Most people who have observed animals even briefly wouldn’t question their emotional lives and their thriving inner worlds. While anthropomorphic animal tales have populatedRead about another book on the list.storytelling for as long as humanity has existed, in Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures — part of my collaboration with The New York Public Library — science writer Virginia Morell takes us on an unprecedented tour of laboratories around the world and explores the work of pioneering animal cognition researchers to reveal the scientific basis for our basic intuition about what goes on in the hearts and minds of our fellow beings, from the laughter of rats to the intellectual curiosity of dolphins.
Observing her puppy Quincy invent a game, Morell contextualizes how far the study of animal sentience has come in the last half-century:Why was I surprised when our pup invented a game? I think because at that time, in the late 1980s— not so very long ago—scientists were still stuck on the question “Do animals have minds?” A cautious search was under way for the answer, and the researchers’ caution had spilled over to society at large. In those days, if you suggested that dogs had imaginations or that rats laughed or had some degree of empathy for another’s pain, certain other people (and not just scientists) were likely to sneer at you and accuse you of being sentimental and of anthropomorphizing — interpreting an animal’s behavior as if the creature were a human dressed up in furs or feathers.She goes on to explore how modern science has illuminated such marvels as how birds think, how an elephant’s memory works, how ants learn, and what goes on in the imagination of dolphins.
Read--Coffee with a Canine: Virginia Morell and Buckaroo.
--Marshal Zeringue
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