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tjwallace04 's review for:
The Inner Life of Animals
by Peter Wohlleben
I picked "The Inner Life of Animals" by Peter Wohlleben as a book to read for #scienceseptember. I love animals. I am interested in science. It seemed like the perfect pick! Little did I know...there is not much actual science in this book.
"The Inner Life of Animals" is an interesting and very readable book. It has 41 short chapters about how animals experience the world and whether they feel different emotions; chapters like "Gratitude," "Lies and Deception," "Grief," "Pain," "Just for Fun," and "Good and Evil." Wohllenberg's underlying thesis is that animals experience the world very similarly to humans.
But each chapter is mostly just a series of anecdotes, many from Wohllenberg's own life. Wohllenberg is clearly knowledgeable about animals; he is a forest manager in Germany who cares for domestic animals like goats, horses, and dogs, as well as having the opportunity to observe many wild animals like red deer, boar, wood mice, and various birds. But the anecdotes are just anecdotes. He occasionally will refer to an actual experiment or vetted research on one of the topics, but the book is mostly his pleasant, enthusiastic observations. For example, the chapter on "Grief" is a story about how mother deer will return again and again to the spot where a fawn died, even if the body is no longer there. Touching? Yes. Does it convince me that deer feel grief the same way humans do? No.
But hey! I still enjoyed the book. Even though it wasn't what I was expecting. I feel like I have a bunch of random conversation starters about animals now. (Me, by the punch bowl at a party: "Ma'am, did you know that there are carnivorous mice on Gough Island that team up to attack and eat albatross chicks 200 times their size? Excuse me...where are you going, ma'am?")
"The Inner Life of Animals" is an interesting and very readable book. It has 41 short chapters about how animals experience the world and whether they feel different emotions; chapters like "Gratitude," "Lies and Deception," "Grief," "Pain," "Just for Fun," and "Good and Evil." Wohllenberg's underlying thesis is that animals experience the world very similarly to humans.
But each chapter is mostly just a series of anecdotes, many from Wohllenberg's own life. Wohllenberg is clearly knowledgeable about animals; he is a forest manager in Germany who cares for domestic animals like goats, horses, and dogs, as well as having the opportunity to observe many wild animals like red deer, boar, wood mice, and various birds. But the anecdotes are just anecdotes. He occasionally will refer to an actual experiment or vetted research on one of the topics, but the book is mostly his pleasant, enthusiastic observations. For example, the chapter on "Grief" is a story about how mother deer will return again and again to the spot where a fawn died, even if the body is no longer there. Touching? Yes. Does it convince me that deer feel grief the same way humans do? No.
But hey! I still enjoyed the book. Even though it wasn't what I was expecting. I feel like I have a bunch of random conversation starters about animals now. (Me, by the punch bowl at a party: "Ma'am, did you know that there are carnivorous mice on Gough Island that team up to attack and eat albatross chicks 200 times their size? Excuse me...where are you going, ma'am?")