Status
Call number
Collection
Publication
Description
Nature. Science. Nonfiction. HTML: "Like The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben's The Inner Life of Animals will rock your world. Surprising, humbling, and filled with delight, this book shows us that animals think, feel and know in much the same way as we do�??and that their lives are, to them, as precious as ours are to us."""Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an OctopusThrough vivid stories of devoted pigs, two-timing magpies, and scheming roosters, The Inner Life of Animals weaves the latest scientific research into how animals interact with the world with Peter Wohlleben's personal experiences in forests and fields.Horses feel shame, deer grieve, and goats discipline their kids. Ravens call their friends by name, rats regret bad choices, and butterflies choose the very best places for their children to grow up.In this, his latest book, Peter Wohlleben follows the hugely successful The Hidden Life of Trees with insightful stories into the emotions, feelings, and intelligence of animals around us. Animals are different from us in ways that amaze us""and they are also much closer to us than we ever would have thought.Published in partnership with the David Suzuki Institute.… (more)
User reviews
Yet Wohlleben does provide plenty of surprises. Slime molds can find their way through a maze. Bees can remember people. Butterflies can detect the age of plants. Chickens dream. A horse’s whinny can mean different things depending on its pitch. Many animals, he says, have a sense of fairness.
Ornithologists have found shy tits have at least one advantage over more aggressive tits: They notice things their more extroverted, quickly-moving fellows do not, such as seeds left over from the previous summer. (It occurs to me that introverted humans also notice things missed by extroverts.)
Wohlleben manages a forest in Germany, so sensitivity to trees should come with the territory. But forests have a variety of animal life, and his family has owned numerous pets, as well as those goats shown on the cover of his book. So his own observations fill out the book, while the results of many scientific studies, as interpreted by the author, make up most of the text. And Wohlleben tends to interpret those findings in such a way that emphasizes an animal’s intelligence and sensitivity. Other people, such as those who hunt, fish or operate slaughterhouses, might interpret them differently, or more likely ignore them altogether.
The latest scientific research and observations though is uncovering a very different story. Lots are known about dolphins and whales though we and not very far down the road of understanding what is being said, and it turns out there are a lot of other animals that communicate in one way or another but there is another world that is slowly being revealed. They have discovered instances of animals feeling shame, sadness, regret and as well as the way they can consciously select partners.
I really enjoyed Peter Wohlleben's first book, The Hidden Life Of Trees, a subject he knows a lot about having been a forester for around three decades, and the intimacy of his knowledge there shines like a blade of sunlight through the glade. With this, he is out of his comfort zone somewhat and even though he is drawing on personal experience and scientific research to highlight just how animals behave. Whilst it may have a grounding in science, this is primarily anecdotal evidence and also shows how we as humans project our not fully understood emotions and habits onto all sorts of different species. Still worth reading as some of the stories in here are quite entertaining.