The quintessential book on animal intelligence

I’ve shared on social media about the time I watched Season 2 of Planet Earth high on cannabis. It was the first time I really thought about how animals just know how to do things without ever speaking a (human) word to each other. Carl Safina‘s Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel takes that thought and fleshes it out into an entire book. Picador published the book in 2015.

This book contains an incredible amount of research and beautiful prose that could be straight out of a wildlife documentary script. Many of the animal behaviour researchers Safina spent time with studied groups of animals for decades.

He shares how animals make tools to help them with various functions, have their own musical and emotional expressions, and the Theory of Mind of some animals, including their hunting and protective patterns.

Some of my favourite parts of the book are the author’s stream of consciousness on humanity’s Theory of Mind. While the book talks about many animals, its three parts focus on three types of animals, which I’ll highlight here.

Elephants

• The droughts in Kenya can affect all of us, not just the elephants.
• Elephants are creatures of familiarity who can spot changes in their environment.
• They have incredible memory capacity and can remember hundreds of individuals. Safina writes: “Human senses have evidently dulled during civilization.” (I agree!)
• Lab tests confirmed that most animals have nervous systems, emotions, and hormones, just like us.
• Elephants respect the matriarchs and female intelligence. The bigger an elephant family, usually the bigger the presence of the matriarch. For example, a herd will follow the matriarch and travel hundreds of miles over months to reach a water source.
• Safina talks about elephants’ mating rituals, how they play, worry when they lose their children, and grieve.
• We can describe elephant sounds, but not translate their communication.
• Wars occur between elephant poachers and the rangers who protect the elephants.

Wolves

• Wolves are viewed as pests or dangerous killers.
• There is a hierarchy in each wolf pack and each has its own social nature.
• The researchers at Yellowstone Park named some wolves after numbers. Twenty-one was an alpha male who led a pack of 37 wolves and showed selective violence. Forty was an alpha female who attacked her own sister; the pack killed her to protect the pups.
• Two months after wolves were removed from the endangered species list in 2012, hunters killed them.
• Domesticated dogs evolved from wolves.

Orcas

• There are different killer whales, all with various food diets. I didn’t know they ate other mammals, like seals and dolphins.
• How whales hear and speak is biologically different from humans; they have sonar abilities. Researchers could identify packs of whales based on the calls they used for each other.
• Researchers have been able to associate some whale sounds with their basic meaning.
• Whales in captivity have killed their trainers or refused to eat.
• Both toxic chemicals and a lack of salmon supply have contributed to the lack of whale reproduction.
• Dolphins have names and use them on each other.
• Bottlenose dolphin females don’t always have children; some watch others’ children and act like aunts. I love that!
• Dolphins play and learn by playing; they imitate humans. Dolphin parents also punish their young for misbehaving.
• The author ends the book by talking about how we measure intelligence. Researchers told stories about how whales guided lost scientists to shore and seemed to telepathically follow requests from humans. They even know when humans put themselves in harm’s way. Could their sonar ability be responsible for their telepathy? That’s for another book to explore and explain.

Need a book coach, ghostwriter, editor, or formatter to help you create your book so you can get it in the hands of readers? Read more about my services here and contact me if you’re ready to begin!

Note: This post contains an Amazon affiliate link.