Wild animal thinking and feeling
Carl Safina, a trained seabird ecologist, writes in his new book “Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel”, that much published behavioural science continues to adopt neutral language that downplays animal emotion. This can be actively misleading. We should see the value of using the same language for grief, friendship, joy, empathy and other emotions in accounting for animals’ behaviour as we do for humans. He explores the constrained lives of most intelligent mammals, especially focusing on elephants, wolves, dolphins and orcas in a series of reports from the field, where the conservation biologists fight against the odds to protect the few that remain.
Safina has sought to inspire respect and improved understanding of wildlife. He delves deeply into the lives of animals, witnessing their capacity for perception, thought and emotion. His observation and new understanding of animal brain functioning, effectively erases many previously held distinctions between human and other animals. Who we are to individuals depends on who we are to others, and on who others are to us. Certain non-human, too, live lives focused around rich social relationships. If tragedy befalls key individual, survivors brazen out lasting repercussions.
“ I want to know what they are experiencing, and why to us they feel so compelling, and so-close. This time I allowed myself to ask the question that for a scientist was forbidden fruit: who are you?
In Beyond Words, readers travel to Amboseli National Park in the threatened landscape of Kenya and witness struggling elephant families work out how to survive poaching and drought, then to Yellowstone National Park to observe wolves sort out the aftermath of one pack’s personal tragedy and finally plunge into the peaceful society of killer whales living in crystalline waters of Pacific Northwest.
In Beyond Words Carl Safina projects powerful and illuminating insight into the unique personalities of animals through extraordinary stories of animal grief, jealousy, joy , anger and love. He also illustrates the similarity between human and nonhuman consciousness, self awareness and empathy call us to re-evaluate how we interact with animals.
“Another big group of dolphins has just surfaced alongside our moving vessel – leaping and splashing and calling mysteriously back and forth in their squally, whistlely way, with many babies swift alongside their mothers” Safin explains about dolphins
“Finally I saw that very land itself had risen, that the sunbaked land had taken from as something vast and alive and was in motion. The land walked as magnitudes, their strides so utterly of the earth that they seemed the source of the very dust.”.
Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina, Souvenir Press £20, 480 pages.