Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

A great read, absolutely fascinating and well written as well as backed up by proper research and facts. The author has done a great job and I love how he successfully manages to avoid falling for the typical traps that await someone writing such a book (full on anthropomorphism, for example).

Hats off!

This book is truly amazing and should be required reading for "sport" hunters and people who try to deny the intelligence of the animals we share this world with. The stories and observations shared by the author are nothing short of astounding. It's at times a difficult read given the terrible treatment many animals share at the hands of humans, but fortunately the stories of positive interactions and hope make it possible to keep reading.

I compromised by giving this book four stars. It deserves five stars for the depth and breadth of the stunning information and the exciting unfolding of the various "inside stories." But I'd give it three stars for the end-of-animal-chapter "ramblings."

I have not finished the book, having thus far read about only elephants and wolves (over-the-top fascinating, fabulous, and eye opening). I'm taking a break from it before picking up again. But when I do pick it up again, and I will, I'll just skim the end-sections that I found to be hard to read (boring).

I'd recommend this book to just about anyone (taking into consideration my caveat re: ramblings). I do think, though, that some religious folks could take exception to some of the information.

Ah, a tough review to write!

Very interesting and thought provoking. But the author spent a bit too much time focusing on man's destruction of animals (elephants, wolves, whales, etc.); it became more of a political plea than an unbiased discussion of what animals think and feel.

If more people understood our planet the way that Carl Safina understands it the quality of life would improve for everyone and every thing. Beautifully written, seasoned with quotable lines,it should be recommended (if not required) reading for middle school children and their caregivers.

An absolutely fantastic read! Everything the mainstream reviews have said about this book is true. I have little to add, except that I found it first rate from both a behavioral science as well as a literary viewpoint. Simply a pleasure to read--and understand.

Beyond Words, by Carl Safina, is an exquisitely written book that moved me to tears and laughter and sheer outrage.
Safina challenges the notion that animals don’t think or feel through field observations and scientific studies. During his own research, he allowed himself to ask a dangerous question: Who are you? Such a question has the power to bring us closer to animals because it forces us to see beyond the four legs, fins, or a tail.

An animal is a “who” because that one life is entwined with other lives, whether it is an elephant, wolf, chimpanzee, or a whale. “When others recognize and depend on certain individuals, when a death makes the difference for individuals who survive, when relationships define us, we have traveled across a certain blurry boundary in the history of life on Earth—‘it’ has become ‘who’.”

Safina introduces the reader to elephants of Amboseli in Kenya, wolves of Yellowstone Park, and killer whales in the Pacific Northwest ocean, and with vivid, haunting, riveting detail drops us off in the middle of their heartbreaking struggles against humans. At turns uplifting, astounding, and shocking, the reader gets a close-up view of what happens when humans assert power and control in worlds where they truly don’t belong.

The premise that animals have feelings and thoughts, that they experience joy and grief and jealousy, which make them more “like us” than we have ever imagined, is supported by breakthrough discoveries of the brain--not to mention Safina's personal experiences with animals. The stories involve more than elephants, wolves, and killer whales. The emotional lives of tortoises, bonobos, razorbills, Russian foxes, chimps, mallard ducks, seagulls and many more species are illustrated in the book.

In among the astonishing animal stories are scientific data that discuss concepts such as “mirror neurons,” “theory of mind,” and science of cognition. Studies that thoroughly set the stage and, dare I say, provide strong evidence for animal intelligence, emotional and intellectual. Anyone who has had a personal experience with an animal would be hard-pressed to dispute any of the data presented--much of it simply makes sense.

This book is a gem for anyone who is passionate about the wild kingdom, brain research, or conservation issues. Safina is a brilliant, knowledgable writer who keeps the reader captivated with his first love “seeing what animals do, and asking why they do it.” Emotional and intellectual lives of animals make for a fascinating read.

Beyond Words, by Carl Safina, is an exquisitely written book that moved me to tears and laughter and sheer outrage.
Safina challenges the notion that animals don’t think or feel through field observations and scientific studies. During his own research, he allowed himself to ask a dangerous question: Who are you? Such a question has the power to bring us closer to animals because it forces us to see beyond the four legs, fins, or a tail.

An animal is a “who” because that one life is entwined with other lives, whether it is an elephant, wolf, chimpanzee, or a whale. “When others recognize and depend on certain individuals, when a death makes the difference for individuals who survive, when relationships define us, we have traveled across a certain blurry boundary in the history of life on Earth—‘it’ has become ‘who’.”

Safina introduces the reader to elephants of Amboseli in Kenya, wolves of Yellowstone Park, and killer whales in the Pacific Northwest ocean, and with vivid, haunting, riveting detail drops us off in the middle of their heartbreaking struggles against humans. At turns uplifting, astounding, and shocking, the reader gets a close-up view of what happens when humans assert power and control in worlds where they truly don’t belong.

The premise that animals have feelings and thoughts, that they experience joy and grief and jealousy, which make them more “like us” than we have ever imagined, is supported by breakthrough discoveries of the brain--not to mention Safina's personal experiences with animals. The stories involve more than elephants, wolves, and killer whales. The emotional lives of tortoises, bonobos, razorbills, Russian foxes, chimps, mallard ducks, seagulls and many more species are illustrated in the book.

In among the astonishing animal stories are scientific data that discuss concepts such as “mirror neurons,” “theory of mind,” and science of cognition. Studies that thoroughly set the stage and, dare I say, provide strong evidence for animal intelligence, emotional and intellectual. Anyone who has had a personal experience with an animal would be hard-pressed to dispute any of the data presented--much of it simply makes sense.

This book is a gem for anyone who is passionate about the wild kingdom, brain research, or conservation issues. Safina is a brilliant, knowledgable writer who keeps the reader captivated with his first love “seeing what animals do, and asking why they do it.” Emotional and intellectual lives of animals make for a fascinating read.

Safina examines what we know, what we think we know and what we do not know about how animals think and feel. He traces our misguided ideas from the past including the beliefs that allowed the barbaric practice of vivisection to the newest discoveries of the present.

As a scientist Safina has struggled with what science is able to prove to the satisfaction of many scientists and what he finds undeniable if we will observe and interact with animals. The more closely we examine animal behavior the more undeniable it becomes that they do think and feel. One an even see behaviors in animals that are human like. Here he must struggle with those who warn against anthropomorphizing animals. He does not favor doing this and maintains they are their own species and they think and feel their own way, though there are often surprising similarities to humans.

He closely examines work being done with wild elephants in wildlife refuges in Africa, wolves in Yellowstone Park and finally Orca whales (which are actually dolphins) in Puget Sound. We see how all these highly social animals behave, interact and obviously feel. He brings us the great joy in seeing these animals express happiness, sadness, grief, and other powerful emotions as well as how immensely smart they can be. However he also brings us the deep sadness in seeing how we are killing these animals at such a rate that they face almost certain extinction.

This book is highly informative and moving. It will make you smile and it will make you cry. It is an outstanding book.

I've been entertained by Orcas while making the ferry crossing from Victoria, BC, to Vancouver. The walls of my work room are adorned by a pair of framed Bob Talbot prints. I haven't quite as much on elephants but do have a far from complete draft of speculative fiction with an orca and an elephant members of a cyberspace tech team. And I have other attachments to Canis lupus subspecies. So I started out with plenty of sympathy for the case Safina would pull together. Maybe more importantly, I had just finished Robert G B Reid's 2007 Biological Emergences: Evolution by Natural Experiment (Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology) which I will review separately but which comes to the same key point: life forms necessarily have much more in common than they have surface differences. At least I can now leave that story in short form and rely on these two powerfully made arguments as it serves as a pillar from which to present an even wider accounting.

Safina tells his story in four parts. Having not looked ahead, there was a moment near the middle of the third part where I wondered whether it would be all down hill from there, but that part bounced back with a couple of arguments I want to shout out. Then the final part moved to Orcas and convinced me it was an even bigger driver of his thinking than the first two, albeit one he wanted to treat even more carefully because of certain anecdotal evidence which deeply challenges certain staples of rationalist dogma. I'm more than happy to often be wrong and willing to concede in the face of evidence and even accept that that is a bigger challenge for upholders of broad consensus. However even the most skeptical reader of Safina's argument should accept that the way Skinner's behaviourism corrupted scientific practice for a couple of human generations, has done and continues to do massive harm to our fellow inhabitants of this ball of rock.

The first part is built around the life stories of African elephant families as they continue to be disrupted by human commandeering of territory to support growing populations and the never permanently terminated ivory trade. They and their relatives were almost unchallenged on land across much of the planet until our penchant for organisation triggered a first wave of mass extinctions and now our everyday more violent "sporting" weapons rush to finish the job. The underlying message is that each elephant is a who? not a what? and that the individual character of each animal is common across not just the iconic species featured most in this book, but maybe better thought of as a more general norm.

The second part focuses on the wolves reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park, the immense ecological consequences of which have been widely seen in a video narrated by George Monbiot (Vimeo 86466357). Safina focuses more on their family life in which the young stay around to help feed their younger siblings with the alpha female and male monopolising breeding until they are replaced. All too often, that replacement follows sad encounters with fearful humans outside the park's boundaries. We are also reminded that our much loved dogs are a domesticated subspecies.

The third part deviated into tackling the nonsense that is still peddled by some behaviourist holdouts who demand other animals pass tests they imagine are designed for humans, but which can even have a significant element of cultural dependence within our species. Testing even bonobos on how well they recognise individual humans has been shown in recent years to be a lot less useful than observing how well they recognise individuals of their own kind. Safina entertainingly demolishes both the mirror test and the "theory of mind" as products of no proper human thought. An interesting corollary is the growing number of other species found to be able to recognise and respond differently to individual humans.

But it was the final part that really raises the stakes. It now looks as though there are up to eight separate species of Ornicus, of which one or none might finish up with the orca monicker. While looking similar, there are major dietary distinctions which may have started out cultural but I expect are now amplified by their gut microflora. Some specialise in salmon, others in sharks, others in penguins and others in mammals. Despite being as well equipped for predation as Tyrannosaurus rex, no orca has ever harmed a human in open water. Of course they are also big dolphins and I've been privileged to have one experience diving with dolphins which convinced me they could see right through me, and when you think about their facility for sonar imaging and our skin likely not casting much of a shadow between the human bag of mostly water and the ocean we submerge in, this too should not be a surprise. What is a worse surprise is the degree to which our disruption of ocean food chains coupled with our holler that thou military and mineral industries' proclivity to use heavy duty sonar and live fire bombs indiscriminately is putting these masters of the ocean at risk of being their kind's last generation. The late Douglas Adams may have scored one more point for prescience with So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish: Hitchhiker's Guide 4: 4/5

A surprisingly moving and poetic exploration on the topic of individuality in animals. The author is a Doctor of Ecology, and co-chairs the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, and I can certainly see why Mr. Alda (who is one of the best ambassadors of science alive today) chose Dr. Safina for that role. The book teems with facts presented through narrative accounts of the author's journeys through the savanna, the ocean, and the forest as he encounters people working closely with elephants, whales, wolves, and a diverse cast of other creatures, all in an effort to understand how these beings perceive their world and themselves. I was caught off-guard by the poignancy of this book. At times, the attempted poetry in the prose doesn't always come off, but it is only through taking the number of chances that Dr. Safina does that he succeeds as often as he has in this book. A deeply important topic, handled with expert care by a knowledgeable guide. Though I have read a number of more scholarly books on this topic, none have left me feeling as profoundly moved and enlightened as this one. Highly recommended.

Reading from the perspective of a non-specialist in animal behavior, this is an impressively elegant introduction to both the inner and outer lives of animals. On one level, this book is a disciplinary argument, claiming that animal behavoralists have been unwilling to go beyond the external analysis of behavior to consider the interior lives of animals. He thinks we have enough data to make some confident surmises about some aspects of their interior lives. Safina argues that long-term observation of animal behavior can yield insights to animals' inner lives and that our intuitive sense that they have such inner lives - that they can express love, feeling, humor, distress - is genuine. He interviews scientists and others who have observed specific groups - elephants, wolves, and killer whale - over many years and decades; their observations show that animals not only exist in specific social organizations (matriarchies, for example, in elephants) but that they engage in personality behaviors (alliances, conflicts) as much as we do. Sadly, much of the book also chronicles how human predation and encroachment into their habitats have upended these family structures and have propelled a catastrophic amount of species loss. A little on the long side, Safina's book nonetheless conveys both the magnificence and relatability of these magnificent beings and their tragic fragility.

One of the most profound and truly important books I've ever read.

Full disclosure: I recently interviewed Carl Safina for our Inspire Nation Show.

I feel this book is so important, everyone should read it, and it should be required reading in the classroom. We have so much to learn from the animals, about how to live, to care for each other, and for the planet.

And this book shares how we are not alone at the top of the 'animal kingdom' or not animals, but in-fact that we are all brothers and sisters, whether an elephant, wolf, killer whale, or anything else. This is a life-changing understanding, with profound, deep, and important impacts in our lives.

I can't recommend this book enough, and if you're taking a trip, this would be the book to take with you.

I took delight in Carl Safina's talent in writing. Many a turn of phrase brought an appreciative smile to my face.

But most of all I loved the amazing collection of stories. He has spent quality time with several highly devoted animal researchers who watch and record observations of wild animals. Those folks identify not only the different bands or packs, but also get to know the animals as individuals. Some can identify up to 100 animals just by sight because they watch them so much and know the animals so well. They know who the leaders are, what personal style of leadership they use, and how their group responds. They notice who interacts with whom in the group, who is a parent to which youngsters, etc. The individual animals seemed as real as any characters in a good novel, but these were true stories. I felt a proud sadness when "The Perfect Wolf" died such a noble death.

Throughout, it is well demonstrated that the animals have an intelligence that is equal to ours in many ways, and theirs just comes in a different form. This is a major theme throughout the book. The three main sections are about elephants, wolves, and killer whales, but even birds and insects had their stories, too.

If you like animals or are interested in the mysteries of "mind," you'd like this book.

Good book, but too much "defense" of the research. I wasn''t sure if this book should be read by scholars/scientists or laypersons. It didn't seem to find a voice for either, but seemed to be an appear to either depending on which paragraph was being read.

Most of the magnificent large mammals we teach our children about will be extinct soon unless we recognize that' we are both responsible for their downfall and have the power to help their continued existence. The book illustrates how alike all we living creatures are in our priorities: caring for our families and communities, experiencing emotions, pain and joy, hunger and play, grief and sadness.
It also shows how needlessly and carelessly we are treating our shared world...our shared habitat. Safin asks that we live more humanely.

The writing is clear and often inspired, but the power of the book is in the mind-opening realizations the reader is confronted with over and over again concerning many of the creatures with whom we share this beautiful planet. The sorrow I feel at our careless and ignorant disruption and destruction of so many fascinating lives and rich societies is now much keener and deeper, but so is my determination to do what I can to wake people up to the wonders around us - before they are all gone.

I was surprised at the scope of this book. Safina has done an enormous amount of research and makes it understandable to all. I appreciate that he addresses compelling theories not yet proven by science. Sometimes the intelligence and behavior displayed by animals cannot be quantified. He considers viewpoints beyond the scientific method and I appreciate his boldness in asking tough questions.

This book is full of pages that made me pause and simply reflect in awe. One can never think of animals the same way again.

Carl Safina has advocated for those with whom we share our world for a long time and his wonderfully written books have shown us how we are failing to recognize the destruction we are causing. In this new book, he goes further to introduce us not simply to species, but to individuals, making the case that our actions affect other beings who not only share this world with us, but who also share awareness of this world. Ultimately, this is a very sad book as one gradually realizes that the damage we are causing is irreversible, born of our ignorance and our arrogance, driven by our greed and self-cherishing. Our great failure is to not recognize, as the last sentence in the book says, that we are all one.

The subject matter in this book is fascinating. Carl Safina has definitely done the research and his conclusions are well supported and clear. There was a little more scientific detail than I expected, which made Beyond Words a slower read for me. I think that what I most appreciated was the genuine love and respect I felt from the author as I read his words about all the different species in the book. I think it's well worth the read and will appeal to a fairly broad spectrum of readers.
*I received my copy through NetGalley.com in exchange for an honest review.

“Beyond Words” is how I feel trying to describe the remarkable information and beautiful writing in this book. With heartfelt sincerity and science to back it up, this book breaks the long-standing tradition that scientists should only deal with facts that can be tested, and allows us to think about animal individuality, societies, and emotions (in other words, things that may never fit into a study neatly). And it may be those beautifully untestable things that connect most with people and will ultimately be what leads humans to protect other species. I got this book in the library and just finished it last night with tears streaming down my face. I am so reluctant to return the book that I just ordered a copy so I can savor it again. You don't have to be an animal lover to be amazed by this book. You just have to be alive.

This is a brilliant book for those who appreciate animals and even those who don't. My favorite line is that modern humans are a farmed animal themselves. The animals studied are far more gentle and generous than the humans around them.It is sad that we will be the death of them all.