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.