“Do Animal Minds Run Out,” Annulet. June 2023. Fiction Folio guest edited by Kelly Krumrie.

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On “Do Animal Minds Run Out”: The first book I ever read was Dr. Seuss’s One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish (Beginner Books, Random House 1957), and it still delights me. Fish counting (the world)—has become complicated by several books: Can Fish Count? by Brian Butterworth (Basic Books 2022) makes a case for animals having hardwired mechanisms for mathematical activity. In this otherwise fascinating book, Butterworth unapologetically maintains a traditional hierarchy of animal cognition, which was challenged by Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (Penguin 2022)—although Yong’s book was about more strictly about Umwelten, I couldn’t help but think of Jennifer Ackerman’s plea at the end of The Bird Way (Penguin 2020) for humans to stop thinking in terms of human superiority over other animals. (Importantly, if I’m considering whether “fish” can count, it’s right to acknowledge Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller (Simon and Schuster 2021), which does away with the category of fish.) The ideas about biological counting that Butterworth discusses in Can Fish Count? brought to mind Brian Rotman’s Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting (Stanford 2000), which asks us to reconsider several assumptions about the activity of mathematics