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About How Animals Grieve
Product Description 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’s 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. From Booklist Do we just imagine that animals have feelings like our own, that their loyalty springs from something other than the need to be fed? Anthropologist King investigates research and scores of stories of animals grieving the loss of animal companions, speculating that where there is grief, there must be love. She explores a variety of settings, from farms to homes to fields, to detail how creatures as diverse as ants and elephants mourn their dead. Cautious of the human tendency to interpret animal behavior from the human perspective, King offers strong evidence of attachment that leads to grief when a companion dies. Among her stories: a house cat loses her sister and lifelong companion and wails inconsolably; horses gather in a circle to mourn at the burial site of a recently deceased companion; elephants surround their matriarch, keeping vigil as she dies. King recounts stories of cats, dogs, rabbits, goats, and other animals grieving to the point of depression and weight loss. She also points to additional resources, including video clips of animal behavior, in a beautifully written book that will appeal to animal lovers. --Vanessa Bush Review "A beautifully written book that will appeal to animal lovers." ― Booklist “Barbara J. King has pulled together anecdotal and scientific data on grief and love in animals in her excellent book How Animals Grieve. With her engaging story telling she opens up our eyes to the possible inner lives of some surprising species. We expect big-brained chimpanzees and elephants to express their feelings, but her tales of rabbits, goats, birds, turtles and others force us to look again at the emotional content of animal lives.” -- Cynthia Moss, author of Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Ele “Poignant, thoughtful, and sometimes heartbreaking. King once again elevates the discussion of animal emotion. She tackles a tricky subject with a scientist's care and an animal lover's grace.” -- Jennifer Holland, author of Unlikely Friendships "I must admit that I was skeptical that an entire book could be written on the subject of animal grief, because the scientific literature in this area is so painfully thin. But Barbara King has succeeded beautifully. She has collected an inc
