Two rangers quietly sat on a platform 25 feet up in a tree with a large pile of bananas and red buckets filled with milk. As I watched, a dozen orangutans quickly climbed and swung over to grab the fruit and stick their heads in the buckets for a drink. The orange-haired apes then lounged around, undisturbed by the humans alongside them. 

Half a mile further into Borneo’s Kabili-Sepilok rainforest it was much less hectic. The air felt humid. I could smell the earth and hear the droning sound of cicadas filling the forest as I avoided the leeches dropping from above. Up ahead I spied another feeding platform. The rangers there sat alone as they scanned the trees but saw no signs of orangutans eager to eat. One of the men bellowed out an apelike long call to announce their presence. Soon a single female with an infant gripping its fur lowered from the canopy above. She snatched some fruit and quickly disappeared back into the jungle. 

The Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre near Sandakan, Malaysia, serves as a temporary home for the apes. Infants rescued from habitats destroyed by logging and orphans whose mothers have been killed by poachers are treated and cared for, their beseeching hands reaching out to anyone who enters the nursery. “It’s difficult when the orangutans come in very young,” Reynard Gondipon, the center’s veterinarian, told me as he showed me through the facility. “I urge the rangers to hug them every now and then.” As they grow, the orangutans are moved out onto the grounds of the 9,000-acre center. There these naturally solitary creatures live alongside others as they learn the lore of forest life: how to climb, build nests, search for food, survive. Slowly, like the mother and child who disappeared into the canopy, they embrace the wilds. Once it is determined that they can fend for themselves, Sepilok’s staff transport them into the forest far away from humanity. 

I have long been fascinated by our closest living relatives and our linked ancient ancestry. In the early 1980s I was thrilled to hear presentations by all three of the primatologists known as the Trimates—Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas—when they were in New York to discuss their studies of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. I recall Fossey mentioning a visit to the American Museum of Natural History’s Akeley Hall of African Mammals. While there, she stopped in front of the mountain gorilla diorama. The creatures behind the plate glass had been shot in 1921 by naturalist Carl Akeley during an expedition he led for the museum. Akeley soon after convinced the Belgian government—which controlled the land where those gorillas once lived—to create a national park to protect the apes. Fossey spoke of how she mourned the taxidermic creatures forever frozen in the case yet appreciated Akeley’s and the museum’s efforts to study and save those still in the wild. Of course, Fossey would die only a few years later as she herself fought to protect gorillas in the remote rainforests of Rwanda’s Virunga mountains. 

The work Fossey, Galdikas, and Goodall dedicated their lives to is not for the faint of heart. Galdikas recently described to me the hardships she endured studying Borneo’s orangutans: “You are sitting in the swamp. It is so primeval. You couldn’t stand the buzzing of the mosquitos, the buzzing of the other insects, the horseflies that bite you. They really hurt, just a sharp hurt. And of course, the leeches.” But she also experienced true joy observing the magnificent animals, recalling how on Christmas Day 1971 at the start of her time doing her research she watched a mother and its child emerge from its tree nest. Galdikas called the sight “the best Christmas present.” 

Humans and the great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans) and smaller apes (gibbons) share a common past. Our species diverged millions of years ago and evolved. Earth’s human population was about 1 million in 10,000 BCE, and 3 billion when Goodall arrived in Tanzania in 1960. There are now 8 billion people on earth. While the human population has exploded, that is not the case for apes. In 1900 there were more than 1 million chimpanzees in the wild. At most, a third of that number now exist. Orangutans have dropped from 300,000 to roughly 100,000. 

Many more will perish, as the human population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2100. Apes’ numbers have been decimated, as they lose their habitats to deforestation and their lives to poachers. While there are laws to protect these species, trafficking is highly profitable. Each year, thousands of young apes are captured, with baby gorillas being offered for more than half a million dollars on social media sites like WhatsApp. 

There are, though, hopeful signs for some ape populations as they and their habitats are being protected. The mountain gorillas in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest have seen their numbers increase from 254 in 1981 to more than 1,000 today, due to intense conservation practices and ecotourism. 

To preserve their habitats, governments and organizations have trained locals to manage the forests. This creates jobs and encourages communities to protect what they have. The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund has trackers who monitor daily the largest of the apes where Fossey set up camp back in 1967. “These guys are the front line of conservation,” says Tara Stoinski, president of the fund. “They are the reason that these animals are still on the planet. These mountains are cold, they’re wet, and they are tracking up to 13,000 feet 365 days a year. They are true conservation heroes.”

Galdikas’ Camp Leakey and her Orangutan Care Center and Quarantine facility in the Indonesian village of Pasir Panjang 700 miles southwest of Sandakan similarly cares for and rewilds apes. And the new 117,000 acre Ekolo ya Bonobo, created by Claudine André in rainforests in the northwest of the Democratic Republic of Congo, has become home to freed bonobos. There are fewer than 2,500 Javan silvery gibbons left in the wild, and the Aspinall Foundation in conjunction with the Indonesian government has successfully reintroduced two dozen into protected areas. 

Such work is an uphill and often dangerous battle. Legions of researchers, scientists, and volunteers have devoted their lives to watching over, studying, and protecting our magnificent relatives. As the great primatologist George Schaller wrote of the gorillas in National Geographic in 1995, which holds true for all the great and smaller apes, “We have a common past, but only humans have been given the mental power to worry about their fate.”

Enjoy this selection of photos from LIFE’s new special issue Apes: Their Remarkable World.

Nick Ledger/Alamy; (background) Gudkov Andrey/Shutterstock

A chimpanzee mother and her baby at the Conkouati-Douli National Park in the Republic of Congo.

Gudkov Andrey/Shutterstock

As it is with human children, chimpanzees like to have fun. Playtime is an important developmental activity and can lead to breathy laughter. Three-year-old Gizmo and his 8-year-old brother Gimli enjoyed a bit of roughhousing at Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park.

Anup Shah/Stone/Getty

The bonobo is often mistaken for a chimpanzee, but it smaller and slimmer.

Gudkov Andrey/Shutterstock

Gorillas are the largest living primates.

P. Wegner/imageBROKER/Shutterstock

Orangutans like these have the most intense mother-child relationship of any primate besides humans.

Freder/E+/Getty

The Siamang Gibbon makes sounds that can be heard two miles away.

Steve Clancy Photography/Moment/Getty

A lar gibbon and its child swing through the forest canopy.

Kittipong Chotitana/Shutterstock

The post Apes: Their Remarkable World appeared first on LIFE.

You never forget your first penguin. Mine stood atop a white slab of ice, the tuxedoed groom on a wedding cake, looking back at our passing ship slicing through the Drake Passage from Argentina to Antarctica. Thousands more awaited on that frozen continent, where gregarious birds gazed into the GoPros of tourists in rubber Zodiacs making landfall on the rocky shore of the Antarctic Peninsula. Solicitous in their feathered dinner jackets, the Adelie penguins were outgoing and unflappable, nature’s maitre d’s.

On another continent, in another year, I stood in Nelson Mandela’s former prison cell on Robben Island, off the windswept coast of Cape Town, in South Africa. The braying of African penguins had been a happy diversion to the political prisoners in their eight-by-seven concrete cells there. Ordered to gather seaweed along the island’s shoreline, Mandela was delighted by the penguins, who offered modest “pleasure and distraction” during his 18 years there. “We laughed at the colony of penguins, which resembled a brigade of clumsy, flat-footed soldiers,” he wrote. Like the Birdman of Alcatraz, dreaming of flying beyond the bars of his island prison, the men of Robben Island were given lift by the flightless penguin.

Long before I saw a penguin in its natural state, I had been delighted by penguins in unnatural states, encountering them from earliest childhood in superhero mythology. Burgess Meredith played the Penguin, Batman’s nemesis, on the kitsch TV series of the 1960s. Penguins were a staple of vintage TV cartoons of that era (Tennessee Tuxedo or Chilly Willy) and remain so in modern animated films (the Penguins of Madagascar and Happy Feet franchises). Penguins star in live-action films (Mr. Popper’s Penguins, based on a 1938 book of the same name) and movies that combine animation and live action (the cartoon penguin waiters in Mary Poppins charmed their costar Dick Van Dyke). Penguins front everything from prestige documentaries to Munsingwear golf shirts to the professional hockey team in Pittsburgh. Why?

“All the world loves a penguin,” noted English explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who lived to tell the tale of Robert Falcon Scott’s deadly Antarctic expedition of 1910, in his classic account, The Worst Journey in the World. “I think it is because in many respects they are like ourselves, and in some respects what we should like to be.” Penguins are physically courageous, maternally inclined, intensely curious, and proud. “They are extraordinarily like children,” Cherry-Garrard wrote of Adelie penguins, “these little people of the Antarctic world, either like children or like old men, full of their own importance.” 

Perhaps that’s why children are so enthralled by penguins, their spiritual counterparts. The international pop stars Harry Styles and Ed Sheeran got complementary penguin tattoos after a night of drinking, both men honoring Pingu Penguin, the stop-motion, anthropomorphic emperor penguin of the children’s show Pingu, which first aired in Switzerland before emigrating to the larger world.

Musician John McVie found the penguins at the London Zoo so enchanting as a young man that his band, Fleetwood Mac, in 1973 named their eighth studio album Penguin and adopted the bird as their mascot. McVie—with his then wife and bandmate, Christine—donated a penguin to the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo before a concert in that city in 1977. “Ever since I’ve known him, John has enjoyed penguins,” Christine McVie, who passed away in 2022, said. “He was always taking pictures of them at the zoo.” Fans sent him stuffed penguins, penguins appeared on the band’s liner notes and album art. John McVie had a penguin tattooed to his right forearm. “It got a little out of hand,” Christine said, but Penguinmania tends to do that. 

“Penguins are habit forming,” wrote Roger Tory Peterson. The artist and author who produced the first field guide to birds, in 1935, and became the world’s most famous birdwatcher, nevertheless retained a special affinity for these birds that cannot fly. “I am an addict,” confessed Peterson.

And yet “flightless bird” is not quite the right epithet for penguins. “Penguins do fly, in a sense,” Peterson noted, “but in a medium heavier than air.” They are strong, beautiful swimmers, porpoising through frigid waters, shiny as seals, diving for fish and squid. Researchers at the University of California report that emperor penguins can stay underwater, breath held, for 27 minutes. Diving as deep as 1,600 feet, they slow their heart rates to 10 beats per minute. 

In his physical prime, Olympic champion Michael Phelps could swim as fast as six miles per hour. Gentoo penguins can swim 22 miles per hour. In short, penguins—often depicted as wobbly bowling pins—are extraordinary athletes. But they are so much more than that.

McVie, Sheeran, and Styles notwithstanding, one of the most famous depictions of penguins is inked on spines, not arms—specifically on the orange spines of paperbacks published by Penguin, purveyor of soft-cover classics, whose British founder, Allen Lane, wanted a mascot in 1935 for his new venture. 

Lane sent 21-year-old Edward Young to the London Zoo for inspiration, and the young designer returned with a sketch of a bird that fit the bill. A long, thin, pointed bill, as it turned out. For books that are upmarket but inexpensive, Lane wanted a mascot that was both “dignified and flippant.” The penguin is both of those.

Dignified? Many of the 18 species of penguin appear to wear tuxedoes. (The much-circulated notion that penguin in Mandarin Chinese translates as “business goose” is the kind of urban legend we wish were true but isn’t.) The penguin’s tuxedo—called countershading—serves as camouflage from predators. Viewed from above, a penguin’s black back blends in with the ocean water, while viewed from below, its white belly resembles the sunlit surface of the sea.

Flippant? A rockhopper penguin has what is often described as a punk-rock hairdo—a multicolored mohawk crest that would have looked at home at CBGBs circa 1977. Penguins are waddling contradictions—black-and-white punks in tuxedoes, flightless birds who soar in water. They contain multitudes. Penguins are at once noble (think of the emperor in winter, standing stoic while protecting the egg of his offspring) and adorable. 

They are wobbling purveyors of happiness. Robin Williams, who grew to love penguins while voicing the rockhopper penguin Lovelace in the animated film Happy Feet, was struck by their communal nature. “The sheer connection that they show for each other is very powerful,” he said. “And they look so cute—until you get them in person, and then if they overheat their eyes get red and they peck you. You have to keep them in a certain temperature zone. But I think people love the fact that they’re so true and loyal and playful.” 

In their family dynamics—stay-at-home fathers, working mothers, coparenting couples devoted to their children, same-sex couples—they are models of the modern family, and have been for centuries.

Picasso painted a penguin in two brush strokes in 1907 and Le Pingouin—like the penguin more broadly—still delights people. Is it any wonder why? The penguin is regal and comical, opera and slapstick, pathos and joy. The greatest film comedian of the silent era—and perhaps of any era—was accused of stealing his entire screen persona from this magnificent bird. Charlie Chaplin disavowed the connection, but in his walk, in his black-and-white plumage, in his continued dignity despite ridiculous circumstances, Chaplin was at the very least penguin-adjacent. And like the penguin, Chaplin made people happy.

When the English philosopher John Ruskin found himself in “states of disgust and fury” at the 19th-century world, he would “go to the British Museum and look at Penguins till I get cool,” as he wrote in a letter to Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton on November 4, 1860. “I find at present penguins are the only comfort in life. One feels everything in the world so sympathetically ridiculous, one can’t be angry when one looks at a Penguin.”

And yet plenty of people have looked upon them with indifference, malevolence, or desperation. The earliest known recorded sighting of a penguin was likely by Alvaro Velho, sailing around the Cape of Good Hope with the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama in 1497. In his account of that trip, Velho described a bird, flightless and apparently unfeathered, “as big as a duck” but braying like a jackass. As Velho casually noted: “We slaughtered as many as we could.”

Penguins have been imperiled almost ever since. For centuries, their blubber was used by whalers as fuel. In the 20th century, Peruvian penguin guano was a lucrative, nutrient-rich fertilizer, and the mining of fossilized penguin poop imperiled the colonies that lived atop several centuries of their forebears’ dung. 

In early expeditions to Antarctica—before the practice was made illegal—explorers fed penguins to their sled dogs, and in desperation to themselves. In the natural food chain, the leopard seal and killer whale prey on penguins in the water. On land, their eggs and chicks are vulnerable to skuas and giant petrels. But modern-day penguin populations are primarily imperiled by roundabout means of human predation: oil spills, marine pollution, commercial overfishing, and, above all else, the climate crisis. 

There is no reliable census of the number of penguins in the world—the figure is in the tens of millions—but almost all of them live in the Southern Hemisphere, perhaps 20 million breeding pairs in the Antarctic region alone. As many as half of all penguin species are endangered. 

March of the Penguins won the 2006 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, enchanting a global audience with the extraordinary lives of emperor penguins trekking to their breeding grounds from the sea and back again, living a flipper-to-mouth existence on Antarctica, in the harshest conditions on earth.

“Despite their charm and worldwide popularity,” notes the aviation conservation charity BirdLife International, “they are marching toward extinction.” But that march is not inexorable, and humans can still prevent the slow fade to black-and-white of a flightless bird, found on and around four continents, in polar and equatorial climates, in 18 different species, each of which is special in its own way.

Here are a selection of images from LIFE’s new special issue Penguins: Their Extraordinary World:

Cover image by Tui De Roy/Minden Pictures

Adelie penguins leapt off a floating iceberg in Antarctica.

Patrick J. Endres/Corbis/Getty

A family of Emperor Penguins; the Emperors are the largest penguins on Earth.

Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty

African Penguins are an endangered species, with a population below 50,000.

Juergen Christine Sohns/imageBROKER/Shutterstock

A scene from the 2006 film Happy Feet.

Warner Bros/Kobal/Shutterstock

Burgess Meredith played the villainous Penguin on the Batman television series, 1966.

Alamy Stock Photo

Mario Lemieux, star of the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins, posed at the Pittsburgh Zoo & Aquarium, 1984.

Lane Stewart/Sports Illustrated/Getty

The post Penguins: Their Extraordinary World appeared first on LIFE.

In its Dec. 13, 1968 issue LIFE wrote about Penny Ann Early and her battle to break the gender barrier in horse racing. At age 25 she was one of the first women to become a licensed jockey in the U.S. (The first was 1968 Olympic equestrian star Kathryn Kusner, who sued for that right but then suffered a broken leg before she could attempt to race). Early’s battle to get on the track was chronicled for LIFE by photographer Bob Gomel.

When Penny Ann Early attempted to compete at Churchill Downs, male jockeys were so opposed that they boycotted the races she was set to appear in. One male jockey cast the boycott as defending his livelihood. “If you let one woman ride one race, we are all dead,” he told LIFE.

Early told LIFE, “I have nothing against men. Next to horses I like men best. All I want is a chance to race against them. Is that so bad?”

Apparently it was. That issue of LIFE included a startlingly brazen guest editorial from Hall of Fame jockey Bill Hartack. He acknowledged that women had a legal right to ride and criticized the boycotts of Early as a misguided tactic. But Hartack also predicted that once women had the chance to compete, they would fail.

Hartack wrote:

“They’ll find out how tough it is and they’ll give it up. The tracks won’t have to worry about being flooded with women because a female cannot compete against a male doing anything….They might weigh the same as male jockeys, but they aren’t as strong. And as a group, I don’t think their brains are as capable of making fast decisions. Women are also more likely to panic. It’s their nature.”

Hartrack also dreamed up a scenario where women might use sex to get male jockeys to take it easy on them in a race. “If she was sharp enough I might take advantage of the situation myself,” Hartack wrote. “I wouldn’t ease up in the race, but I wouldn’t put it past me to con her into thinking that I would.”

While Early was ultimately unsuccessful in her attempts to break the gender barrier at the track, she did compete against men in another professional sport: basketball. Her battles at Churchill Downs caught the attention of the Kentucky Colonels of the fledging American Basketball Association, and the Colonels signed her to a one-day contract. She checked into a game long enough to receive an inbounds pass while wearing a sweater with the number 3, representing the number of times that male jockeys had boycotted her races.

But it didn’t take long until the gender barrier was broken—by Diane Crump, racing at another track. On February 7, 1969, became the first women to compete in a pari-mutuel race, at Hialeah Park Race Track in Florida, with LIFE photographer George Silk on hand. Her appearance was controversial enough that she needed police protection from the crowd before the race.

Crump finished ninth at Hialeah. Two weeks later she won her first race, and in 1970 she competed in the Kentucky Derby. And she and Early helped clear the path for other groundbreaking jockeys such as Julie Krone, who in 1993 became the first woman to win a Triple Crown race, atop Colonial Affair in the Belmont Stakes.

In an interview with CNN in 2012, Crump modestly said, “I like to think I was a little inroad on the path to equality.”

Jockey Penny Ann Early with her horse Randy in Louisville, Kentucky, 1968.

Bob Gomel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Penny Ann Early, whose attempts to become to first female competitive jockey were met with boycotts, 1968.

Bob Gomel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Penny Ann Early, whose attempts to become to first female competitive jockey were met with boycotts, 1968.

Bob Gomel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Penny Ann Early, whose attempts to become to first female competitive jockey were met with boycotts, 1968.

Bob Gomel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Penny Ann Early, whose attempts to become to first female competitive jockey were met with boycotts, 1968.

Bob Gomel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Penny Ann Early, whose attempts to become to first female competitive jockey were met with boycotts, 1968.

Bob Gomel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Penny Ann Early, whose attempts to become to first female competitive jockey were met with boycotts, 1968.

Bob Gomel/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Diane Crump, the first female jockey to compete in a pari-mutuel race, Hialeah, Florida, 1969.

George Silk/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Diane Crump, the first female jockey to compete in a pari-mutuel race, Hialeah, Florida, 1969.

George Silk/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Diane Crump, the first female jockey to compete against men, Hialeah, Florida, 1969.

George Silk/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Diane Crump readies to become the first female jockey to race against men, Hialeah, Florida, 1969

George Silk/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Diane Crump races against men for the first time in Hialeah, Florida, 1969.

George Silk/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post Female Jockeys Who Broke Down Barriers appeared first on LIFE.

It sounds like a fanciful idea, perhaps a premise for a children’s book. But in Sacramento in the 1950s, there was a place where kids could actually check out animals and take them home.

The service was run out of the California Junior Museum, which was located on the state fairgrounds. The museum had exhibits which taught young people about the natural world (this quaint film strip documents a field trip there), and one if its programs was a lending library for living creatures. LIFE photographer Carl Mydans, whose portfolio includes many brutal scenes of war, was there to document the cuteness.

Here’s how the library worked, according to the story in the July 14, 1952 issue of LIFE:

Children who visit the California Junior Museum can, if they are at least seven years old and have their parents’ permission, take home rats, rabbits, squirrels, or in special cases, a skunk or a porcupine. Designed to give children first-hand information about U.S. wildlife, the lending library has 40 animals which circulate about the rate of 20 a week….animals may be kept out for a week, and there is a ten-cent fine for overdue animals.

And yes, you read correctly: that list of animals available for borrowing did include a rat. The closing anecdote of the LIFE story was actually about a white rat who had been kept out past her due date:

One boy did keep a white rat past the limit, but he was excused from the fine. At the time that the rat was due back it was in the boy’s living room—busily giving birth to a litter of eight in the pop-eyed presence of every child in the neighborhood.

Sounds like quite the education.

Animal lending library In Sacramento, 1952.

Carl Mydans/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Animal Lending Library In Sacramento, 1952.

Carl Mydans/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Animal borrowers clustered around the librarian who checked applications and parents’ permission slips for lending pets, Sacramento, California, 1952.

Carl Mydans/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Animal lending library In Sacramento, 1952.

Carl Mydans/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

From a story on an animal lending library in Sacramento, 1952.

Carl Mydans/LIfe Picture Collection/Shutterstock

From a story on an animal lending library In Sacramento, 1952.

Carl Mydans/LIfe Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Youngsters on their way home from an animal lending library in Sacramento, 1952.

Carl Mydans/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

From a story on an animal lending library in Sacramento, 1952.

Carl Mydans/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

From a story on an animal lending library in Sacramento, 1952.

Carl Mydans/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dirk Schwartz fed Pogie the porcupine with an ear of corn, shot for a story on a California animal lending library, 1952.

Carl Mydans/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The animal lending library lent this rabbit to a kindergarten class, Sacramento, 1952.

Carl Mydans/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A little boy holding his new pet snake.

Carl Mydans/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A youngster with the white rat he borrowed from the animal lending library in Sacramento, California, 1952.

Carl Mydans/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Skunks like this one were available for checkout from the animal lending library in Sacramento, California, 1952.

Carl Mydans/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Derek Leigh checked out this skunk from the animal lending library; the skunk had its glands removed to avoid the spray of odor, Sacramento, California, 1952.

Carl Mydans/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post Seriously, Check Out This Porcupine: A Lending Library for Animals appeared first on LIFE.

“Deprived of wide open spaces, they are just as happy and healthy as country dogs and live years longer,” declared a headline in LIFE’s April 3 ,1944 issue. The article used as its chief source a book called How to Raise a Dog in the City and In the Suburbs by Dr. James Kinney, which claimed that city dogs lived two to three years longer than country dogs. The story offered this rationale for the disparity: “City owners lavish more affection on dogs than country owners, not because city dogs are more lovable but because they are more often underfoot. A dog thrives as much on affection as it does on wide-open spaces.”

All these decades later, some still argue that city dogs are better off. A recent article on Vetstreet points out in the country, dogs there are more likely to roam unleashed, which means that they get hit by cars more often. Country dogs also encounter more types of parasites. And if a dog has some intestinal disease, the city owner is more likely to notice, because the evidence will be left in on a carpet rather than amid the bushes.

One counter-argument for country life is that dogs are simply happier there. According to a study reported on in Psychology Today, city dogs are much more fearful and anxious than their country cousins. The study found that city dogs were 45 percent more likely to be afraid of strange people, and 70 percent more likely to be afraid of strange dogs.

Also, the pictures of city dogs that LIFE photographer Nina Leen in 1944 to illustrate the story sometimes run counter to story’s premise—or, to put it more simply, some of the dogs don’t seem all that happy as they go on their walks in New York. The grumpiest-looking dog belonged to actress-model Joan Caulfield, whose West Highland terrier named Witty attempted to hide away in the hedges. Just about all the dogs that Leen photographed belonged to public figures, such as actors Frederic March and Ruth Gordon, but it’s not clear that they benefitted from the reflected glory.

Wherever you live, there’s plenty of evidence that owning a dog is good for the owner, both mentally and physically. In other words, what studies show most clearly is that people and dogs are better off with each other, and that’s true anywhere in America.

Actor Fredric March w.alked his cocker spaniel in the rain, 1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Actress Joan Caulfield briskly walked her West Highland terrier Witty, down Fifth Avenue in New York City, 1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Actress Joan Caulfield reached deep down behind a hedge to extract her West Highland terrier Witty, while trying to take him for a walk in New York City, 1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Actress Joan Caulfield lifted her West Highland terrier Witty, out from behind a hedge, while trying to take him for a walk, 1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Artist Earle Winslow, with a painting under his arm, struggled to control his stubborn Irish setter, New York City, 1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Artist Earle Winslow (right) showed his painting to a friend while struggling to keep his Irish setter under control, New York City, 1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Artist Earle Winslow, with a painting under his arm, struggled to keep his Irish setter under control, New York City, 1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Model Mimi Berry walked her cocker spaniel, who carried a package for her, 1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Metropolitan Opera singer Lauritz Melchior with his wife and their Great Dane, 1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Sportscaster Bill Stern read a newspaper as his Chesapeake Bay retriever sniffed a sidewalk grate, New York City, 1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ed Sullivan, then an entertainment columnist before he became a television host, brought his black Scottie dog to a fenced-in area on the street in New York City, 1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Conductor Artur Rodzinski and his wife with their poodle at 57th St. and 5th Ave in New York City, 1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Actress Joan Roberts, wearing her costume for the musical Oklahoma, walked Goggles, her English bulldog, during the show’s intermission, New York City, 1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Actress Joan Roberts, wearing a costume for the musical Oklahoma, walked her English bulldog Goggles during intermission, 1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Actor John Boles coaxed his stubborn schnauzer puppy to jump a concrete barrier New York City ,1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Actress Margaret Webster’s two Cairn terriers checked out a cat perched in the window, New York City, 1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

William F. Schlemmer, of Hammacher-Schlemmer, walked his Yorkshire terriers, New York City, 1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Comedian Jimmy Durante walked his Irish setter in Times Square, 1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Author Fannie Hurst enjoyed the jumping antics of her Yorkshire terrier Orphan Annie, New York City, 1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Actress Ruth Gordon walked her black poodle, New York City 1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Actress Cornelia Otis Skinner, clad in a sheared beaver fur coat, walking her dogs in New York City, 1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Music conductor Andre Kostelanetz with his sheep dog Puff, New York City, 1944.

Nina Leen/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

This Maltese poodle/wire-haired terrier mix called Pooch was cuddled by its owner, former Metropolitan Opera singer Thalia Sabaneev, New York City, 1944.

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Former Metropolitan Opera singer Thalia Sabaneev’s Maltese poodle/wire-haired terrier mix called Pooch was featured on the cover of LIFE magazine’s issue of April 3, 1944.

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A boy read newspaper comics while his leash-tethered mutt waited, New York City, 1944.

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One morning, some years ago when I was living in New York City, I gathered Kaya into an old blue shawl and carried him eight blocks to the animal clinic to be put to sleep. He had been my cat since I was in the ninth grade. I named him after the Bob Marley album. “Nineteen years is a long time for a domestic short hair,” the vet said, stroking him.

Kaya still had a little life in him at the end. On the walk over to the clinic he batted at my chin from inside his wrap. I talked to him matter-of-factly, telling him about a recent CNN/New York Times poll that had voted him one of the seven best cats in the Northeast. I often told him things like this over the years: my version of coochy-coochy-coo.

Kaya always tolerated the stuff about the polls, though he must have known he wasn’t all that. Not compared to his brother Korduroy, anyway. Korduroy did things you’d tell people about. He would stand in the road near the STOP sign, for example, and when a car pulled up, he’d jump on the hood and peer into the windshield. Kaya would watch this impassively, and he also looked on when Korduroy engaged in elaborate play-fighting games with the neighbor’s German shepherd. Next to Korduroy, a skilled small-game hunter who knocked on our front door by putting a paw into the mail-slot, Kaya seemed a simpleton.

He was docile and deliberate and he purred a lot. He didn’t much go for killing things but he got into sudden, spirited battles with ball-point pens and dangling extension cords. He had white mittens on his front paws, white knee-length stockings on his hind legs, and soft snowy fur around his muzzle, neck, and breast. Otherwise he was cloaked in a hodgepodge of blacks and browns. He had wide, yellow-green eyes. He lay down a lot.

Among me and my immediate family we’ve had maybe a dozen cats over the years—not including the eight kittens that once roamed my parents’ house after Palaleela had her litter—and there is no question that in matters of decency and kindness Kaya was the best of the lot. He let Korduroy eat first. He put up with two-year-olds who tugged his tail. He kept you company. Many cats are keen to human suffering, but none was keener than Kaya. When someone was sad, Kaya always came around. “Mow,” he’d say, and look up at you.

Kaya appreciated good, simple things: being brushed with a fine comb, warm chicken scraps, a scratch behind the ears, weekends on the Cape, a place to sleep at the foot of the bed. How often do we celebrate the life of a cat?

Maybe it was because he didn’t know any tricks that in the last few years of his life, Kaya began to talk. He mewed incessantly. His most common issuance was a loud, plaintive wail that sounded more like a human baby than any animal I’ve heard. “Dude, you’ve got a kid over there?” friends would say during phone conversations. My professional acquaintances knew him too. I’d be interviewing someone, and when Kaya’s voice filled the phone lines I’d sense the person on the other end ignoring it uncomfortably. “I know,” I’d say to Kaya afterward, “it can be hard to be a cat.”

Kaya delivered other sounds besides that trademark yowl. He had a two-beat high-pitched me-ow for when he was playing happily or anticipating food. He gave a short, chirplike mew as a greeting when he walked into a room. His long trilling mew meant he wanted to go out. A low, guttural “reowwl” said he was encountering another cat. An airy half-mew, half-yawn meant he was waking up, and Kaya’s odd, unnerving series of yips told you he sensed a thunderstorm on its way. Whatever Kaya’s agenda, the only sure way to quiet him was to take him onto your lap.

The mewing became a backdrop to my life that did not fade until the very end. When I made the appointment at the clinic, Kaya had been sick for several weeks. Thyroid condition. He slept nearly all the time and he couldn’t keep his medicine down. He stopped jumping up onto the bed at night. He kept to a corner of the apartment, venturing out every few hours to stare into his water dish and take a few half-hearted laps. When his mewing died down, a strange silence settled upon the apartment. Around that time he stopped eating.

It got to me, of course. I tried to tempt him with his favorite foods. Friends came over to tell Kaya good-bye. The night before we went to the clinic I was sitting on the couch—quiet, glum, and staring off. I guess Kaya could tell I was in a rotten way. I looked down when I felt him rubbing weakly against my shins. He peered up at me. “Mow,” he said, and then he slumped back over to the corner to rest.

The next morning I carried him in the crook of my arm. I talked to him as if nothing were wrong. At the clinic I set him on a table in a small greenish room and stroked him until I could feel a faint purr in his breast. The vet was there too, and Kaya, with what seemed like great effort, gave a final, soft meow.

His life was gentle, I tell people, and you could have learned from him.

The special issue Cats: Companions in Life is available for purchase here.

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Kittens can sleep up to 20 hours a day, but this one woke all the way up to smile for the camera.

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This fluffy cat was in a playful mood; feline personalities begin to emerge at around five weeks, which is when they begin to be weaned.

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Ancient Egyptians honored cats by preserving them as mummies.

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A Bengal cat named Tobysden Pyrrha posed for a studio portrait after participating in the 2018 GCCF Supreme Cat Show in Birmingham, England.

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This boy, a Dutch billiards prodigy, fed cream to his cat in 1953.

Nat Farbman/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Brownie drank milk straight from the cow as Blackie waited his turn at a dairy farm in Fresno, Calif., in 1953.

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It looks like this dog, cat and mouse were considering acting out the food chain, but this was in fact a friendly gathering of the household pets of the Lyng family in Denmark, 1955.

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This Siamese cat escaped up a pole in Carlsbad, N.M. in 1962, and hoped the cocker spaniel in pursuit would obey the sign.

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Sometimes cats and dogs do get along.

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Diana wrote in her diary at the desk in her sitting room in Kensington Palace.

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Oscar, a hospice cat, who had an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients were going to die, walked past an activity room at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, R.I. David Dosa profiled Oscar in his 2011 book, “Making Rounds With Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat.

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Scarlett the cat, whose eyes were singed shut after saving her kittens during a building fire, snuggled with her new owner, writer Karen Wellen in 1997; Scarlett’s eyes healed.

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