The Parrot's Lament and Other True Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence, and Ingenuity
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.46 (722 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0525944761 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 224 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-09-20 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
An insightful, delightful book! Debbie Lee Wesselmann I loved this book from start to finish. Eugene Linden's individual essays on the intelligence of different species are insightful glimpses into the sentience of animals. From the extraordinary and intelligent efforts of a female gorilla to escape her solitary enclosure to rejoin her friends and family in an adjacent enclosure (she succeeded twice in overcoming electric fences and a moat by using non-conductive and sturdy logs and branches) to a parrot saying, upon seeing her owner's dinner of a Cornish game hen, "Oh, no! Paco!", referring to her male companion kept in another cag. Five Stars Amazon Customer good. Jeanne Yocum said A thoroughly delightful book. I happened to hear the author of this wonderful book on NPR and ordered it immediately based on the totally amazing story he told about the leopard that is pictured on the book jacket. What a great find! These animal stories are thoroughly entertaining and enlightening about animal behavior. I'll never look at my pet cat the same again!
In The Parrot's Lament, noted environmentalist Eugene Linden offers more than one hundred true anecdotes about animal acts of cooperation, heroism, escape--even tales of deception or manipulation of human beings. An orangutan picks a lock to let himself out of his zoo enclosure and two elephants adopt a tag-team strategy to keep their handlers from putting them back into theirs. Scientifically sound and emotionally compelling, The Parrot's Lament contains remarkable stories that are sure to resonate with animal lovers, turning skeptics everywhere into believers.. Drawing on the first-person experiences of veterinarians, field biologists, researchers, and trainers, Linden has compiled a warmly entertaining and powerfully persuasive argument for animal consciousness that, while not human, far exceeds what humans usually grant animals. A gorilla shrewdly sells back a missing key chain to the highest bidder
The science of consciousness and animal intelligence is contentious, but many in the field--Linden included--deeply suspect that animals know more than we can verify. Linden lays down the science with clarity and good humor, but he leaves it to his animal coauthors, the amorous dolphins, escape-artist orangs, enigmatic cats, and lying hyenas that populate the book's scores of anecdotes, to make his argument. "Are you a rutabaga?" "I'm not a rutabaga!" she would giggle. "Are you a waterbug?" "I'm not a waterbug!" Soon, Sofia learned to riff off her father's teasing: "I'm not a rutabaga; Daddy is a rutabaga!" or the truly insightful, "I'm not a rutabaga; the