Beyond words
"Weaving decades of field observations with exciting new discoveries about the brain, Carl Safina's landmark book offers an intimate view of animal behavior to challenge the fixed boundary between humans and nonhuman animals. In Beyond Words, readers travel to Amboseli National Park in the threatened landscape of Kenya and witness struggling elephant families work out how to survive poaching and drought, then to Yellowstone National Park to observe wolves sort out the aftermath of one pack's personal tragedy, and finally plunge into the astonishingly peaceful society of killer whales living in the crystalline waters of the Pacific Northwest. Beyond Words brings forth powerful and illuminating insight into the unique personalities of animals through extraordinary stories of animal joy, grief, jealousy, anger, and love. The similarity between human and nonhuman consciousness, self-awareness, and empathy calls us to re-evaluate how we interact with animals"
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4recommend
6mentions
4people
2015–2019years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I recently listened to the audiobook "Beyond Words" by Carl Safina, I believe on the recommendation of an HN comment.
If you're interested in the intelligence, empathy, and minds of animals, I can heartily recommend this book. The last third or so of the book covered Orcas (and some whales and dolphins) and it was pretty amazing. I particularly liked that he covered some of the stories that are not quite scientific in nature, while calling them out as such. The book will definitely leave you with the lingering feeling that minds and awareness are not quite as simple and clear cut as we might believe them to be.
- I recommend Carl Safina's "Beyond Words", which is an in-depth look at elephants, wolves, and orcas, and I recommend the audio book form, because he rants, with sincere anger, about how obvious it is that these animals display theory of mind.
- Yes! Highly recommend Carl Safina's Beyond Words.
- If you're interested in these questions I highly recommend the book "Beyond Words" by Carl Safina. He embeds with researchers that have been living with different species for decades. Cataloging the exploits of individuals and families across generations. We should not simply assume animals have the same experiences as humans, but we should also not assume they don't. Safina's book shows as we're actually investigating this question we're discovering there's likely a lot more richness to the animal experience than we expected. Fascinating subject, and beautifully written book.
- If you're interested in this topic, I heartily recommend Carl Safina's Beyond Words. It presents compelling evidence for the thesis that the default in the animal kingdom is conscious & feeling.
- If you enjoyed this you should check out Carl Safina's book "Beyond Words" (review here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/10/08/amazing-inner-liv...).
While we shouldn't simply assume animals have minds, what we have tended to do instead is just as bad: assume they do not. In the West, Descartes famously declared animals are automata. Safina shares this quote from Voltaire in response:
``` Voltaire disdainfully called out Descartes’s contradictions of logic, even referring to him and his followers as “barbarians”: “What a pitiful, what a sorry thing to have said that animals are machines bereft of understanding and feeling,” wrote Voltaire. He continued: Is it because I speak to you, that you judge that I have feeling, memory, ideas? Well, I do not speak to you; you see me going home looking disconsolate, seeking a paper anxiously, opening the desk where I remember having shut it, finding it, reading it joyfully. You judge that I have experienced the feeling of distress and that of pleasure, that I have memory and understanding. Bring the same judgment to bear on this dog which has lost its master, which has sought him on every road with sorrowful cries, which enters the house agitated, uneasy, which goes down the stairs, up the stairs, from room to room, which at last finds in his study the master it loves, and which shows him its joy by its cries of delight, by its leaps, by its caresses. Barbarians seize this dog, which in friendship surpasses man so prodigiously; they nail it on a table, and they dissect it alive in order to show the mesenteric veins. You discover in it all the same organs of feeling that are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel? Has it nerves in order to be impassible? Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in nature.
Safina, Carl (2015-07-14). Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (pp. 79-80). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition. ```
