Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, By Carl Safina

Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

By Carl Safina

This well-researched book is a fascinating, passionate and thought-provoking examination of how animals truly think and feel. Award-winning author and MacArthur Fellow, Carl Safina, takes us inside animals’ lives and minds, witnessing their profound capacity for perception, thought and emotion. Safina weaves scientific research with observations of actual animal families in their native habitat revealing animals’ consciousness, self-awareness, empathy, non-verbal communication, imitation, teaching and the expression of deep grief by certain species. The book highlights how much animals think and feel like people do—of course, people are animals too!

Carl Safina’s work has been recognized with MacArthur, Pew, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and his writing has won Orion, Lannan, and National Academies literary awards and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. He has a PhD in ecology from Rutgers University. Safina is the inaugural holder of the endowed chair for nature and humanity at Stony Brook University, where he co-chairs the steering committee of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and is founding president of the not-for-profit organization, The Safina Center. He hosted the 10-part PBS series Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina. His writing appears in The New York Times, National Geographic, Audubon, Orion, and on the Web at National Geographic News and Views, Huffington Post, and CNN.com.

The book is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and some small booksellers.

Here’s more about Carl Safina.