Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart

Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart

Thinking bees, ice-skating buffaloes, dreaming rats, happy foxes, ecstatic elephants, despondent dolphins--in Minding Animals , Marc Bekoff takes us on an exhilarating tour of the emotional and mental world of animals, where we meet creatures who do amazing things and whose lives are filled with mysteries. Following in the footsteps of Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, Bekoff has spent the last 30 years studying animals of every stripe--from coyotes in Wyoming to penguins in Antarctica. He draws on this vast experience, as well as on the observations of other naturalists, to offer readers fascinating stories of animal behavior, including grooming and gossip, self-medication, feeding patterns, dreaming, dominance, and mating behavior. Many of these stories are truly incredible--chimpanzees medicating themselves with herbal remedies, elephants clearly mourning a dead group member--but this is not simply a catalog of amazing animal tales, for Bekoff also sheds light on many of the more serious issues surrounding animals. He offers a thought-provoking look at animal cognition, intelligence, and consciousness and he presents vivid examples of animal passions, highlighting the deep emotional lives of our animal kin. All this serves as background for his thoughtful conclusions about humility and animal protection and animal well-being, where he urges a new paradigm of respect, grace, compassion, and love for all animals. Marc Bekoff has gone deep into the minds, hearts, spirits, and souls of animals, giving him profound insight into their lives, and no small insight into ours. Minding Animals is an important contribution to our understanding of animal consciousness, a major work that will be a must read for anyone who loves nature. Bekoff is an ethologist: a scientist who studies animal behavior. In this new look at the consciousness of animals, he shares his experiences along with the nitty-gritty details of how animal behaviorists make their living. But Bekoff goes beyond a mere description of the science of ethology. He also tackles bigger issues, such as the questions of animal cognition, intelligence, and their emotional lives. Chapters cover such broad topics as the richness of behavioral diversity, animal emotions, play and cooperation, and human intrusion into animals' lives. Bekoff has a talent for making his points by leading readers through the evidence for and against an issue and guiding them to a conclusion. Interweaving anecdotal stories, discussions of scientific research, and explorations into the philosophy and theology of our relationship with nature and other animals, Bekoff builds a case for the necessity of understanding animals and granting them mutual respect as "other persons." The conversational writing style makes for a highly accessible book. Nancy Bent Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "To find out about the rich emotional life of nonhuman species, read Minding Animals ."-- Natural History "A book with both brains and a heart.... Bekoff joins courageous figures such as the anthropologist Frans de Waal and the maverick biologist Rupert Sheldrake in their attempt to make humans recognise and respect non-human animals' complex sentient and emotional lives."-- Sunday Telegraph "With this abundant narrative of Marc Bekoff a new age of intimacy between humans and animals has begun. The companionship, the play, the healing, the guidance, the protection provided by the animals, all these will be needed in the future as never before. Everyone should read Minding Animals , an amazingly thorough, delightful, and most important book." --Thomas Berry, author of The Dream of the Earth and The Great Work "For those of us who have immersed ourselves in the well being of life forms other than human, the fact that they communicate and have feelings is as natural and understandable as breathing. Through this lens we see clearly how their well being is intricately interconnected with our own. In Minding Animals Marc Bekoff has done a wonderful job of showing us how learning to understand and 'mind' animals and their behavior leads us to recognize their feelings as well. Through their layers, we find even more richness and joy of life as we glimpse into ever deepe parts of ourselves. This book is fun, inspiring, thought-provoking and educational! What a great mix!" --Julia Butterfly Hill, author of The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods "Just as the best doctors attain detailed and compassionate knowledge of the uniqueness of each patient, so too do the best behavioral biologists--with Marc Bekoff prominently among them--learn to recognize each animal as a distinct individual with its own internal life and experiences. By minding animals, we obtain our best scientific understanding of their evolution and behavior." --Stephen Jay Gould, author of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory "Except for relatively min