What animals think and feel

As good as it is, and The Inner Life of Animals is very good, it could never top The Hidden Life of Trees by the same author, Peter Wohlleben. After all, once you’ve said that trees can feel pain, nurse their young and communicate with each other, there is not much shock value in saying animals are more intelligent than most people give them credit for.

Yet Wohlleben does provide plenty of surprises. Slime molds can find their way through a maze. Bees  can remember people. Butterflies can detect the age of plants. Chickens dream. A horse’s whinny can mean different things depending on its pitch. Many animals, he says, have a sense of fairness.

Ornithologists have found shy tits have at least one advantage over more aggressive tits: They notice things their more extroverted, quickly-moving fellows do not, such as seeds left over from the previous summer. (It occurs to me that introverted humans also notice things missed by extroverts.)

Wohlleben manages a forest in Germany, so sensitivity to trees should come with the territory. But forests have a variety of animal life, and his family has owned numerous pets, as well as those goats shown on the cover of his book. So his own observations fill out the book, while the results of many scientific studies, as interpreted by the author, make up most of the text. And Wohlleben tends to interpret those findings in such a way that emphasizes an animal’s intelligence and sensitivity. Other people, such as those who hunt, fish or operate slaughterhouses, might interpret them differently, or more likely ignore them altogether.