Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures [Kindle Edition] Author: Virginia Morell | Language: English | ISBN:
B00985DZQ4 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Have you ever wondered what it is like to be a fish? Or a parrot, dolphin, or an 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 and rats love to be tickled. They’ve discovered that dogs have thousand-word vocabularies 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 and among the pioneering researchers who are leading the way into once-forbidden territory: the animal mind. Morell uses her formidable gifts as a storyteller 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. In this surprising and moving book, Morell brings the world of nature brilliantly alive in a nuanced, deeply felt appreciation of the human-animal bond.
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- File Size: 1707 KB
- Print Length: 304 pages
- Publisher: Crown (February 26, 2013)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00985DZQ4
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #67,942 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #8
in Books > Science & Math > Biological Sciences > Zoology > Animal Psychology - #19
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Biological Sciences > Zoology - #19
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Biological Sciences > Zoology
- #8
in Books > Science & Math > Biological Sciences > Zoology > Animal Psychology - #19
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Biological Sciences > Zoology - #19
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Biological Sciences > Zoology
The book is a well written interweaving of scientific, philosophical, and ethical reflections about animals combined with stories and interviews about events and experiments related to whether or not animals think and feel. I like the way that the author shows a kind of methodological bias that predisposes the researcher to not believing that animals can think and feel, a criterion that would make it hard to prove that we can think and feel (similar to the behaviorist arguments of B. F. Skinner proposed in BEYOND FREEDOM AND DIGNITY). The author further goes into several select experiments to do prove, to me, that animals can think and feel. There are some choice quotes seeded throughout the book and are designed to provoke some thinking of our own about the subject, like (page 50):
"Intelligent circuitry can be assembled in any brain, that's my big belief," Schuster said, where he did several of his archerfish studies. (He's since moved to Bayreuth.) "It's not limited to those animals with large brains and many neurons," he said. "if evolution requires it [this kind of intelligent circuitry], it will be assembled--even with a small number of neurons."
And (page 96):
"People have wondered about this for centuries," Berg said. In captivity, he added, parrots do not simply react when humans speak to them (as dogs, cats, chimpanzees, and other animals do); they also articulate responses, almost as if talking back, and sometimes even use words in the correct context; as Alex did. "Those kinds of vocalizations absolutely send a shiver up the spine of cognitive scientists," Berg said, because they suggest that parrots have some innate understanding of the purpose and functions of words as sounds that convey meaning.
Do animal have minds? Are they aware of themselves as entities? Do they love? Grieve? Are lower-order animals capable of learning, or do they just operate on instinct? How much of our thinking and emotions do we share with our fellow creatures, and how much is uniquely human? Those who have loved furry companions tend to one extreme; those not fortunate enough to have had a relationship with a non-human companion tend to the other and may regard most animals as little more than a mobile bundle of instincts. In Animal Wise, science and nature writer Virginia Morell follows the work of dedicated scientists trying to learn the truth about the inner lives of animals from ants to dolphins and chimps.
Each chapter is devoted to the work on a particular species. It begins with ants and runs through fish, parrotlets, parrots, rats (who laugh!), elephants, dolphins (both wild and captive), chimpanzees and other primates, and finally dogs and wolves. Interestingly, Morell, who lives with both cats and dogs, notes that little work has been done on cognition in cats, an omission that I would infer might derive from the innate nature of the subjects as much as a lack of interest.
There are many different things to enjoy in Animal Wise. The animal behavior she documents is delightful and often touching, whether it be archer fish bringing down their prey by squirting them with jets of water or dolphins helping injured members of their species. Equally fascinating are Morell's descriptions of the extremes to which the scientists must go to carry out their work. For example, she recounts the almost bizarrely painstaking process whereby Dr. Nigel Franks and his teams paint tiny dots on the bodies of ants so that they can identify individuals in the course of their study.
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