5:30: Refreshments in Courtyard, courtesy of Down to Earth
6:30: Talk

Learn how animals across the evolutionary tree — from insects to fish to birds to mammals — communicate in ways we're only now starting to detect and understand. As our tools for perceiving their world expand, so does the case that these are not primitive minds, but sophisticated, sentient ones we've long underestimated.

Learn, too, about two elephants named Mari and Vaigai who have lived out their lives in tiny enclosures on noisy zoo grounds in Honolulu and the historic case underway which has reached the Hawai'i Supreme Court—a case  that could help give these elephants back a measure of agency and peace, and reshape how the law treats captive animals elsewhere, as well. 

This is a free public educational event.

Speaker: Victoria Anderson, PhD, is a former Linguistics professor at UH Mānoa, where she also taught courses in animal communication.