What We Should Know About Animals

It's easy to assume that animals experience happiness (just think of a dog wagging its tail), but what about higher-level emotions and qualities like selflessness, empathy, or even love? In "Beyond Words: How Animals Think and Feel," conservationist Carl Safina shares stories from decades of observing animals and combines it with new brain research to paint a picture of animals' emotional landscape that sounds remarkably like our own. In this interview, he shares a story about a wolf who selflessly tries to distract other wolves from attacking his sister, and a whale who saves a seal. He also suggests that animals' experience of life is not a limited version of our own, but rather a more vivid one. These theories are just part of a growing body of evidence that there is much more to our living environment than previously thought, and knowing this, we cannot continue on the same path.

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