When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals Paperback – Unabridged Author: Visit Amazon's Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0385314280 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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From Publishers Weekly
An examination of the inner lives of animals, arguing that they possess an emotional sensibility not unlike that of humans.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
YA?Animals do in fact lead emotional lives, according to Masson. He has managed to find hundreds of anecdotes from the published works and field studies of such noted behaviorists as Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Cynthia Moss that support his theory. It seems that, despite the fact that anthropomorphism is among the worst of scientific taboos, these respected scientists cannot help but notice the similarities between human and animal behavior. Chapters are organized by topic, such as fear, love, grief, and even compassion and beauty. An index provides access by species and by personal name of both people and animals. An excellent resource in psychology, this title will also be a useful addition for animal research. Its clear and conversational style makes it interesting for general readers as well. A well-documented, compelling, and thought-provoking defense of animal emotions.?Robin Deffendall, Prince William Public Library System, Manassas, VA
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: Delta (May 2, 1996)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0385314280
- ISBN-13: 978-0385314282
- Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
In "When Elephants Weep", author Jeffrey Moussaief Masson attempts to demonstrate that humans are far from being the only animals to lead complex emotional lives. If someone wanted to make a case for animal rights, it would probably have a greater chance of success if it were based on animal intelligence, as that is much easier to prove and quantify than emotions. But there is already a body of literature on animal intelligence, and many researchers continue to pursue an understanding in that area. This is why Jeffrey Masson has written a book on animal emotions. It is a topic that is very much underrepresented in literature, probably because the idea of animal emotions is much vilified in the scientific community. The content of "When Elephants Weep" comprises, almost entirely, evidence of the existence of emotions -some primitive, some complex- in animals other than humans. Most of the evidence is anecdotal, although there are some examples of controlled studies as well. Most of the emotions that are discussed fit into these broad categories: fear, hope, love, sadness, grief, rage, compassion, shame, aesthetic appreciation, and a sense of justice. Apart from the evidence presented, the text contains a lot of criticism of the scientific community's staunch reluctance to acknowledge the existence of emotions in animals on the basis that any such idea would be anthropomorphic. But the fact is that the scientific community can no more prove the existence of emotions in humans than it can in animals. And it will not be able to do so until it possesses the technology to identify and detect the neuropathways responsible for emotions. Until then, we accept that humans have emotions based on their behavior and our own experience.
I love animals. Anyone who has ever lived with a dog, cat, horse, or many other species of animals knows that they have emotions. Some humans just don't have the time or the heart to respond to them. This book deserved to be so much better than it actually was. Great idea executed poorly. "When Elephants Weep" ended up being too much of an intellectual discussion about what is wrong with the human race and is written from a sophomoric slant enough to bore all but the most devout pop psychology buff to complete and utter insanity. In the first two chapters, authors Susan McCarthy and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson just rail on unfeeling humans (there is actually a chapter entitled "Unfeeling Brutes") and all we get for over 40 pages is a diatribe against the scientific community. The author even goes so far to discuss the deficiencies in Freudian psychology in the area of human child sexual abuse, but never fully explains why this is relevant to the topic of the book.
Opinions, opinions, and more opinions. I kept waiting for even moderately detailed, heartwarming accounts of animal emotions and all I got were short burst of dry, clinical accounts of various animals followed by paragraphs and paragraphs of human psychology. The main author Masson has a PhD in Sanskrit. Maybe he should stick to something he knows about, because he doesn't demonstrate that he knows anything about emotion in this book - animal or otherwise. This book is overwrought, poorly written, not well thought out, disorganized, doesn't make a good argument for animal emotions (which deserves one), and doesn't do anything to seriously convince the scientific community why they should study this subject more closely. Books like this actually hurt the cause more than they promote it. I just can't believe he got this published.
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