"For dogs are wolves that came to live with us."

[Jim__]

That quote is from a review of 2 books: Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina and The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell in the October 8th issue of The New York Review of Books. I haven't read the books, but based on that review, if you've ever wondered if there is other human-like intelligence in the universe, these books will put your mind at ease.

An excerpt:

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The free-living dolphins of the Bahamas had come to know researcher Denise Herzing and her team very well. For decades, at the start of each four-month-long field season, the dolphins would give the returning humans a joyous reception: “a reunion of friends,” as Herzing described it. But one year the creatures behaved differently. They would not approach the research vessel, refusing even invitations to bow-ride. When the boat’s captain slipped into the water to size up the situation, the dolphins remained aloof. Meanwhile on board it was discovered that an expeditioner had died while napping in his bunk. As the vessel headed to port, Herzing said, “the dolphins came to the side of our boat, not riding the bow as usual but instead flanking us fifty feet away in an aquatic escort” that paralleled the boat in an organized manner.

The remarkable incident raises questions that lie at the heart of Carl Safina’s astonishing new book, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. Can dolphin sonar penetrate the steel hull of a boat—and pinpoint a stilled heart? Can dolphins empathize with human bereavement? Is dolphin society organized enough to permit the formation of a funeral cavalcade? If the answer to these questions is yes, then Beyond Words has profound implications for humans and our worldview.

Beyond Words is gloriously written. Consider this description of elephants:

Their great breaths, rushing in and out, resonant in the halls of their lungs. The skin as they moved, wrinkled with time and wear, batiked with the walk of ages, as if they lived within the creased maps of the lives they’d traveled.

Not since Barry Lopez or Peter Matthiessen were at the height of their powers has the world been treated to such sumptuous descriptions of nature.

Safina would be the first to agree that anecdotes such as Herzing’s lack the rigor of scientific experiments. He tells us that he is “most skeptical of those things I’d most like to believe, precisely because I’d like to believe them. Wanting to believe something can bias one’s view.” Beyond Words is a rigorously scientific work. Yet impeccably documented anecdotes such as Herzing’s have a place in it, because they are the only means we have of comprehending the reactions of intelligent creatures like dolphins to rare and unusual circumstances. The alternative—to capture dolphins or chimpanzees and subject them to an array of human-devised tests in artificial circumstances—often results in nonsense. Take, for example, the oft-cited research demonstrating that wolves cannot follow a human pointing at something, while dogs can. It turns out that the wolves tested were caged: when outside a cage, wolves readily follow human pointing, without any training.

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[left-of-center2012]

1. Sounds interesting

And, each book receives 4½ out of 5 stars on Amazon.
A bit pricey for me though.

[Scuba]

6. Check your public library! Loves me some good old American socialism.

[NealK]

2. Thank you. This sounds like a great read.

[a la izquierda]

3. On my wishlist! Thanks for posting! NT

[Person 2713]

4. Thank you want to read more!

[sorechasm]

5. I wonder if emotions precede perceptions, intelligence, and social skills.

Dolphins that lead a funeral parade for a deceased human? Worms with unique personalities? I've heard of elephant graveyards, but not about the following degree of convalescence:

Elephants have been known to extract spears from wounded friends, and to stay with infants born with disabilities. In 1990, the Amboseli female Echo gave birth to a baby who could not straighten his forelegs, and so could hardly nurse. For three days Echo and her eight-year-old daughter Enid stayed with him as he hobbled along on his wrists. On the third day he finally managed to straighten his forelegs and, despite several falls, he was soon walking well. As Safina says, “His family’s persistence—which in humans facing a similar situation we might call faith—had saved him.”

The two books seem to respect animal lives by recognizing otherwise human traits. We would have to give credit to Jane Goodall for guiding science down that path.

Thanks Jim_ for showing us what looks to be fascinating reads.

[DirkGently]

7. Cool. n/t