The Emotional Life Of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, And Empathy–And Why They Matter, by Marc Bekoff

I’m surprised why this book needs to exist in the first place. There is a wide gap between the understanding of normal people when it comes to animals and what scientists are willing to admit when it comes to animals, and this book falls into that spot where a scientist tries to gently nudge his fellows along to a conclusion that everyone else knows to be mindblowingly obvious. Anyone who has ever spent any time around animals–and that includes even me–is well aware that animals have a rich emotional life. It is easy to consider this to be mere anthropomorphizing, but given the way that fish show fear, that animals like dogs show what appears to be genuine embarrassment and a knowledge of wrongdoing, and that animals like crows and elephants have been well-known to possess strong memories attached to specific people that can only be considered grudges, it is no surprise that there is a lot of material that shows the rich emotional life of animals. This obviousness about the book’s subject matter, it must be admitted, does not make this a bad book. It is a good book, but it is a good book that is not in any way surprising, except perhaps to those who are so familiar with the scientific perspective that their minds have been blinded to the obvious.

This book is a short one at a little over 150 pages, and could easily have been longer and more detailed had the author wished to go into more detail about how, for example, the emotional lives of animals helps us to understand something of the purpose of emotions and the worth in recognizing them widely. The book begins with a foreword from Jane Goodall, who describes the struggles she faced in being respected as a scientist by others within the community. This is followed by a preface on the gift of animal emotions and some acknowledgements. After this the author makes an obvious case for animal emotions and why they matter (1). This is followed by a discussion of the author’s field of cognitive ethology, the studying of animal minds and hearts (2). This is followed by a discussion of what animals feel (3). After this the author makes a solid case for wild justice and empathy and fair play and a simple understanding of honor among animals (4). This is followed by a discussion of supposed hard questions asked by scientists about the idea of animal feelings (5). Finally, the author discusses ethical choices about what we do in the knowledge that animals have feelings and suffer in the same manner that we do (6). The book ends with endnotes, a bibliography, and an index.

The biggest area of disagreement between the author’s perspective and my own is precisely why I find the existence of this book–and the author’s view that this book is somehow important–to be rather mystifying. The author in this book is repeatedly at pains to assure the reader that he is making these conclusions about animals and their feelings as a good Darwinist. Over and over again he acts like he is crossing himself and begging and pleading before the Darwinian inquisition that he is no heretic to the faith, and quite honestly I find the whole almost apologetic tone of the book to be rather off-putting. Someone should not have to apologize for stating that animals have feelings and that it is so obvious that even ignorant scientists should find it obvious and would find it obvious if it did not offend with their self-interest in treating animals like cadavers that can be cut up without any concern for the sort of being that they torture and experiment upon. When this is combined with the author’s self-righteous vegetarianism, one gets the feeling that the author should be trying to appeal to different people than he does. The fact that the book could have been better and need not have been written at all, at least without any pretensions of originality, does not mean it is not a good book, it’s just not nearly as groundbreaking as it assumes itself to be.