Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures

Virginia Morell

Did you know that ants teach, earthworms make decisions, rats love to be tickled and chimps grieve? Did you know that some dogs have thousand-word vocabularies and that birds practise songs in their sleep? That crows improvise tools, blue jays plan ahead and moths remember living as caterpillars? Animal Wise takes us on a dazzling odyssey into the inner world of animals, from ants to elephants to wolves, and from sharp-shooting archerfish to pods of dolphins that rumble like rival street gangs. With 30 years of experience covering the sciences, Virginia Morell uses her formidable gifts as a story-teller to transport us to field sites and laboratories around the world, introducing us to pioneering animal-cognition researchers and their surprisingly intelligent and sensitive subjects. She explores how this rapidly evolving, controversial field has only recently overturned old notions about why animals behave as they do. She probes the moral and ethical dilemmas of recognising that even 'lesser animals' have cognitive abilities such as memory, feelings, personality and self-awareness-traits that many in the twentieth century felt were unique to human beings. By standing behaviourism on its head, Morell brings the world of nature brilliantly alive in a nuanced, deeply felt appreciation of human-animal bond.