Animal Wise

The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures

By: Virginia Morell

Narrated by: Kirsten Potter

Noted science writer Virginia Morell explores the frontiers of research on animal cognition and emotion, offering a surprising and moving exploration into the hearts and minds of wild and domesticated animals.

Have you ever wondered what it is like to be a fish? Or a parrot, dolphin, or elephant? Do they experience thoughts that are similar to ours, or have feelings of grief and love? These are tough questions, but scientists are answering them. They know that ants teach, earthworms make decisions, and that rats love to be tickled. They’ve discovered that dogs have thousand-word vocabularies, that parrots and dolphins have names, and that birds practice their songs in their sleep. But how do scientists know these things?
Animal Wise takes us on a dazzling odyssey into the inner world of animals from ants to wolves, and among the pioneering researchers who are leading the way into once-forbidden territory: the animal mind. With thirty years of experience covering the sciences, Morell uses her formidable gifts as a story-teller to transport us to field sites and laboratories around the world, introducing us to animal-cognition scientists and their surprisingly intelligent and sensitive subjects. She explores how this rapidly evolving, controversial field has only recently overturned old notions about why animals behave as they do. She probes the moral and ethical dilemmas of recognizing that even “lesser animals” have cognitive abilities such as memory, feelings, personality, and self-awareness–traits that many in the twentieth century felt were unique to human beings.
By standing behaviorism on its head, Morell brings the world of nature brilliantly alive in a nuanced, deeply felt appreciation of the human-animal bond, and she shares her admiration for the men and women who have simultaneously chipped away at what we think makes us distinctive while offering a glimpse of where our own abilities come from.

Animal Wise is Wise Indeed

Although I love anecdotes that provide glimpses into the presumed thoughts and feelings of animals, I also like to see what comparative psychologists, primatologists, ethnologists, and others have to say as well. Animal Wise does an excellent job of providing a survey about what published studies by these researchers have to say. Although it would be easy for such a survey to become dry and academic, Morell is an accomplished science writer (think Nat Geo) who does a good job of making this information interesting and accessible to a lay audience. Along the way she tours what is known about animals you are likely to be somewhat familiar with - you know, dogs, chimpanzees, elephants, and porpoises, but she also covers animals and creatures you are probably less familiar with, like ants, fish, and birds (especially crows!).

What surprised me the most about reading Animal Wise is that Morell explores the philosophical and moral implications of animal intelligence: To the extent that there is evolutionary continuity at a physical level, what does it mean that there is also intellectual and emotional continuity between humans and other animals? What if any bearing do these issues have on how we treat and how we eat these animals?

If books of this type are of interest, check out "Our Inner Ape" by Frans de Waal.

Beautiful insights into the minds of animals

What did you love best about Animal Wise?

I was tempted to say I was blown away by this sensitive and informative book about the inner minds and emotions of animals. But I'm not really. For anyone who loves and respects animals, this is more a confirmation of what we may have suspected than a surprise.

Virginia Morrell does a wonderful job of explaining some of the ways humans have been discouraged from believing in the intelligence and emotional connections of animals. She then goes on to explore case after case where people (scientists usually) who have spent great time studying certain kinds of animals have learned about what creative, intelligent and interactive lives they have. (Think Jane Goodall, but with every species...insects, birds, fish, mammals...)

In the beginning she states that we study animals' minds as a "better way to share the earth with our fellow creatures." And as she lays out her findings, one is repeatedly reminded that they *are* our fellow creatures.

This book may leave hunters, lab experimenters, even maybe just meat eaters re-thinking some of their positions. But whether that happens or not, it is undeniable that the book will leave you feeling amazed and far more respectful of our other animal kin.

Kirsten Potter does an excellent job of narrating, but I did find myself wondering what it might have been like if the author had read it herself. I am sure I will listen to this over and over.

Highly recommend!

Utterly Fascinating

Animal cognition is such an enlightening field of study. Surprising that it took us so long to get around to it. This book presents some snapshots of cognition projects encompassing a wide range of animal species (mammals, fish, birds, insects) from around the globe. Engrossing read!

"The Age Of Animals..."

That is what Mark Bekoff, author of Wild Justice, calls the twenty-first century, anticipating a growing awareness of animal cognition and emotion, along with a growing awareness of how close we really are in relation to animals and the way they live. Like Bekoff's Wild Justice and Dale Peterson's The Moral Lives Of Animals, Morell uses a wonderful combination of anecdote, science and philosophy to weave together a plausible argument that animals not only think and feel more like we do than we before believed, but that they, too, possess their own forms of morality, which, in most instances, very much resemble ours as well. Anyone who has spent a lot of time around animals knows that it is true, but we are just now fighting our way out of Descartes' famous proclamation that animals are simply "elaborate machines" without REAL thoughts and feelings. It is good to see a growing body of literature that, at last, contradicts that and publicizes what a lot of us knew by simple observation and interactions with our fellow beings.

Amazing!!!

It was such a beautiful book that really makes one appericate all forms of life. I will and have already recommended this book to anyone willing to listen. I truly believe that if humans start to value animals more as intelligent creatures many of the problems we have today may cease to exist.