BOOK REVIEW HOLIDAY SPECIAL SECTION : Animal Magic

I am not sure I can write that there has never been a time when so many books about animals appear on a daily basis. But I think I can safely say that never before have there been so many books about animals where the theme is so uniform and so different from books that appeared just a few years ago. That theme is a recognition of the astonishing complexity of animals with respect to thinking (something they were deemed not to do), culture (something they were deemed not to have), speech (only primitive communication was thinkable) and even their feelings (which they were not supposed to experience).

We are truly undergoing a sea change in our attitudes toward animals, for as our information no longer comes from hunters, but observers, we are able to begin to fathom the complexity of their memories, of their communications, and even of their feelings.

If birds feel fear and loneliness, are they aware of these internal states? I cannot see why they would not. But when I say this to people, they often counter, but what about snakes, surely a snake has no feelings? How can we be so certain? There is hardly a single animal about which we do not have some nasty but tenacious mythology based on no or false information (the raven for Edgar Allan Poe was “grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous”--talk about projection).

But many animals who are feared and condemned are at the same time worshiped, as we learn from “Snake Charm,” by Marilyn Nissenson and Susan Jonas. Is this our unconscious attempt to make up for the fact that we are defaming and annihilating them for no reason beyond our fantasies of their evil nature?

These books remind us of how humans are interconnected to other animals. It may not be so surprising to learn that we are very much like wolves (hence our love of dogs?), but a crow, or a raven? Yet that is what we learn from Candace Savage’s wonderful book “Bird Brains.” These birds find it as hard as we do to be separated from their kind; they, like us, yearn to belong. Whereas science claimed, until quite recently, that birds never played, Savage gives examples of their enjoying king of the castle, playing catch with wolves, and even of a young raven and a dog who took turns chasing each around a tree trunk. Are human animals the only compassionate species? Not by a long shot. “Crows are known for their acts of kindness to injured and ailing members of their species. In one well-documented case, a mated male Northwestern Crow regularly brought food to an unmated female that was handicapped by deformities and partial blindness.”

We have a tendency to deny the existence of what we do not know. And we know so little about so many animals. Whales, for example. Nobody has swum with them in the wild or lived with them. Their hearing is phenomenal, and the noises they make are almost as varied as our speech. What they are saying, nobody knows. Stefani Paine’s “The World of the Arctic Whale” is a sober book, with much information and little speculation. I missed that. Those who know the most often refuse to speculate. I asked Roger Payne, the foremost expert on whales, whether he thought whales had emotions. Of course, he told me, but would say no more, as it is almost impossible to observe them “having” them. man animal is the only animal who writes poetry and composes symphonies.” We were wrong about language, we were wrong about the use of tools; perhaps we are wrong about poetry. Maybe the songs of whales, which we have not yet decoded, “The huwill turn out to be epic poems about being hunted. Many animals must find it mysterious why we seem to hate them so, and want to hunt them to extinction. Sometimes, though, they seem to understand enough to make us uncomfortable: Elephants have been reported to remove and hide the tusks from elephant carcasses, as if they understood that the reason they had been murdered was for their tusks. shy and gentle koala bear, Ann Sharp tells us in “The Koala Book,” when frightened, shakes and makes a sound like a baby screaming. Must we be accused of anthropomorphism if we recognize that this is suffering, much like our own suffering?

Even the familiar dog is still an “other” being, as we are reminded by some wonderful stories in “Dog People,” such as the touching account by Cynthia Heimel of an older dog. If a dog’s heart can break at the death of its owner, so can ours at the death of a dog.

There are many books on baby animals, but there can never be too many. Who can resist one that tells you that young Thompson’s gazelles perform stiff-legged high jumps called “stotting” or “pronking” that may be an expression of the sheer joy of being alive? The daughter of a wounded elephant in Tanzania’s Lake Manyara National Park acted as a physician to her mother. She used her delicate trunk to fill the wound with dirt, thus ensuring her mother’s survival.

The apparently banal world of farm animals also contains hidden mysteries. “Portraits” allows us enough of a glimpse into the complexity of their seeming ordinariness to realize that “Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson knows more about cows than the farmer who uses them entirely for his own benefit. Farm animals deserve our compassion for many reasons, not the least being the exploitation and slavery to which we subject them.

If you have cats you need to read “Good Owners, Great Cats,” by Brian Kilcommons and Sarah Wilson. I did not know you could train a cat to stop what they are doing, to come, to sit and to go with you for a walk. The authors remind us what a joy it is to live with a miniature lion.

“The Quotable Canine” is beautifully printed, but the binding came apart in my hands as I was looking at the gorgeous photos. I learned from this book that Groucho Marx said that “outside of a dog, a man’s best friend is a book; inside of a dog, it’s very dark,” and I had to agree with Mordecai Siegal, who said that “acquiring a dog may be the only opportunity a human ever has to choose a relative.”

A hundred years ago gift books on animals would have been about how to destroy, how to hunt and how to stuff. The lessons I took away from these books: Listen rather than dictate, stand still rather than chase, observe rather than experiment.

****

BIRD BRAINS: The Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies and Jays. By Candace Savage (Sierra Club Books: $25; 144 pp.)

PORTRAITS: Photographs of Farm Animals, By Danielle Weil, introduction by Verlyn Klinkenborg (Artisan: $15; 60 pp.)

DOG PEOPLE: Writers and Artists on Canine Companionship, Edited by Michael J. Rosen, (Artisan: $25; 160 pp.)

THE WORLD OF THE ARCTIC WHALES: Belugas, Bowheads, and Mammals. By Stefani Paine (Sierra Club Books: $26; 128 pp.)

THE KOALA BOOK, By Ann Sharp (Pelican Publishing: $29,95 160 pp.)

GOOD OWNERS, GREAT CATS: A Guidebook for Humans and Their Feline Companions, By Brian Kilcommons and Sarah Wilson (Warner Books: $19.95; 224 pp.)

SNAKE CHARM, By Marilyn Nissenson and Susan Jonas (Abrams: $29.95; 160 pp.)

THE WORLD OF BABY ANIMALS, By Bryan Hodgson (Hugh Lauter Levin Associates: $25; 120 pp.)