Everyone knows that Gandhi line about a nation’s moral progress being equal to how it treats its animals. So how do we North Americans rate? On the one hand, it’s easier to get into most medical schools than to adopt a rescue dog. On the other, we seem to be okay with the non-stop house of horrors that is factory-farmed meat. So a mixed bag, really.
Perhaps that’ll change as breakthroughs in science help us better understand non-human animals’ intelligence, adaptability and ways of processing the world. The four following recently published books should help with that considerably, in part by taking our anthropocentric arrogance down a notch. David Byrne may well have been on to something when he wrote, in his lyrics to the Talking Heads’ song Animals: “They think they know what’s best / They’re making a fool of us.”
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For the big-picture perspective, it’s hard to imagine a better place to start than Steve Brusatte’s fun-yet-magisterial The Rise and Reign of the Mammals, detailing mammals’ 325-million-year residency on earth (the book does cover homo sapiens, but just barely, reflecting our relative lateness to the game). We tend to think of mammals as popping up right after the dinosaurs. But the two groups share a common ancestor, and mammals lived successfully in the shadow – literally, none being bigger than a badger – of dinosaurs for millions of years. Mammals have also done a formidable job navigating various radical climate change events and mass extinctions, to say nothing of continents breaking apart.
The author of a previous bestselling book on dinosaurs, American-born, Scotland-based Brusatte has emerged as something of a star in the paleontology world. It helps that he’s young, charismatic and has good writing chops: each of the book’s sections begins by drawing us in with a cinematic “clip,” often of a mammal facing some geologic or evolutionary turning point.
Among many other things, we learn why the advent of hinged jaws and specialized teeth created the modern mammal. Learn, too, that the absence of dinosaurs didn’t just allow mammals to get big, it allowed them to get weird, so if fauna dentistry isn’t your thing, you can marvel at Brusatte’s descriptions of various post-Ice Age megafauna. These include the “unholy horse-gorilla hybrid” known as the chalicotheres, the “hell pigs,” giant beavers and three-metre-high sloths. You can’t make this stuff up, but you can dig it up, apparently.
Mammalian evolution didn’t always go in expected directions, either. We’ve all seen those comics with fish sprouting legs and crawling on land. Less well known are the “walking whales” that chose to abandon terra firma for ocean in what is now desert, near present-day Cairo. As much as Brusatte tips his hat to Darwin, in his own telling evolution sometimes sounds less like the result of natural selection than a drunken game of exquisite corpse.
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Like Brusatte, Ed Yong, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer for The Atlantic, has a rare ability to break down overwhelming amounts of information into compelling, digestible detail. His An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realm Around Us will make you question everything you thought you knew about how non-human animals perceive our shared world.
Yong structures his endlessly fascinating book around the German concept of Umwelt, which posits that all animals, including us, live inside a unique sensory bubble that we (erroneously) believe to be all-encompassing. We see, in other words, what we need to see, which you can take as a political metaphor if you wish.
A case in point is sight. Our belief that dogs are missing out because they don’t see the same range of colours we do turns out to be a case of glass-house-ism: our own inability to see ultraviolet, for example, is the exception in the animal kingdom, not the rule. Birds, reindeer and fish are taking in all kinds of cool stuff we aren’t.
Animals see in unexpected, myriad ways. Among the book’s takeaways is the mind-bending fact that the brittle star, a marine invertebrate related to the starfish whose entire body acts as a compound eye, has vision even though it can’t form pictures. It’s a concept that we, a highly visual species, find it hard to wrap our much bigger heads around.
Yong’s writing is wonderfully fluid – wry, light, even tetchy at times. My only beef with An Immense World is the copious footnotes. Sadly, they’re far too interesting to ignore; so don’t, but do make sure you’ve got plenty of pairs of drugstore readers at hand.
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Deflating our smug sense of human exceptionalism is Nova Scotia-based animal behaviourist and dolphin specialist Justin Gregg’s mission in If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity, which is far better than the unfortunately cutesy title might suggest. (It refers to the cognitive dissonance of animal lover Friedrich Nietzsche’s wish to be as dumb as a cow so he wouldn’t be burdened with nihilistic thoughts, and his simultaneous pitying of cows for being too dumb to think nihilistic thoughts.)
The question of what our avowed smarts have done for us lately dominate the chapters that follow, each of which contrasts human and animal forms of intelligence, invariably to the detriment of humans. While we may be unique in our ability to ask “why” questions (animals rely on causal inferences), whether that ability has benefitted us in the long term is up for debate. To wit, no other animal has, in the course of creating the conditions for its comfort, also created the conditions for its extinction.
In often amusing, absurd detail, Gregg demonstrates time and again why animals may have the intellectual upper hand. He suggests that human intelligence may be rare not because it’s so great, but because it may not actually be all that useful.
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“A History of the World in …” books have been on the scene for a while now (objects, maps, meals, cheap things, glasses, or, per Julian Barnes, 10½ chapters), so Simon Barnes’s A History of the World in 100 Animals was perhaps overdue. Chockablock with paintings, etchings and photographs sumptuously reproduced on thick white stock, it has the feel of a coffee-table book in miniature. But no one reads coffee-table books, whereas this compendium of animals that have, in the author’s estimation, had the greatest effect on humans through the ages, definitely should be.
Like his predecessors in this list, Barnes, a British novelist and erstwhile wildlife journalist for the London Times, starts by admonishing us for our embrace of the “heresy of human uniqueness” that has led us on a path of destruction. Animals have enabled our agriculture, warfare and health, via the medicines and the food their bodies provide. But while we continue to need them, most don’t need us.
The book’s brief (three to four pages) entries, each of which covers a series of nicely curated facts about a particular animal, can be read non-linearly, as the mood moves you. Some – the horse, cat, dog, bison, mosquito – are obvious and expected. Others, like such as the barnacle, saloa, or archaeopteryx, less so. About the egret, we learn that a Victorian vogue for their plumage threatened their extinction until four women successfully campaigned for their preservation on both sides of the Atlantic, thus paving the way for the modern environmental movement.
The cockroach? Barnes suggests our disgust stems from the fact that they’re one of the few species we’ve been unable to destroy. As such, they’re a reminder that animals were here long before us and will remain long after we’re gone.
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