Laurel Braitman is author of Animal Madness: How anxious dogs, compulsive parrots and elephants in therapy help us understand ourselves (Simon & Schuster, June 2014). She has written for Pop Up Magazine, The New Inquiry, Orion and a variety of other publications. She received her PhD from MIT in history and anthropology of science, is a 2014 TED Fellow and an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts. In her free time she organizes concerts for gorillas, seals and other animals. She lives on a houseboat in Sausalito, California.