How Animals Grieve
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- Synopsis
- From the time of our earliest childhood encounters with animals, we casually ascribe familiar emotions to them. But scientists have long cautioned against such anthropomorphizing, arguing that it limits our ability to truly comprehend the lives of other creatures. Recently, however, things have begun to shift in the other direction, and anthropologist Barbara J. King is at the forefront of that movement, arguing strenuously that we can and "should" attend to animal emotions. With "How Animals Grieve," she draws our attention to the specific case of grief, and relates story after story from fieldsites, farms, homes, and more of animals mourning lost companions, mates, or friends. King tells of elephants surrounding their matriarch as she weakens and dies, and, in the following days, attending to her corpse as if holding a vigil. A housecat loses her sister, from whom she's never before been parted, and spends weeks pacing the apartment, wailing plaintively. A baboon loses her daughter to a predator and sinks into grief. In each case, King uses her anthropological training to interpret and try to explain what we see to help us understand this animal grief properly, as something neither the same as nor wholly different from the human experience of loss. The resulting book is both daring and down-to-earth, strikingly ambitious even as it is careful to acknowledge the limits of our understanding. Through the moving stories she chronicles and analyzes so beautifully, King brings us closer to the animals with whom we share a planet, and helps us see our own experiences, attachments, and emotions as part of a larger web of life, death, love, and loss.
- Copyright:
- 2013
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- Book Size:
- 208 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9780226043722
- Related ISBNs:
- 9780226436944
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- Date of Addition:
- 07/21/23
- Copyrighted By:
- Barbara J. King
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Science, Animals, Psychology
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.