My unerring interest in animal behavior sometimes has me wondering whether I should have become a wildlife biologist. If I were only braver and smarter, maybe I could have been a new Jane Goodall, spending my life in the woods and learning about a completely different species. But my interests are never persistent or steady enough to commit to anything like that. So I have to satisfy this interest with some occasional reading. I recently read Animal Wise by Virginia Morell, which I found both eye-opening […]
Animals are people, too, or people are animals, something like that
Sometimes I think I should have been some kind of wildlife biologist/animal behaviorist. But not one that performs experiments or has to kill its research. I’d rather just watch and observe. In Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures (2013), Virginia Morell answers the question of whether animals are able to think and feel by describing studies done with a number of different animals. If you asked me when I was in kindergarten whether animals had thoughts or emotions, I would have said ‘of […]
A Haunting Tale about the Human/Animal Equation
A laugh-out-loud/cry-out-loud tale designed to illuminate our lives and prick our conscience. It is the story of Rosemary, who begins her story “in the middle,” saving the big reveal for later. Rosemary is at college when the novel begins, suffering from a lack of friends, a lack of self-esteem and from a huge gaping hole inside her dating back to when she lost her twin sister Fern at age five, her beloved older brother Lowell not too long afterwards, and watched her father descend into […]