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Animate

How Animals Shape the Human Mind

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Animate

Written by: Michael Bond
Narrated by: Michael Bond
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About this listen

Read by the author, Michael Bond.

A mind-expanding deep dive into how animals have shaped us, from the palaeolithic to the present day.

In Animate, science writer Michael Bond explores how animals have profoundly influenced our minds and cultures. Drawing on cutting-edge insights from psychology, anthropology, literature and neuroscience, Bond traces the varied ways their lives have affected ours, from our hunter-gatherer ancestors whose brains were rewired by the prey they hunted and the predators they feared, to the medieval and Enlightenment thinkers who used animals to promote notions of human supremacy.

Scientists today are challenging the assumption that we are separate from and superior to animals, showing that they too possess intelligence, empathy, creativity and even the ability to use tools. If everything that supposedly makes us human is shared with other creatures, where does that leave us? And if we are not as exceptional as we thought, how should we be treating the animals we live alongside?

A fascinating exploration of what it means to be both human and animal, Animate shows that to better understand ourselves, we must pay more attention to the other beings with whom we share our world.

 Anthropology Biological Sciences Outdoors & Nature Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Science

Critic Reviews

Compelling . . . absorbing . . . excellent (Mark Cocker, Country Life)
A rich blend of psychology, anthropology and sociology . . . Offers a timely reminder that humans, similarly to all other animals, are embedded in and dependent on the natural world'
In this beautiful biography of humans’ evolution with animals Michael Bond explores how we can resolve our recent messy divorce from nature and ‘reanimate’ ourselves, returning to a place where we can learn, judge and find ourselves through the way we relate to the animal world. Full of wonders and insights, awash with compassion and self-reflection, Animate is an astonishing adventure into our own psychology expressed through our relationship with animals (Isabella Tree, author of Wilding)
'It's hard to know where we end and our dog begins. The same is true, if we could only see it, for humans and non-humans generally. By letting us eavesdrop on the conversation between us and the wild, Bond, in this thrilling, effortlessly readable book, helps us to see – and so to know our own shape and nature. Essential, transformative stuff (Charles Foster, author of The Edges of the World)
In this beautifully written, wide-ranging, and impeccably researched book, Michael Bond carefully traces how we, humans, arrived at where we are today, disconnected from wild animals and their homes and wrongly thinking of ourselves as superior to other animals and separate from and above them. This humancentric arrogance is driven by indifference and the fear of seeing ourselves in other animals resulting in an era called the Anthropocene, often called "the age of humanity," when, in fact, it's more appropriately called "the rage of inhumanity.'" Bond aptly and correctly concludes, without other animals, "we can hardly be human." Animate will make you rethink who they (other animals) truly are and who we truly are, and we can only hope it will result in people changing their speciesist abusive ways of interacting with our animal kin with whom we actually share a large number of traits (Marc Bekoff, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals)
I loved Animate. Michael Bond writes with such wonderful empathy and curiosity, and Animate makes the reader see the world – and humanity's place in it – in a completely different light (Tabitha Stanmore, author of Cunning Folk)
In his robust raspberry to human exceptionalism, Michael Bond shows that the lengths to which people have gone to justify our exalted estate only point up our close relationship with the animals with whom we share this planet (Henry Gee, author of The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire)
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