★ 2017-09-19
Forester Wohlleben (The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World, 2016) turns his attention to how animals feel.Writing nontechnically but with obvious depth of knowledge, the author invites readers to imagine that animals have many of the same feelings we do. His argument might not pass the most rigorous of scientific challenges, but it makes good sense. "Basically," he writes, "emotions are linked to the unconscious part of the brain. If animals lacked consciousness, all that would mean is that they would be unable to have thoughts." That does not presuppose, however, that animals cannot have emotions, since animals certainly have the same sorts of automatic nervous system responses humans have; in that view, maternal love may be hard-wired in deer or frogs just as much as it is in humans. All vertebrates, argues Wohlleben, share the same hardware, so to speak, for emotions, and he takes this down into other orders, noting, for instance, that fish produce oxytocin, "the hormone that not only brings joy to mothers, but also strengthens the love between partners," and that even single-celled animals can perform complex tasks involving awareness of their surroundings and, therefore, at least a kind of intelligence. And what of the love that an animal might feel for a human? In that instance, the author observes, the driving force may not be anything quite so immutable but instead a more variable quality: the ability to have curiosity about the world. The upshot is that humans need to give animals more credit for feeling—and therefore should not be so quick to eat them, to say nothing of other kinds of maltreatment. Indeed, on reading this gently learned book, readers will pay more attention to animals generally and learn how to be better neighbors to them.Can squirrels be said to be good or bad? For an answer to questions of that sort, this is the book to read. A treat for animal lovers of all stripes.
A treat for animal lovers of all stripes.”—Kirkus starred review
“With the same charm and clarity that drew so many readers to The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben has produced another gem. I found delight on every page, thanks to the author’s rare skill at blending scientific discoveries with his own wealth of insightful personal experiences. Read this book, and never again doubt that we share the Earth with other beings living rich and colorful lives.”—Jonathan Balcombe, author of What a Fish Knows
“Peter Wohlleben’s convincing, highly readable stories about free-living and domestic animals show there’s much overlap between how humans and other animals experience bonding, loss, and the great, shared themes of life.”—Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words, What Animals Think and Feel
“Wry, avuncular, careful and kind, Wohlleben guides us from one creature to the next. ...Each story adds to a widening vision of intelligence, emotion and relationship.”—The Guardian
“Like The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben's The Inner Life of Animals will rock your world. Surprising, humbling, and filled with delight, this book shows us that animals think, feel and know in much the same way as we do—and that their lives are, to them, as precious as ours are to us.”—Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus
“Wohlleben offers an insightful consideration of the emotional and cognitive lives of animals.”—Booklist
“Animal lovers everywhere will be enthralled by The Inner Life of Animals. Find out what squirrels, deer, and other animals really do out in the woods.”—Temple Grandin
“Animals is a natural follow-on to 'Trees' and just as beautifully questions human assumptions about nature. ...Wohlleben’s words are bound to touch even the animal-emotion skeptic.”—Washington Post, Jennifer S. Holland, author of Unlikely Friendships
“The Inner Life of Animals is an important reminder that while we surely are different from other animals, the similarities in our cognitive, emotional, and moral lives are not only surprising and daunting, but very real. And, we must use this information on their behalf in an increasingly human-dominated world.”—Marc Bekoff, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals and The Animals' Agenda
