This book invites us to change the way we view animals, the world, and our place in it. As Charles Darwin suggested more than a century ago, the differences between animals and humans are "of degree and not of kind." Not long ago, ethologists denied that animals had emotions or true intelligence. Now, we know that rats laugh when tickled, magpies mourn as they cover the departed with greenery, female whales travel thousands of miles for annual reunions with their gal pals, seals navigate by the stars, bears hum when happy, and crows slide down snowy rooftops for fun. Learn about an orangutan who does “macramé,” monkeys that understand the concept of money, and rats that choose friendship over food. Even language, math, and logic are no longer exclusive to humans. Prairie dogs have their own complex vocabularies to describe human intruders, parrots name their chicks, sea lions appear capable of deductive thinking akin to a ten-year-old child’s, and bears, lemurs, parrots, and other animals demonstrate numerical cognition.
Shooter, the resident elk at the Pocatello Zoo in Idaho, is huge — standing six-feet tall without taking into account his massive antlers, and ten-feet tall if you do. As you can imagine, he attracts a lot of attention, and one day a few zoo staffers watched as he acted strangely. He repeatedly dipped his entire head into his water trough, a decidedly uncharacteristic elk behavior. He certainly wasn't just taking a drink. Then, things got even more curious. Pulling his head from the water, Shooter now dipped his front hooves into the trough and seemed to be rooting around. After a minute or so, he withdrew his hooves and dunked his head again. When his head emerged this time, he had a tiny dripping marmot in his mouth. He carefully released the marmot on the ground and nudged him with one hoof until — recovered from his near drowning — he scampered away.
Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts
2 comments:
What an incredible little story to open the book! Fascinating!
Thanks, I'm going to look into this one
Post a Comment