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Book2Dragon's Reviews > Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
by
by
Book2Dragon's review
bookshelves: animals, giveaways-winner, nature, non-fiction, owned
May 21, 2022
bookshelves: animals, giveaways-winner, nature, non-fiction, owned
This author has studied animals for many years and worked with humans to make their lives less fearful and more humane. She herself is autistic, so that may give her more insight. She works from "Blue Ribbon Emotions" felt by all animals in some degree. They are : Seeking, Fear, Panic and Rage, Care and Play. This is from research by Dr. Panksepp, not her own. The book is well researched and well documented with many notes and references.
I was afraid at first animal cruelty and abuse may be the main focus, but there is more than that. Still, I think someone interested in animal husbandry or that works with animals would get more from the book than a lay person. However, some myths on the role of dominance were interestingly explored. I did fine with the chapters on horses and dogs and cats, but for some reason had a hard time with the pigs and chickens. Their confinements are openly cruel.
Again, if you are in a career or contemplating study of animals, this would be a great book to read.
I was afraid at first animal cruelty and abuse may be the main focus, but there is more than that. Still, I think someone interested in animal husbandry or that works with animals would get more from the book than a lay person. However, some myths on the role of dominance were interestingly explored. I did fine with the chapters on horses and dogs and cats, but for some reason had a hard time with the pigs and chickens. Their confinements are openly cruel.
Again, if you are in a career or contemplating study of animals, this would be a great book to read.
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Quotes Book2Dragon Liked
“I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal's emotions rights, we will have fewer problem behaviors... All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain.”
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
“There’s a saying in engineering: You can build things cheap, fast, or right, but not all three.”
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
“The big companies are like steel and activists are like heat. Activists soften the steel, and then I can bend it into pretty grillwork and make reforms.”
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
“Animals like novelty if they can choose to investigate it; they fear novelty if you shove it in their faces.”
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
“Bad things always happen when an animal is overselected for any single trait. Nature will give you a nasty surprise.”
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
“There's a point where anecdotal evidence becomes truth”
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
“What a horse does under compulsion he does blindly, and his performance is no more beautiful than would be that of a ballet-dancer taught by whip and goad. The performances of horse or man so treated would seem to be displays of clumsy gestures rather than of grace and beauty. What we need is that the horse should of his own accord exhibit his finest airs and paces at set signals.”
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
“Our whole image of wolf packs and alphas is completely wrong. Instead, wolves live the way people do:7 in families made up of a mom, a dad, and their children. Sometimes an unrelated wolf can be adopted into a pack, or one of the mom’s or dad’s relatives is part of the pack (the “maiden aunt”), or a mom or dad who has died could be replaced by a new wolf. But mostly wolf packs are just a mom, a dad, and their pups.”
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
“Being negative is natural and being 100 percent positive takes work.”
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
“intense stereotypies—stereotypies an animal spends hours a day doing—almost never occur in the wild,”
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
“The memory feats of food-caching animals that can remember the location of hundreds of food stores are highly similar to the ability of some people with autism to memorize every street in a city. My theory is that savant-type skills occur when memories are sensory-based instead of language-based. Language leads to abstractification and loss of detail. Animals naturally lack language and autistic people have language problems because of a disorder, but in autistic people and animals the cause of sensory-based memory is the same: thinking and remembering in pictures instead of words.”
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
“Behavioral trainers never talk about vices and depravity. Behaviorists are some of the most "optimistic' teachers and trainers there are, because if a person or an animal isn't learning, a behaviorist is trained to examine what "he" is doing wrong, not what the person or animal is doing wrong. This means that behavioral teachers and trainers don't blame the student.”
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
“Instead of making the children do good behaviors by threatening to punish them if they don't, the teachers watch the children until they spontaneously do a good thing and give them rewards to reinforce the behavior and make them more likely to do that behavior again in the future.”
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
“Positive control is the opposite (of aversive control). Even though the teacher or psychologist has created an environment that "controls" the persons behavior through positive reinforcement, the person doesn't feel like he's being controlled probably because he is getting reinforced for behaviors he didn't "have" to do ... described as those that we 'like' or 'chose' to engage in.”
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
“How many people would even try to be Jane Goodall today? Jane Goodall was a superb fieldworker who lived with animals, observed them closely, and understood them. She did her work in the field, not behind a computer making mathematical models of chimpanzee population.”
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
― Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
Reading Progress
April 26, 2022
–
Started Reading
April 26, 2022
– Shelved
May 14, 2022
–
57.48%
"Didn't bother me the discussion on horses, but when it came to pigs and chickens I could hardly bear it. It's all about recognizing that animals have feelings and social structure too. They feel pain, anxiety, fear and rage; just like us."
page
196
May 20, 2022
–
Finished Reading
May 21, 2022
– Shelved as:
animals
May 21, 2022
– Shelved as:
giveaways-winner
May 21, 2022
– Shelved as:
nature
May 21, 2022
– Shelved as:
non-fiction
May 21, 2022
– Shelved as:
owned
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Rowan
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May 21, 2022 09:51PM
Excellent review! I have added this one to my read list now :)
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