The solution came from an unlikely place: a 1978 paper on social learning in captive wolves . Mira designed a two-week “mentorship” protocol. First, she desensitized Oso to formic acid by pairing it with honey—anteaters, surprisingly, have sweet receptors on the tips of their snouts. Then she introduced a wild-born, unreleasable anteater named Chiquita into an adjacent enclosure. Chiquita foraged normally on the same ant species. Through a mesh partition, Oso watched her tongue flick, listened to the soft schlick of her feeding, and—on day eleven—his own tongue uncurled.