We are delighted that Peter Wohlleben’s follow-up to The Hidden Life of Trees is here. In The Inner Life of Animals, Wohlleben ascribes many of the fundamental emotional qualities to animals. He doesn’t do so scientifically, but does so from an armchair empricist’s standpoint. To put it bluntly, he doesn’t come out and say, “Ducks love other ducks like we love ducks,” but rather he presents evidence of affection-like behavior in ducks (for example) and posits the value of that behavior. Wohlleben isn’t a duck—or a goat or a bat or a cow—but he likes to think about what they’re doing and why. We will, of course, be delighted to read this thoughts because, like his previous book about trees, this leads to empathy with the world around us, which is most certainly a quality we like to engender in ourselves and in others.
–A Good Book Cafe, Sumner, WA
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