Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

I have been an avid reader of all of Carl Safina's books and have read all of them at least twice; he is in my top three list of nature/conservation writers and I was very excited when I saw that the topic for his next book would be animal cognition, emotions, and intelligence. As anticipated, Dr. Safina does not disappoint with his latest book "Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel". The book is divided into four distinct sections concerning African Elephants, wolves in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Killer whales in the Pacific Northwest, and a forth section entitled "Whines and Pet Peeves" in which Dr. Safina basically breaks down common "educated" thinking concerning animal cognition and intelligence, sprinkled with anecdotes about his two wonderful dogs Jude and Chula. Dr. Safina spends time in each section of the book with leading researchers and biologists in the field of study for each animal highlighted and discusses the remarkable cultures, family bonds, intelligence, communication abilities, emotions, and so many other fascinating aspects of these animals and also steps back to widen the lens to other species which share similar behaviors, emotions, and intelligence. All this makes for absolutely fascinating reading and I was entranced by the many descriptions of animal intelligence and emotions in which Dr. Safina expresses, all relayed to the reader in his excellent and thought provoking prose. There are a few more depressing parts of the book concerning man and our relationship to the whales, elephants, and wolves (aren't there always) but I think Dr. Safina includes these sections of the book to inspire the reader to do something to help protect and preserve the amazing animals discussed; I was firmly entrenched in that camp long before starting to read this book but hopefully others new to the subject will be inspired by the wonderful writing and passion brought to these parts of the text by Dr. Safina. In summary, "Beyond Words" was an absolutely wonderful reading experience, enlightening, inspiring, infuriating, passionate, educational, and I thank Dr. Safina so much for writing it and bringing this topic to the masses. It will prove to be one of my top reads of 2015 and will sit proudly on my book shelf next to the other works of this wonderful writer. Recommended reading!

Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina Carl Safina’s Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel suggests that we have been asking the wrong questions about animal intelligence. From our human-centric perspective, we have asked: How are other animals are like us? Safina, award winning author and ecologist, has travelled extensively to observe animal behaviors in the wild. In this book, he focuses on elephants in Kenya, wolves in parts of the United States and Canada, before moving on in section three to articulate a concise and stirringly poetic argument for animal intelligence beyond our current understanding. In Kenya, an awe-inspiring range of complex elephant behaviors, relationships and communication inspired him to ask, rather: What are they like? What do they feel? What is it like to be them? What do they mean when they communicate? He argues that without a sense humility and curious kinship with other beings, we have no access to what he so powerfully describes as a word that “sparkles with silent sentiments,” much of it beyond our human range of detection. In section three, Safina outlines some of his pet peeves about current research and methodology, leading him to ask, “Could there really be just one intelligence among us or among species?” (p. 340) In other words, if we can’t even define human intelligence, how can we propose to reduce animal intelligence to a standard series of tests? Ever since Descartes denied the sentience of other beings, objective empiricism insisted that we resist anthropomorphism so devotedly that science has ignored what is most obvious; animals think, feel, love, grieve, mourn, celebrate, play, and suffer, not as we do, but more importantly, in their own way. They are individuals with personalities just as humans are individuals with personalities. Safina points to our sharp scientific division between human brains and other brains as our great hubristic folly. He explains that just as we are closely related to animals physically, we can also assume we are related to them mentally. We are conscious by virtue of the same complex processes, and we are all, as he puts it, on one vast “continuum.” He elaborates on how closely related we are to other animals; that our sentience is part of that continuous family of diverse forms of sentience. Safina concludes his wonderful book with an admission to previously thinking that people who spoke of dogs or other animals as “family” or “friends” as silly. He explains that after years of research and experience with many animals, he feels it would be “silly not to.” His book is one of a very few that truly recognize our planet’s diverse life as a continuous, sentient whole. He offers this perspective not by way of abstraction, but through years of research, relationships, and living in the field seeking to understand that many animals, such as elephants and wolves form complex bonds and social relationships, communicate in a sensory range we cannot even perceive. They can be silly, grieve and celebrate, and love with a depth that we cannot begin to truly fathom. Safina’s thorough and skillfully crafted book invites us on a journey into the world of elephant, wolf, whale, and other animal experiences, compelling us to understand them on their own terms, as selves with meaningful lives that matter as much as human lives do. My own experience as an environmental educator confirms for me how crucial it is that Safina tells his enlightening and poignant stories. Unless humanity grows out of its human exceptionalism and awakens to the sentience and intelligence of other species, we will never become as intelligent a species as we could be, and we will continue to make the same destructive mistakes. Safina’s epilogue holds this sage warning, “Understanding other animals is not a boutique endeavor. Failure will speed their end and a bankrupting of our world.” (p. 411). Truer words were never spoken.

Happy to have been able to purchase this book here from Amazon. Important subject matter in a nice writing style.

I am not the best person to rate this book, but I will give it a try. First of all, the writing is excellent. I am fascinated with elephants and the author's description and analysis of their means of communication, their reaction to their environment and events that occur around them is amazing, thorough and wonderfully descriptive. So I kept reading with great interest. But then it wandered into the world of other animals/species and examined their non-physical natures. All very interesting and much of it quite new to me. It is all based on research by other researchers as well as the author's own observations and branches out far and wide into the animal world. That is when I got a little lost; mainly I lost interest. I am not a researcher/scientist - so my interest and understanding are limited and superficial in the context of this book. I leave it to zoologists to dive deeper into the the weeds on this. However, I must emphasize that I was fascinated and enjoyed reading as far as I did - about 1/3 of the book. I may pick it up again some other time, but for now this is all I could handle.

This book is one that I literally think every human being on the planet without exception should have to read. When you realize what we humans are doing to the world, building and drilling and polluting and killing every last thing we can get our hands on without any restraint or limit, it's of great concern, or should be. This book shows, by observation and fact, that animals are not "just animals" (whatever that means anyway), or things to be used to make money, but thinking, feeling creatures, not human but not all that different. If you think otherwise, you are simply wrong and possibly resistant to the inconvenient truth, in which case I hope you can't vote or reproduce. The book follows a few animals and clearly shows how animals think thoughts, develop relationships, experience fear, terror, pain, depression, mourning for the dead, etc. Yeah, inconvenient but clearly and factually true. We can't avoid killing animals for food and self-defense and such, but there are some animals that we kill for "sport" or fun (Cecil the lion…), for money (poachers for ivory), and there are events in some countries that actually torture animals as if it's a celebration, etc. We've hunted animals to extinction, we are fishing the oceans out and catches diminish, and we hack up and fragment wild areas without realizing (or perhaps troubling ourselves to care about) the implications. So much for our higher intelligence and awareness. Animal lovers are not little old ladies with thirty cats, they simply see and understand what is there. Certainly some people over-humanize animals and read human things into animal behavior, and that is equally incorrect, but this book confirms what many people have suspected or known and is a great read for anyone with an open mind and "human" as we like to think of that word. Safina demonstrates intellectual rigor with crystal-clear insights and analogies, coupled with a lush writing style, it's a well done book. But it is also sad to read what we as a race are doing to creatures not all that different from us. The author does not explicitly condemn people, he understands and conveys why people feel compelled to harm or kill animals, but it's obvious that we need to think differently than we do, and to do so soon or risk destroying things that can't be replaced and who's loss will ultimately affect us directly, in ways we may or may not understand yet.

As biologist Carl Safina shows in Beyond Words, many animals have complex emotional and intellectual lives. Safina invites readers to view animals as individuals who have their own “personalities” (“who, not what”). The chimps and dolphins in Beyond Words are even more interesting than anything in the Uplift novels - and they happen to be real! I’d read Jeffrey Moussaieff Mason and Susan McCarthy’s When Elephants Weep years ago, as well as Cynthia Moss’ books about the Amboseli elephants, so was already on board with the idea that many animals have complex social lives. So, to some extent, I was probably not Safina’s target audience as he spends a considerable amount of time trying to convince readers that animals are individuals. Nevertheless, I found myself in awe at all that we’d learned over the past few decades about animal behavior. Safina does an excellent job conveying the “personality” of individual animals, noting how they react to humans and putting their emotional responses into words that we can understand. Beyond Words is divided into four parts. Three sections focus on elephants, wolves (including dogs), and dolphins (particularly orcas). Researchers have spent decades studying individual behavior amongst these animal groups, so Safina can tell the stories of individual animals in a way that he simply couldn’t with giant squid or even many lesser primates. Reading about orcas who interacted with different humans differently based on the human’s personality was humbling in that they seem to have mastered social skills I and many other people lack. Although Beyond Words isn’t limited to these charismatic megafauna, I would have preferred if the book had spent less time with the “usual suspects.” Throughout the book, Safina brings up examples from throughout the animal kingdom, including chimps, parrots, and turtles. I understand that we have gained much more insight into the lives of elephants and dogs due to proximity, but these are also the “easy cases.” Even most hardened skeptics would admit that elephants and whales have some measure of intelligence and individuality. What truly shocked me was the possibility that even nematodes might. But perhaps that will have to wait for future research. The fourth section of Beyond Words discusses the lab research and neuroscience of animal behavior. Safina spends less time with what we know than about how little we know (and how we often know less than we think we do). As he notes, an elephant is an elephant and has elephant intelligence, not human intelligence, yet most existing scientific tests for animal intelligence are based on human intelligence. This undoubtedly biases the tests against finding animal intelligence. For example, dogs rely more on scent than on vision, so the “mirror test” might not work for a dog because dogs care relatively little about how they appear in a mirror. On the other hand, cetaceans have echolocation abilities that we can barely even imagine. If dolphins were to test human intelligence based on our sense of echolocation, we’d all fail.

I have only read this book once, and its emotional impact was so massive that I need to read it a second time to take away the principles and concepts he illustrates through his examples. The impact of the book comes from its premise, one that I share: that animals are "whos", not "its." And so it is exquisite and thrilling to wade into disinterested, scholarly presentations of fellow creatures' 'who-nesses' but it is equally agonizing to juxtapose those with the ravages our species has so often wrought upon our magnificent fellow creatures. It was difficult for me to hold on to the intellectual or conceptual points he was making, even though he made them pointedly, clearly, and repeatedly. This, though, is not a negative criticism of Dr. Safina's book as much as it is the nature of encountering this groundbreaking work. It presents us with a mirror image of our aggressive species filtered through the gifts of our fellow creatures and the horror we have often inflicted on them. I am not talking guilt here but a new self knowledge on a speciate level. I was also interested in his touching on what we call ESP, in other animals, a subject I have only seen broached by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas in her work on The Social Life of Dogs, and that, as I recall, was in an appendix. Her take on the faculty was that it, if indeed it does exist, it is a primitive faculty rather than the product of the 'highly evolved' mind and something tied to the emotions, making it difficult to study. Dr. Safina gives no answers to this, but with example after undeniable example, raises intriguing questions that beg for examination & study. I look forward to reading Beyond Words a second time, after the emotions of the first read have quieted somewhat. I want to remember all his points, want them to become part of my assumptions. Beyond Words was, I think, a very courageous book to write, and I also think it takes courage to read and fully digest. It is quietly, relentlessly excellent and in the very best and nonviolent way, revolutionary.

I was very excited to get this book and read it the second i took a look at the reviews, although this book has a more scientific and factual side, i didn't mind. Author Carl Safina basically shares his research collected from being near and around these animals. I believe everybody, if you like animals or not, should read this book because of how educational it is on the extinction and the death along with animal patterns and family. Its very educational and opened my mind up to really think about how smart and loving these animals really are. As you read on you gain more compassion and love for the different species, it uncovers horrible truths about the humans who use the animals for profit. Safina puts into words the love and sacrifices animals make for each other, family or not, this book shows how smart animals are. I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone to read because animals like these will be extinct one day and to be able to read about the path to extinction in hope to stop it is something i am lucky to do. Hopefully we can stop this path were going down.

Finally researchers into animal intelligence and behaviour have given up their avoidance of using emmotional teminology to explain animals' reactions to loss, fear, in brief, all of the emotions human beings have. The author builds up his argumentation via careful observation of the animals he is analysing, the social structures of the various species as well as their responses to one another. At no point does anthropomorphisation distort our view of the animals mentioned, not is their any kind of sentimentality, which would destroy what he is trying to do: give the reader at least a hint of animals' emotional life. Throughout centuries, philosophers and scientists tried to present animals als mere automatons, running on instinct and reflexes alone; Safina's book reveals this to be an invalid construct. Whoever is really interested in why animals often react in unexpected ways, should take the time to read this book. It never becomes too technical, but it reveals many details that people who own birds or animals have known all the while.

Beautiful book Thankyou

CARL SAFINA, BEYOND WORDS. WHAT ANIMALS THINK AND FEEL, New York 2015. Questo libro è una battaglia. Tutti dovrebbero leggerlo e se ne dovrebbe fare, a cura dell'autore stesso o di qualcun altro da lui indicato, una riduzione per le scuole e renderla obbligatoria. Guarisce dal peggiore errore dell'uomo, quello di credersi misura di tutte le cose e di pensare che il mondo sia fatto per lui. E quello di credere che ci sia un salto qualitativo fra la nostra e le altre specie animali. Nelle sue 441 pagine in carattere piccolo, Safina ci ricorda e ci dimostra su base scientifica che condividiamo con le altre specie animali tutta la nostra parte emozionale, che appartiene agli strati più antichi dell'evoluzione, e che non siamo affatto gli unici detentori di una cosa chiamata intelligenza e neppure di quell'altra cosa chiamata linguaggio. Attraverso 4 grandi sezioni - dedicate agli elefanti, ai lupi, a riflessioni su alcuni abbagli degli etologi, alle orche - Safina attinge ai più recenti studi sul comportamento animale e narra le emozionanti e romanzesche storie degli animali seguiti dai ricercatori. Si scoprono cose che mai si sarebbero immaginate e il capitolo sulle orche conduce a porsi domande inquietanti: forse gli altri esseri come noi, che tanto abbiamo immaginato di incontrare un giorno in qualche pianeta del sistema solare, sono già qui con noi, nelle acque degli oceani, e noi li stiamo distruggendo con le bombe e i sonar delle navi militari, consumando le loro risorse alimentari con la pesca eccessiva del salmone, avvelenandoli con le sostanze chimiche che disseminiamo e che si concentrano al sommo della catena alimentare danneggiando il sistema immunitario e quello riproduttivo (e qui il discorso ci tocca da vicino perché anche noi siamo al sommo della catena alimentare...). La conoscenza dei nostri compagni nel viaggio su questa terra è la base fondamentale del rispetto e dell'amore che dovremmo avere per loro. Ma il libro è una denuncia spietata delle atrocità che gli esseri umani hanno commesso e stanno commettendo verso questi compagni, che ci siamo addirittura spinti in passato (ma è davvero passato?) a giudicare senz'anima e incapaci di soffrire, per non provare rimorso quando li torturavamo o li uccidevamo. Devo dire che leggendo ci si vergogna di essere uomini, o più precisamente uomini occidentali viventi in un sistema capitalistico, perché le varie tribù native, che avevano con l'ambiente un rapporto armonioso, rispettoso ed equilibrato, sono state trattate dal sistema capitalistico esattamente come gli animali. Verso la fine della sezione sulle orche, animali gioiosi e inventivi ed estremamente sociali, Safina si chiede come saremmo se fossimo capaci di vivere anche noi in maniera gioiosa, con continua meraviglia e desiderio di conoscenza, sopraffatti dalla bellezza della vita e infinitamente grati per essa.

Nice one. Got it in 2018

A beautifully written book on a fascinating subject. Humourous and heart-breaking in equal measure, I genuinely believe that this is one of the best books that I have ever read. It draws attention to the almost wilful misunderstanding of the complexity of animal communication by humans. I was riveted from the start and I cannot recommend this book enough. Carl Safina has that rare quality in a scientific writer: the ability to tell a spellbinding tale. Beyond Words is a book that feels like a discovered treasure. An absolute must for anybody who has an interest in animals. I bought it as a gift for someone else, but after reading the first few pages I got them a box of chocolates and kept it for myself. Get it, you won't regret it.