Let’s start by meeting Ken Allen. He was incredibly adept at his job, and led a peaceful life. Liked and respected by his local community, he achieved fame as an escape artist, demonstrating forward thinking skills and dexterity. Even as an adolescent, Ken displayed the aptitude with mechanical skills that would serve him well as an adult. Admired by his fans, he passed away in 2000 at the young age of 29.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, Ken Allen was not a person, he was a Bornean orangutan. Dubbed the ‘Hairy Houdini’ by the local media, Ken escaped captivity from San Diego zoo nine times from 1985 till the late 1990s. After climbing what were thought to be escape-proof walls, he would wander around the zoo like a tourist.

He was never aggressive or violent towards any human or animal. Well, just once, when he threw rocks at another orangutan Otis, the latter known to be obnoxious and unpleasant to other animals and humans. Zookeepers were constantly amazed at Ken Allen’s ingenuity. He could unscrew bolts, remember the location of pathways to follow, and even enlisted the support of other orangutans.

The zoo authorities provided Ken with three females, hoping to divert Ken’s energies from wanderlust to just plain sexual lust. They were wrong. One of his female companions found a crowbar left behind by a zoo worker; she opened a window and Ken climbed through it in yet another escape.

Zoo keepers went ‘undercover’, posing as tourists in the hopes of finding out how exactly Ken was escaping. The other orangutans, and Ken, spotted the zoo agents. Lulling them into a false sense of security, Ken would stage elaborate wall climbing ‘escape attempts’, thus fooling the zoo agents to relax their guard. Ken, increasingly aided and abetted by orangutan accomplices, would carry out the real escape days later.

Sadly, Ken was diagnosed with a type of cancer – lymphoma – and euthanised in 2000. His exploits as an escape artist provide us with an interesting insight into animal cognition. Can our primate cousins understand the world the way we do? Certainly Ken demonstrated a level of planning, tool use and perception sophisticated enough to outsmart the San Diego zoo authorities.

Jane Goodall (1934 – 2025), the English primatologist, passed away in October this year. Multiple commentaries have elaborated her astonishing career and accomplishments as a scientist, a woman in a male-dominated field. Let’s highlight a few of the ways she made us rethink our relationship with primates.

Rather than mindless, brutish simpletons, our primate cousins display in basic form the emotional and social complexities that humans navigate every day. For instance, chimpanzees and gorillas have used tools, experience emotional states, and form webs of interrelationships. Goodall made us consider the emotional and social lives of primates, even in their embryonic form. We can see them demonstrate what we regard as intelligence.

Animal cognition is not the exclusive preserve of primates; there is a growing and extensive body of literature documenting and exploring the realm of cephalopod intelligence. Cephalopods are a class of marine animals which include squid, cuttlefish and octopus. The latter, a marine invertebrate, seems like an unusual candidate for the study of animal cognition. Yet, there are numerous documentary specials and biological studies examining the remarkable smarts of the octopus.

The octopus not only has eight tentacles, but nine brains. These brains, rather than located in one spot, operate as a distributed network of information gathering and processing centres. Octopuses are known to have used coconut shells as protection from predators, even using corals as a defensive shield. In captivity, they have been observed opening jar lids to extract food, even escaping through gaps in the water pipes, swimming hundreds of metres to an open ocean.

The octopus, unlike other molluscs, lost its protective shell millions of years ago. Without it, the soft flesh of the octopus became vulnerable to predators. Compensating for this loss, the octopus had to rely on developing street smarts, so to speak, outmanoeuvring its hunters. The octopus did have defence mechanisms before it lost its shell, to be certain. But that crucial change provided an enormous boost to the development of cephalopod intelligence.

While being solitary creatures, octopuses display moods and emotional reactions – hiding under rocks being shy, but also curious and attempting interactions with observers or objects in their vicinity.

We cannot conclude our exploration into the world of animal cognition without paying our respects to C341 – the number assigned to Félicette, the first cat to survive a journey into space. Long forgotten in the rough and tumble Cold War competition for spaceflight supremacy, Félicette was a stray cat launched into space by the French authorities in 1963.

From the 1950s onwards, scientists wanted to study the effects of space travel and cosmic radiation on living organisms. Both the US and USSR had sent mammals on cosmic journeys; the most famous was that of Laika the dog in 1957.

Launched into space on Sputnik-2 by the Soviets, she became world famous for this mission. However, at that time, there was no technology for reentry to Earth. The Moscow space scientists knew that Laika’s first voyage would be her last. She died in space.

Félicette was one of 13 stray cats recruited into the French space medicine agency, the Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherches de Médecine Aéronautique (CERMA). Passing a rigorous training programme, Félicette was selected to be the first cat launched by France into space.

The mission was launched from the Sahara, French Algeria in October 1963. Félicette passed the Karman line, the technical boundary between the upper reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. Lasting 15 minutes, Félicette spent a longer time in space than Katy Perry and her glitzy friends.

Scientists back on Earth were monitoring the cat’s heart rate, breathing and other vitals through electrodes implanted in her body. The capsule carrying Félicette detached from the rocket, and parachuted safely back to Earth. She had made history for the French space programme.

A few months after she completed her mission, Félicette was euthanised so the scientists could examine her brain for any impact from cosmic radiation. What they learned from the autopsy is exactly nothing. She was gone, and forgotten – well, not quite.

In 2019, a bronze statue of the intrepid feline was unveiled at the International Space University near Strasbourg, France. It depicts sitting atop the Earth. She takes her place among the other animals sacrificed for space exploration.

Studying animal cognition and behaviour will hopefully lead to a better understanding of ourselves, our relationship with the natural world, an equip us with the skills to comprehend the subjective experience of our animal relatives.

This month, 80 years ago, the Nuremberg trials began. What were they and why are they important as a starting point for the current article? In brief, the trials were a series of international military tribunals formed for the express purpose of prosecuting the top Nazi German politicians, military commanders and economic leaders for the crimes they committed in pursuit of aggressive predatory warfare.

The victorious allies – the US, Britain, France and the USSR – agreed to form a tribunal, assembling irrefutable evidence of Nazi atrocities, such as the extermination of European Jews, exploiting forced labour in concentration camps, and systematic violence directed at civilian populations. Indictments were filed against the main Nazi defendants in October 1945, and trial itself commenced in November.

The network of concentration camps established by the Nazi hierarchy was extensively documented, and its inner workings were elaborated in full detail. The horrific nature of these camps constituted a powerful indictment of Nazi atrocities.

Let us now examine an irony of history.

In 1945, British soldiers, among others, helped to liberate the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp complex in northern Germany. Originally a prisoner of war camp, it was expanded during the war to accommodate civilian prisoners. The full horrors of the place, the use of forced labour, mass starvation of prisoners, the sadistic beatings of inmates by SS guards, were publicised to highlight the crimes of the Nazis.

Only a few years after that, the British military and colonial authorities in Kenya, established a nation-wide network of internment camps, where Kenyans were held without trial, subjected to inhumane torture, and used as forced labour.

The British military was waging an anticolonial counterinsurgency against the Kikuyu nation, and its military wing, the Mau Mau. The English took civilians as hostages, a practice that had been condemned as a crime against humanity at the Nuremberg trials.

In our own times, the genocidal violence inflicted by the Israeli military on the Palestinians, and the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, constitute grievous crimes against humanity. Millions were killed and displaced, and many more Iraqis and Palestinians are still suffering. The perpetrators of these crimes, the politicians whose decisions led to these criminal actions, remain free and unaccountable.

Multiple human rights and nongovernmental organisations are explicitly stating that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide. I am not making this up; no, I am not motivated by a homicidal antisemitism. Numerous scholarly and mainstream organisations, such as Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, (Medicins sans Frontieres) are all collecting evidence that the Israeli government, and its military forces, are guilty of genocide in Palestine.

Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies and former Israeli military officer, arrives at the inescapable conclusion that Israel is committing genocide. His article ‘I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It’ is worth reading in its entirety.

We should always be cautious when applying serious terms, like the word genocide, to a given situation. There is no disputing the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust. The immediate results of the 1945-46 Nuremberg trials were to establish a framework of international laws and rules by which all states (and nonstate forces for that matter) must comply when dealing with each other, and their respective populations.

We must continue to teach the lessons of the Holocaust, so that future generations never forget. The phrase Never Again is certainly one way of sensitising ourselves against those who would repeat the crimes of the past.

The Nuremberg trials, and the subsequent Nuremberg proceedings, established a precedent where individual military officers, politicians, and businesspeople could be held to account for crimes against humanity.

The subsequent Nuremberg trials, held by the International Military Tribunal, prosecuted second-level Nazis, and those in the wider business community who assisted and actively participated in the commission of crimes against humanity. For instance, one of those trials – out of a series of twelve – charged German doctors and administrators with conducting inhumane medical experiments on concentration camp inmates, without their consent.

One of the main defendants at the original Nuremberg trials with Arthur Seyss-Inquart (1892 – 1946), an Austrian-born Nazi and Reichskommisar (Reich commissioner) of German-occupied Netherlands. He was basically the governor of the Netherlands for Germany. When the Dutch resisted his rule, he cut off the supply of food and coal (the latter used for fuel) as collective punishment.

The 1944-45 winter is known as the Hunger Winter. Intentionally starving large portions of the Netherlands, thousands died of malnutrition and freezing. The effects of this human-made famine are still examined by medical professionals and historians today. Dutch authorities commemorate – if that is the right word – that particularly painful chapter in their nation’s history out of respect to the victims.

Seyss-Inquart was convicted of crimes against humanity, sentenced to death and hanged in 1946.

The BBC, hardly a bastion of leftist propaganda, published an article in August this year detailing how Israel’s actions have resulted in a human-induced famine in Gaza. Citing spiralling rates of child malnutrition and poverty, the situation for the Palestinians is dire. Who are the Israeli politicians and military commanders responsible for this crime? Who are the Israeli equivalents of Seyss-Inquart?

Let us perform a revealing comparison when it comes to the treatment of genocide. This examination owes its origin to Caitlin Johnstone, a political writer. There is no shortage of condemnations of the genocidal atrocities committed by the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The massacres carried out by this murderous militia are plain for all the world to see.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a major funder and military ally of the RSF. The UAE receives extensive financial and military backing from the United States. Numerous American politicians have been able to draw the dots – the US is complicit in the genocidal actions of the Darfur-based paramilitary group.

No-one has lost their job because they denounced the RSF. No-one been canceled or silenced for speaking out about the genocidal RSF. No-one has faced an army of online trolls, hysterically accusing the anti-genocide voices of being hateful, or propaganda tools of a foreign power, or apologists for racial hatred.

Yet pro-Palestine advocates face precisely that kind of sustained, organised political pressure. And there are academics who have lost their jobs for speaking up about Palestine.

The state that claims to be the inheritor of the victims of the Holocaust has been misusing and repurposing the memory of the dead to insulate itself from any and all criticism. If the phrase Never Again is to have any meaning and relevance today, it must be applicable to all victims of genocide, including the Palestinians.