Beyond Words What Animals Think and Feel

by Safina, Carl

• ISBN13: 9780805098884
• ISBN10: 0805098887
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-07-14
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Summary

I wanted to know what they were experiencing, and why to us they feel so compelling, and so-close. This time I allowed myself to ask them the question that for a scientist was forbidden fruit: Who are you?

Weaving decades of field observations with exciting new discoveries about the brain, Carl Safina's landmark book offers an intimate view of animal behavior to challenge the fixed boundary between humans and nonhuman animals. 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 astonishingly peaceful society of killer whales living in the crystalline waters of the Pacific Northwest.

Beyond Words brings forth powerful and illuminating insight into the unique personalities of animals through extraordinary stories of animal joy, grief, jealousy, anger, and love. The similarity between human and nonhuman consciousness, self-awareness, and empathy calls us to re-evaluate how we interact with animals. Wise, passionate, and eye-opening at every turn, Beyond Words is ultimately a graceful examination of humanity's place in the world.

Author Biography

Carl Safina is author of six books, including Song for the Blue Ocean, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Eye of the Albatross, Voyage of the Turtle, and The View From Lazy Point. Safina is founding president of Blue Ocean Institute at Stony Brook University, where he also co-chairs the University's Center for Communicating Science.

His work has also been featured in The New York Times, and National Geographic and a new Foreword to Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us.

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE: INTO THE MIND FIELDS 1

PART ONE: TRUMPETS OF ELEPHANTS 5
The Big Question 9
The Same Basic Brain 16
Distinctly Human? 25
Deep and Ancient Circuits 31
We Are Family 36
Motherhood Happens 42
Do Elephants Love Their Babies? 49
Elephant Empathy 58
Good Grief 66
I Don't Know How You Say Good-bye 75
I Say Hello 86
Holding Back, Letting Go 95
Troubled Minds 100
Ebony and Ivory 108
Where Baby Elephants Come From 126

PART TWO: HOWLS OF WOLVES 137
Into the Pleistocene 139
A Perfect Wolf 143
Packing and Unpacking 151
The Wolf Named Six 160
A Shattering of Promises 167
In a Time of Truce 177
Magnificent Outcasts 183
Where the Wolf Birds Lead Us 191
Wolf Music 200
The Hunter Is a Lonely Heart 210
A Will to Live 216
Domestic Servants 221
Two Ends of the Same Leash 229

PART THREE: WHINES AND PET PEEVES 241
Never Mind Theory 243
Sex, Lies, and Humiliated Seabirds 250
Conceit and Deceit 258
Chuckles and Wacky Ideas 266
Mirror, Mirror 273
And Speaking of Neurons 280
People of an Ancient Nation 286

PART FOUR: KILLER WAILS 295
Sea Rex 297
A More Complex Killer 304
Just Very Sexual 308
Inner Visions 316
Diverse Minds 325
Intelligent in What Way? 336
The Social Brain 345
Woo-Woo 351
Helping in Mind 367
Do Not Disturb 375
To Have and to Hold 383
Expect Personality 392
A Vision True and Mighty 399

EPILOGUE: FINAL SCRATCH 410

Notes 413
Selected Bibliography 437
Acknowledgments 439
Index 443