OUR WILD CALLING
How Connecting With Animals Can Transform Our Lives — and Save Theirs
By Richard Louv
Illustrated. 308 pp. Algonquin. $27.95.
A scuba diving marine biologist, pulled down by a huge octopus, is running out of air — but after the two make eye contact, the octopus begins to disentangle, and they come to the surface together. A big cat expert and a wild jaguar cross paths in a forest in Belize and end up sitting down, looking into each other’s eyes — in peace. Tales like these, of transcendent interactions with untamed creatures, are at the heart of “Our Wild Calling.”
Louv, a well-known nature writer and coiner of the term “nature deficit disorder,” has long argued for the benefits of (respectful) contact with nature. These connections, he says, can do more than make us feel good: They can also help us save wildlife and our world. With ongoing extinctions, climate change and the resulting shifts in habitat, there is an urgent need for humans to make space, share space and get along with other species.
In making his case, Louv deftly brings together cutting-edge science, longstanding wisdom and recent discoveries, along with wonder and humor, while never losing sight of the magic that’s possible when humans and nonhumans connect.
“To fully protect anything,” he says, “we must know it, love it, act in mindful reciprocity — giving back to animals as they give to us.” He provides many examples of large and small conservation efforts that do give back, like vast, safe wildlife corridors that include bridges over and tunnels under highways, and improvements that create nature-friendly cities.
Louv says that “we can choose empathy over separation or superiority. We can take strange comfort in the knowledge that zebra finches experience REM sleep, that dolphins recognize themselves in mirrors, that our early ancestors may have been domesticated by wolves.” That bit about the wolves, by the way? Louv has fun citing the work of the author who refers to it — I love this — as the “lupification” of “human behavior, habits and even ethics.”
This is a book that offers hope. Who knows? Maybe some of those old lupine lessons of warmth and even love have stuck with our species after all.
THE HIDDEN WORLD OF THE FOX
By Adele Brand
Illustrated. 213 pp. Morrow/HarperCollins. $24.99.
Its skull may fit neatly into her hand, but the essence of vulpes vulpes, the red fox — as Brand, a British ecologist, makes abundantly clear — is far too complex to grasp so easily.
In “The Hidden World of the Fox,” her ode to this familiar yet mysterious creature, Brand provides fox basics: how they evolved, their modern reputation, what we still don’t know about them and how we can better coexist with them. For coexist we do: Red foxes range over four continents, “from Alaska to Australia, via Saudi Arabia, Belarus and Tibet,” and thrive in environments as varied as cities, deserts and rain forests.
Having spent decades observing them, Brand often writes in characteristic field lingo. The female is a vixen, a male a dogfox. A fox family is a “skulk” and dens are “earths.” For sustenance, a fox generally needs a daily rat, or the caloric equivalent — roughly nine voles, for instance.
Brand, who has set out to write of foxes as an “honest biographer,” is by turns lyrical, salty, funny and scholarly as she describes the nuances of fox existence. Foxes are not social, exactly, she notes — they can’t compete with the “intensely cooperative” wolf pack — but “there are moments in which they appear to enjoy not being alone.”
While her writing about fox issues can occasionally verge on crankiness — misleading information in British tabloids regarding the behavior or habits of wild foxes annoys her — for this naturalist who grew up in England’s Surrey Hills, the sight of foxes can lift her prose into poetry, as when she describes the “gentle amble” of a handsome fox hunting voles in frosty winter meadows and weaving through the “quiet tussocky grasses.”
ANIMALKIND
Remarkable Discoveries About Animals and Revolutionary New Ways to Show Them Compassion
By Ingrid Newkirk and Gene Stone
294 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27.
In this compendious book Newkirk, the founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and Stone, an author and co-author of numerous titles, have separate but closely related agendas.
The first half of “Animalkind,” on the wonders of the animal world, offers a torrent of stories and research findings. Meant to evoke both admiration and empathy, the content ranges from animal achievements — male dung beetles haul 1,100 times their body weight! — to research and observations on the emotional lives of animals. Elephants, for instance, have been observed removing tranquilizer darts from friends, or tending to their wounds.
The tone in this section is often light and jokey: “Rolling a ball of poo is not quite as easy as it may seem to all of you who have never tried it,” the authors note. They compare the cannibalistic courtship of the praying mantis to a bad Tinder date, and their disquisition on the male elephant’s hormonal state of “musth” is headlined “Musth-Dos.”
The second half focuses on animal exploitation in four areas — science, clothing, entertainment and food. Naturally, the jokes pretty much stop here, giving way to grim anecdotes about past abuses, like blow-torching pigs in order to study burn treatments. Still, the overall theme in this section is that kindness to animals is possible.
And the authors offer a road map to such improvement, including practical advice for readers interested in reducing the harm their lifestyle does to animals. Switch to a plant-based diet, avoid purchasing leather goods, become a more involved advocate.
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