Make Sense of Animals: Animals Make Us Human

So my review this week is for all you animal lovers out there. Well, I guess you don’t actually have to love animals to read this book, but you should probably be at least mildly curious. After all, Temple Grandin’s (and Catherine Johnson’s) Animals Make Us Human is all about, what else, animals.

Anyway, let’s touch on some of the Pros and Cons of this book.  Pro: it gives you a great look into the behavior of domesticated animals—the ones we’re more likely to interact with on a daily basis. I mean honestly, for the average person, knowledge of giraffe behavior probably isn’t as useful as knowledge of dog behavior since it’s pretty unlikely you’re going to run into a giraffe just strolling down the street. That being said, this isn’t really a book that will teach you how to train your dog—though I personally think it’s great supplementary reading when you’re training your pets because it explores the motivations for why animals respond to certain types of training.

I will let you know up front though, this isn’t technically a “just for pleasure” read. If you have no use for more knowledge about animals, then you might want to skip this book (though, as a pretty serious animal nerd, I personally feel you’d be missing out).  If you do need to learn about animal behavior, for a class for example, this is probably a good book to check out, though you may have to supplement it with other, more extensive studies if you need to know more about a particular species. The people this book is perfect for are the people like me who, as I’ve mentioned before, just have a thirst for more knowledge about the world. It’s just detailed enough so you’ll know more than the average guy off the street, but not so much that you have to have a Ph. D. in animal science (like Temple Grandin does) just to understand it. I learned a whole bunch about animal learning and behavior that I now like to share with my friends, family and pretty much anyone else who will listen or pretend to listen (and all of whom probably couldn’t care less).

So, let’s just assume you’re either sort of like me, or you have a vested interest in animals. Why is this book for you? Well, for starters, the book is organized really well. Since Grandin and Johnson are dealing with a variety of domesticated animals in this book, they appropriately split it up into subcategories. While reading, you start with dogs, go on to cats, then horses, cows, pigs, poultry, wildlife, and zoos. This makes it a lot more manageable than some other books on the same subject because you can read about one species at a time rather than getting overwhelmed by a jumble of general animal behavior information. Plus, if you only want to learn about one of those categories and don't really have time to go fishing through the whole book, it's really easy to find and read just the section you're looking for.

Then, to make the book an even more manageable read, each section is also split into smaller sections so that you’re not just reading a huge blob of text. You get to look at each species and their behavior on a few different levels. And at no point did I really feel like I was drowning in excessive animal science jargon because another huge plus for this book is the writing in general--Grandin and Johnson take concepts that are quite difficult and talk about them in a way that is really easy to understand. 

Perhaps my favorite part about this book though, is that once you’re done you feel so much better able to understand animal behavior. Now I totally know what my cats are thinking!…yeah but on a less crazy-cat-lady note, it is nice to have a general idea of why cats, dogs, horses, cows, pigs poultry, wildlife, and zoo animals do what they do. Because you may think you're not really interested in what a pig has to say, but let me tell you, you'll find yourself intrigued anyway. I picked up the book mostly to learn about dogs and cats because I intend to own both throughout my life. A great part of the book for me was that it made me want to know more even just about animals I probably won't have in my lifetime. The knowledge of how one species communicates kind of informs our understanding of how the other species do. It reveals our expectations for how we think animals should communicate, and then shows us why we're wrong to simply assume that cats should behave like dogs, or pigs like poultry--they're each a whole separate species with different biological and instinctual motivations. And as far as practical applications go, knowing all this allows you to tailor your behavior so as to make both your own pets, and other animals more comfortable around you (and, I'd say, it also makes you more comfortable around them).

So basically, if you want to know what your pets are thinking (well, not really, but sort of) then this is definitely a book you’ll want on your shelf.