine a nod of respect on their part before they descended.

LULU: The morning after it happened, we were empty. My dad couldn't look up. He kept rearranging chairs around the kitchen table as if some new arrangement would obscure the empty spot on the floor. And for so long, that's how we experienced it. It was about us, the family member we lacked. And then one day, years later, it dawned on my sister that for all the sadness we felt, that last moment for Charlie was probably glory. For that one moment, he was wild. He went out like a wild dog. We were all standing out on the deck when she said it. My mom smiled and said, "Yeah, that's a nice thought." But then she turned to us, "You know, who's to say they got him? Who's to say he didn't off and join the pack?"

JAD: Producer Lulu Miller.

ROBERT: And we'll be right back.

JAD: Wait, before we do, before we—before we jet ...

ROBERT: Yeah?

JAD: Be sure to check out Radiolab.org. You can sign up for our podcast there, and read all kinds of stuff, as well as see a ridiculously cute picture of Charlie, little Charlie the white dog. He's on our website. Radiolab.org.

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[JERRY STONES: Jerry Stones with the Gladys Porter Zoo. Support for NPR comes from the William T. Grant Found—Foundation. Damn! The William T. Grant Foundation, supporting research to improve the lives of young people. Online at WTGrantFoundation.org. And ...]

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