A heartfelt call for compassion for all living species.
Why bonding with animals makes us better human beings.
Neurologist Akhtar (Animals and Public Health, 2012), deputy director of the Army’s Traumatic Brain Injury Program and a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Public Health Service, makes an impassioned and moving argument that empathy with animals deeply affects humans’ health. Drawing on interviews with a wide range of individuals, including prisoners, a serial killer, a vegetarian chicken farmer, animal researchers, and victims of PTSD; scientific studies; and her own experience as a sexually abused and bullied young girl who bonded with an abused dog, the author examines the physical, emotional, and psychological responses that occur when humans connect with any animal, not only common house pets. Animals, she writes, “calm us by lowering our blood pressure, heart rate, and stress hormones. We relax with animals” because they “defuse a lot of the human-generated pressure in our lives.” The beneficial response, one psychologist suggests, comes from the release of oxytocin, a hormone that “increases social interaction, generosity, bonding, and attachment. It also improves trust and decreases aggression, fear, and hyperarousal.” Many organizations, writes Akhtar, promote human-animal connection, such as K9s for Warriors, a nonprofit group that “pairs dogs with military veterans who have PTSD”; Feeding Pets of the Homeless; Rowdy Girl Sanctuary, which rescues farm animals; and FORWARD, an organization that establishes cat sanctuaries in prisons, where inmates care for and socialize abandoned or abused cats. The cats, Akhtar notes, “provide the only physical contact and affection many of the inmates receive.” The author’s research uncovers much animal cruelty at the hands of individuals and in the livestock industry, which she describes in sickening detail. “It is the same mind-set that encourages cruelty toward animals and toward other humans,” she asserts, whereas empathy encourages kindness: “Animals remind us that the world is larger than us. They can teach us to look beyond the racism, poverty, and cruelty in our lives.” A brief appendix offers readers suggestions for positive change.
A heartfelt call for compassion for all living species.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-070-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
Everything you wanted to know about the social behavior of lions, primates, naked mole rats, and more, in this engrossing East African saga by a noted field biologist. Packer's (Dept. of Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution/Univ. of Minnesota) narrative covers a two-and-a-half-month mission to Tanzania's Serengeti and Gombe National Parks and to Ngorongoro Crater. On his 16th trip to Africa, Packer and his crew follow, tag, and test the Serengeti lions for parasites. The author muses on lion sociality. Nomadic males will invade the predominantly female prides and kill all the cubs in order to father their own: ``Every lion in the world has a father who is a murderer.'' Females band together for protection against such raids and to guard against competing prides, resulting in a division of territory that he calls ``the balkanization of the Serengeti.'' Packer revisits Jane Goodall's famous primate research center on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Braving the largest number of poisonous snakes anywhere in East Africa, he slithers through the dense jungle while baboon chasers position themselves to catch stool samples. Then Packer visits the floor of the 2,000-foot-deep Ngorongoro Crater, which teems with wildebeest, zebra, antelope, and their predators. Packer's narrative waxes eloquently about the vastness of the migrating herds across the great spaces of the Serengeti. He includes horrific tales of murderous attacks on tourists by bandits. He laments the population pressures compressing the borders of the parks and the severe depletion of wildlife by poachers. He does not suffer fools gladly, rails against the corruption and inefficiency of local bureaucracies, and quite justifiably complains about the ghastly condition of East African roads. Although he somewhat murkily invokes the spirit of Conrad, his final point is worth noting: Humans, unlike lower forms of life, are capable of improving their society. For both the general science reader and the armchair traveler, an informative and exciting safari. (13 color photos and 4 maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-226-64429-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
A vessel as enchanting as the symbolic and shimmering freight it carries.
A book of trees–both real and imagined–that taps some very deep roots of the human psyche.
Here are a handful of arboreal specimens full of divine wonder and aesthetic pleasure, those for which we have special affinities and that resonate on the atavistic level. They speak of our species’ first homes, of life, of good and evil, of the oracular. Bulgatz (More Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 2000) paws around the earth from which these trees sprouted, discovering allegory, parable and metaphor in the process. He is a playful guide, sometimes speaking as a cherub, sometimes as a scholar discoursing on the cooperative relationship of the plant and animal kingdoms in the “Barnacle Goose Tree” and the “Vegetable Lamb of Tartary.” He introduces readers to the farcical folk of Chelm, into whose hands one day came a miraculous box of oranges (“It was a gift, the paper enclosed said, sent from ‘Harry and David, Fruiterers of the World.’ ”), and to the blessed Shmoo Pear, a tree that adapted perfectly to the Atkins diet. But the laughs are spaced out amongst the author’s deeper exploration of our desire to anthropomorphize trees. Far from a pathetic fallacy, Bulgatz sees within these stories–Philemon and Baucis, the Tree of Liberty, Yggdrasil, the forest-intoxicated Celts, the age of the sacred grove–a profound exercise of the imagination.
A vessel as enchanting as the symbolic and shimmering freight it carries.Pub Date: June 23, 2005
ISBN: 1-4134-8422-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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