I'd love to know how much overlap there is right now between what I am sensing and what the nearest elephant is sensing. The onset of agriculture and the flowering cultures of civilization were themselves enormous changes in the human environment, massively altering selective pressures. Sheila adapted what she had learnt at home in her professional work at St George’s University of London to create When Dad Died, the first book in the series, assisted by artist and storyteller Beth Webb and bereavement expert Dr Lester Sireling. His writing appears in The New York Times, TIME, The Guardian, Audubon, Yale e360, and National Geographic, and online at Huffington Post, CNN, Medium, and elsewhere. It was a great catch-up for me as I haven’t read much on animal behavior studies since syntheses by Jane Goodall on chimps, John Lilly on dolphins, and Barry Lopez on wolves some decades ago (recent exceptions being De Waal on primate empathy and Sapolsky on baboon societies).

Once in a long while, a book is published that felicitously combines lambent writing with dazzling facts, while also illuminating our knowledge of significant and engaging subjects. It was so taboo for the longest time for any animal behaviorist to suggest there were emotions and feelings in other animals it could be a career ending paper to put forth that maybe we aren't alone in this. The content is striking and beautifully written, my imagination went wild whilst reading it, I could see the wolves howling, what they looked like and the mountains as I read it, like I was there. In the case of elephant and wolf examples, the parks in Kenya and Yellowstone are too small to protect species whose range goes outside park and, for elephants, do not a sufficient barrier to poaching.When an intruder is cornered in defeat, she dispenses mercy by letting him go instead of meting out a fatal attack common to others in the same situation. We meet them on their journey through pregnancy, childbirth and the exciting first few days of getting to know their new baby. And touch is a persistent and universal mode of sharing emotions and social cohesion among the three species (as well as dolphins and primates). Longer than any other human being ever has, Cynthia has watched some of the same individual elephants living their lives.

The author goes a step further and proposes ideas that are controversial - on self-domestication, anthropomorphism, empathy, intelligence and understanding. Resources are categorised under health, schools, communities, with chapter extracts from selected books listed at the end.Reading about the herds and how they are structured was so captivating and endearing I was helpless to stop reading, but I wanted to take it slow and absorb every word. Along with Darwin's Origin and Richard Dawkins's Selfish Gene, BEYOND WORDS marks a major milestone in our evolving understanding of our place in nature. After reading this book, one look at animals, even insects, fish and turtles with a new perspective. It is essential reading for all who want to expand their understanding of cognition, culture and life on Earth.

Hare's book draws conclusions by looking at particular experiments, stipulating how they were carried out and analyzing their results. I especially liked the parts where Carl had scientific evidence to support his findings, things like sounds and music and how animals respond was one of the exceptional things I’ve read.I like that he steps back and questions where the facts and evidence seem to point while at the same time stressing what remains unknown. The pictures show how she talks to her supporter and is helped by her to establish some friendships. The 140 images in the book—some rarely published or previously unseen—were edited by McCullin through the process of revisiting his archives and reassessing photographs made from the late 1950s until last year. For some of this time, the series was co-published with the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and the books’ use was professionally led, being used mainly within the NHS as well as in psychotherapy.

It was built off the backbone of evolution, we are not supremely unique in our ability to form bonds with other individuals of the same species. But we were promised an explanation of what animals think and feel, not what the author thinks and feels about animals.A supporting text is provided at the back of each book, giving one interpretation of what is taking place.