Beyond Words: What Elephants and Whales Think and Feel (A Young Reader's Adaptation)

By Carl Safina

A young reader’s adaptation of The New York Times bestseller


Follow researcher Carl Safina as he treks with a herd of elephants across the Kenyan landscape, then travel with him to the Pacific Northwest to track and monitor whales in their ocean home. Along the way, find out more about the interior lives of these giants of land and sea—how they play, how they fight, and how they communicate with one another, and sometimes with us, too.

Weaving decades of field research with exciting new discoveries about the brain and featuring astonishing photographs taken by the author, Beyond Words: What Elephants and Whales Think and Feel gives readers an intimate and extraordinary look at what makes these animals different from us, but more important, what makes us all similar.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9781250144645

Carl Safina

Carl Safina's work has been recognized with MacArthur, Pew, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and his writing has won Orion, Lannan, and National Academies literary awards and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. He has a PhD in ecology from Rutgers University. Safina is the inaugural holder of the endowed chair for nature and humanity at Stony Brook University, where he co-chairs the steering committee of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the 10-part PBS series Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina. His writing appears in The New York Times, National Geographic, Audubon, Orion, and other periodicals and on the Web at National Geographic News and Views, Huffington Post, and CNN.com. Carl's books include Voyage of the Turtle, Becoming Wild, and The View from Lazy Point.

Book preview

One family, three generations

Beyond Words by Carl Safina

Begin Reading

Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

Thank you for buying this

Roaring Brook Press ebook.

To receive special offers, bonus content,

and info on new releases and other great reads,

sign up for our newsletters.

Or visit us online at

us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

For email updates on the author, click here.

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

For the people in these pages who watch and truly listen, who tell us what they are hearing in other voices that share our air, and in the silence

PROLOGUE

Another big group of dolphins had just surfaced alongside our moving vessel—leaping and splashing and calling mysteriously back and forth in their squeally, whistly way, with many babies swift alongside their mothers.

I wanted to know what they were experiencing. What is it like to be a dolphin?

My question for the dolphins was: Who are you?

During the cruise I’d been reading about elephants. So, elephant minds were on my mind as I watched and wondered about the dolphins living and traveling freely in their ocean realm.

That is why this book is about elephants—the world’s largest land animals—and orcas, also called killer whales, which are the world’s largest dolphins. This book is my attempt to answer the question of who they are.

---

We say humans and animals as though life falls into just two categories: us, and all-of-them. Yet we’ve trained elephants to haul logs from forests; in amusement parks, we’ve trained killer whales to entertain us. In this book, we will see how those creatures really live when they are being themselves in the world. We will see who they really are.

I was seven years old when my father and I fixed up a small shed in our Brooklyn backyard and got some homing pigeons. I watched how they built nests in their cubbyholes, seeing them courting, arguing, caring for their babies, flying off and faithfully returning; how they needed food, water, a home, and one another. I saw them living in their apartments like us living in our apartments. Just like us, but in a different way.

But the real question isn’t whether they are like us. The real question is: Who are they, what are they like, and what is life like for them? What might they be thinking? What are they likely feeling?

I wanted a better understanding. And to get that, I needed to take us to where the animals are free-living, working for themselves and their own families.

So, come along. Get your stuff; let’s go.

PART ONE

Lives of Elephants

Delicate and mighty, awesome and

enchanted, commanding the silence

ordinarily reserved for mountain

peaks, great fires, and the sea.

—Peter Matthiessen, The Tree Where Man Was Born

A baby elephant curiously investigates its world

CHAPTER 1

Hitting Reset

"Look how fat that baby is," I say. The fifteen-month-old looks like a ball of butter. Four adults and three little babies are playing in a muddy pool, spraying water over their backs with their trunks, then sprawling on the squishy bank. It’s soothing just to watch.

The elephants seem happy. But when elephants seem happy to us, do they really feel happy?

Elephants experience joy, Cynthia Moss tells me. Cynthia is a scientist who has studied them for forty years. It may not be human joy, she says. But it is joy.

Elephants act joyful in the same situations that make us joyful: familiar friends and family, lush food and drink. So we easily assume they feel the way we feel. But beware of assumptions!

Understanding animals’ thoughts and feelings happens to be the main quest of this book. The tricky task ahead: to go only where evidence and logic lead. And—to get it right. I am here at Amboseli National Park in Kenya, Africa, because I am ready to learn, ready to ask. How are they like us? What do they teach us about ourselves?

What has a lifetime of watching elephants, I ask Cynthia, taught you about humanity? I glance to make sure my recorder’s light is on, then settle back a bit. Forty years of insight; this will be good.

What I don’t see coming is: I have the question almost exactly backward.

Cynthia gently deflects my question. I think of them as elephants, she says. "I’m interested in them as elephants. Comparing elephants to people—I don’t find it helpful. I find it much more interesting trying to understand an animal as itself."

It takes me a moment to get her comment. Then—I am stunned.

As a lifelong student of animal behavior, I’d long ago concluded that many social animals—certainly birds and mammals—are, in many ways, like us. I’ve come here to see how elephants are like us. I am writing this book about how other animals are like us. But I’d just gotten a major course correction.

Cynthia’s comment hit Reset, not just on my question, but on my thinking. I’d somehow assumed that my quest was to let the animals show how much they are like us.

My task now—a much harder task—is to see who animals are—like us or not.

CHAPTER 2

Seeing Elephants

It was the worst year of my life, Cynthia Moss is saying over breakfast. All the elephants over fifty years old, except Barbara and Deborah, died. Most over forty died. So it’s particularly amazing that Alison, Agatha, and Amelia have survived.

Alison, now fifty-one years old, is right there, in that clump of palms. When Cynthia—who still has bright blue eyes and a bubbly personality—arrived in Kenya forty years ago to study the lives of elephants, she came here. The first elephant family she saw she designated the AA family, and she named one of those elephants Alison. And there Alison is. Right there, vacuuming up fallen palm fruits. Astonishing.

With luck and decent rainfall, Alison might survive ten more years. And there is Agatha, forty-four years old. And this one coming closer now is Amelia, also forty-four.

Amelia continues approaching, until—rather alarmingly—she is looming so hugely in front of our vehicle that I reflexively lean farther into the vehicle. Cynthia leans out and talks to her in soothing tones. Amelia, practically alongside us now, simply towers as she grinds palm fronds, rumbles softly, and blinks.

---

Cynthia helped pioneer the surprisingly difficult task of simply seeing elephants doing elephant things. Longer than any other human being ever has, Cynthia has watched some of the same individual elephants living their lives.

This national park—Amboseli—is actually too small for the hundreds of elephants who use it. Amboseli elephants use an area roughly twenty times larger than the park itself. The elephants come here for water. As do cattle- and goat-grazing Maasai people. The only year-round water is here. The 150-square-mile park serves as a central watering hole for the surrounding 3,000 square miles. The park is too small to feed them all. The outer lands are too dry to water them. The food is out there; the water is in here.

Just four years ago, extreme lack of rain—a drought—shook this place to its core. To survive the drought, Cynthia is explaining, different elephant families tried different strategies. Some tried to stay close to the marsh. But they did very badly as it dried. Some went far north, many for the first time in their lives. They did better. Out of fifty-eight families, only one family did not lose anybody. One family of elephants lost seven adult females and thirteen youngsters. Usually if an elephant goes down, the family gathers around and tries to lift it. In the drought, they had no energy. Watching them dying, seeing them on the ground in agony… Cynthia closes her eyes and shakes her head.

One in four of Amboseli’s elephants—four hundred, out of a population of sixteen hundred—perished. Nearly every nursing baby died. About 80 percent of the zebras and wildebeests died, and nearly all of the Maasai people’s cattle. Even humans died.

But when the rain returned, it triggered the biggest baby boom in Cynthia’s history here. About 250 little elephants were born in the last two years. This is a sweet spot in time to be born an elephant in Amboseli. Lush vegetation, plenty of grass—and little competition. And water. Water makes elephants happy.

Several happy

Reviews for Beyond Words

[rockhead515-580421 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Pretty good. Lots of cool animal stories.
Writing's not top-notch and he has a weird thing with italics, but an enjoyable book.

[eowyna_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The author's aim is to understand animals on their terms, not how they reflect human psychology or thinking. He does this by observing them, and, more importantly, by talking to researchers who have been observing them for years. The author addresses the problem of attributing feelings and understanding upon his subjects. They have the same neurological structures and chemicals of serotonin and oxytocin - is it really such a stretch to interpret what appears to be fear and joy to actually be, in a very real sense for the animal, fear and joy?Part one explores elephants in depth. Each chapter begins with a description of "real time" activity, such as being in a jeep, following an elephant family. His guide talks to him and to the animals, describing what they are doing. Then the author takes one aspect of that and expands on it, such as communication - there are the hoots, trumpets, rumbles, but more than that, there is context and observed responses to them. It may not be a language we can transcribe to be read, but it is one we can see is understood.The author mixes immediacy and analysis in each chapter, into an easy to read and yet profound gestalt. It is both exciting to see what we know and how researchers could build on that to yield even more fascinating results, and depressing, as elephants are killed for their tusks, and for resisting the population pressures put on them by the surrounding humans. Someone said that the key to the virulence of the current "Cecil the Lion" controversy is that that lion had a name, and that perhaps if all lions were given names, we would see them differently. Every elephant discussed here has a name - a distinct and specific existence. It may not be enough to keep them alive, but it is one way to make it harder for them to be killed without consequence. Part two explores wolves in depth. Part three is entitled Whines and Pet Peeves. Part four is called Killer Wails (spelling deliberate). At the end are notes, arranged by chapter, a several-page bibliography, acknowledgements, and an index. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone who has ever lived with animals, or loved them.

[stbalbach_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel is an essential update on the latest research and trends in animal intelligence with a focus on the usual suspects: elephants, primates, crows and parrots, dogs and wolves, whales and porpoise. Carl Safina is more than a reporter he adds a level of sublime to his books that carries the reader to new enlightenment. I came away changed, seeing animals as having rich lives full of emotion, families, fears and happiness. They have the same chemical hormones as us, the same organs and neural configurations, respond to life in much the same ways. They are not exactly the same, but not that different either. Most of our perceptions of animals are outdated and wrong - tool use, communication, memory, emotion, art, culture, personality, imagination - all exist in the animal kingdom. This is a wonderful book and will be among my year end favorites.

[b.masonjudy · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Safina's book is a thought-provoking exploration of the lives and cognition animals, drawing largely on evidence and anecdotes of elephants, wolves, and killer whales. What "Beyond Words" does well is marshal evidence and first-hand accounts of animal experts and examines them in order to show an animal's cognitive abilities and their individuality. Safina focuses on animals who are a "who." My main beef with the book, compared to writers such as John McPhee or Barry Lopez, is Safina's constant and jarring digressions. This book would have benefited from a bit more organization and a few less stories about his dogs.

[eilonwy_anne · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Heartbreaking and awe-inspiring and lovely. I doubt anyone can enjoy this book and not pester their nearby friends and family with marvelous anecdotes from it. There are some small points that I disagree with the author — on some stretches of theory of mind, for example — but the book is always curious, open, and kind, in conversation with the reader as well as with the animal world.

[taphophile13 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It took me a while to get through this book. Not because I’m not interested in the subject—I very much am—but because I was frustrated waiting for information about animal thoughts and feelings as indicated in the subtitle. Although Safina points out that the brain chemicals and structures that are associated with human emotions are very similar in animals, he does not provide much insight into just what animals are feeling. As Safina eventually says “We don’t know. What they’re thinking: we don’t know. What they’re saying: we don’t know.” Instead he concentrates on the family life of elephants and wolves in the first two sections, switches to a discussion of theory of mind and mirror neurons in the third section and then shifts to killer whales and their natural sonar along with thoughts on brain size in the last section. There are also stories of killer whales guiding people lost in the fog, returning dogs lost at sea, and amazing incidents that suggest these whales have telepathic abilities.Safina mostly relates observations of others rather than presenting his own data. There are delightful descriptions of elephant families and their playful youngsters. Elephants depend on the matriarch’s knowledge of watering holes and food sources. If she is killed the surviving members of the herd “have elevated stress hormones for at least fifteen years, and give birth to fewer babies.” Later, Safina mentions that when female killer whales die, their children (who stay with their mothers for life) start dying at increased rates. The most poignant passage concerns a female elephant, lone survivor of her family, who has come down to the sea, and stares out beyond the waves to where a blue whale faces the shore. The two huge mammals, so different physically but so alike emotionally, appear to be communicating with deep rumbles. I was expecting a book that discussed recent findings about animals’ cognition and emotions but that is not quite what this book is. It is more a collection of observations of animal behaviors from which we can make some inferences about their thoughts and feelings. What is very clear is that these animals are intelligent, sentient beings who deserve our respect and protection. The tone is conversational rather than academic. (I had never heard the phrase "the whole shimmy" before.) The finished book will contain eighteen black and white illustrations and an index.

[cissa_5 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Humans are human- and we are also animals, with our physical lives on a continuum with other animals.Safina is persuasive enough to convince anyone but the most rigid that "mere animals" share much with us, in terms of intelligence, emotions, sense of humor, and individuality- not to mention social groups and ties.I thought it an excellent point that , regarding many of the "tests" for animal intelligence, etc.- most humans would not pass them. Dogs are stupid because they can be fooled? What about humans victimized by con artists? And, OK, my cat is not going to write a symphony... but then, neither am I!This book is beautifully written, and brings many of the other denizens of our world alive.Highly recommended, both for people interested in the other animals that share our planet, and for sf authors interested in writing persuasive aliens.I received this book in exchange for writing a fair review, from LibraryThing.

[kimaoverstreet · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Carl Safina prompts readers to consider animal behavior and thought, not by comparing it with human behavior, but by viewing it as unique. He encourages marrying science and logic to draw conclusions about animal thoughts and feelings. For example, we may think it good science to very detachedly document the way a dog bounds and jumps up to greet us when we return home. We can also use logic and apply what we know about this dog and our experiences with feeling to say the dog is happy. Major sections include visits with scientists observing elephants, wolves, and killer whales roaming freely in the wild. Dogs, parrots, ravens, tigers, humans, monkeys, and many other species get brief mentions. Content is mostly anecdotal, relaying Safina's own adventures or those of the long-time observers he visits in the field. Reading this book is like sitting down with a friend or relative (albeit a smart and well-traveled one!) and listening to him philosophize as he recounts experiences in the field with some of the world's leading researchers on the behavior of free roaming animals. Safina is entertaining and is not above using some punny humor, particularly in chapter titles. Some of the experiences are hard to read; nature can be cruel. Others are funny. Most all are fascinating. Generally, I read fiction at a rapid pace and assign myself a set number of daily nonfiction pages, like I would with medication or a homework assignment. Beyond Words was highly readable, and I found myself actually wanting to surpass my mandatory quota. I finished the book in three sittings, though I did find the prose a bit verbose at times. (Maybe I would have finished in two, with a bit more editing!) I would have loved to enclose a few quotations from the text to make my points, but could not since I read an advance reader's edition prior to the book's release date. Recommended for those interested in animal behavior.

[nbmars · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is an excellent compendium of animal behavioral studies, although I was already aware of almost all of them before. But for those who have not read much ethology, the findings in this book are laid-out in a comprehensive, accessible, and interesting way. As for new information, most of that relates to the accelerated pace at which humans are killing off other species. And it is very depressing data indeed.The evidence amassed attesting to the way animals feel and think make the numbers all the more horrific. For example, in the last ten years, poachers have killed one hundred thousand African elephants. From an estimated ten million elephants in the early 1900s, there are only some 400,000 in Africa today, with another 30,000 to 40,000 killed every year - an elephant every fifteen minutes! To give some specific examples, Kenya’s elephant population is down 90 percent, Uganda’s 85 percent, the Congo is down 90 percent, and Sierra Leone has no elephants left. These elephants are mostly killed for ivory, with the proceeds often going to finance terrorist armies, such as Joseph Kony’s Lords Resistance Army in Uganda, Sudan’s Janjaweed, and possibly even Al Qaeda’s Al Shabab wing.The book goes on to document depredation of other species, while also explaining how and why the effects of such violence are so disruptive to animal families and communities. With elephants, the biggest ivory comes from the oldest family members, and so the leadership of the family units, along with knowledge about how best to survive, is destroyed along with the elephant. Youngsters are particularly affected. The author discusses the many sounds made by animals that humans can hear, as well as the fact that they make many sounds that are outside of our hearing range. (Elephants, for example, make sounds that span ten octaves, but humans cannot hear the low frequencies without special equipment. Further, they even have special receptors in their feet to pick up rumbles over long distances, often from several miles away.) He notes that just because we can’t understand their “languages” doesn’t mean they don’t have any. (Think of how they might interpret the sounds we make!) Nor does the fact that they don’t verbalize feelings mean they are without them. As he argues persuasively, genetically we aren’t very different from other animals. It is unrealistic to conclude that thinking and feeling arose without evolution. He observes that each characteristic of higher animals reflects a slight tweak on something older:“Everything humans do and possess came from somewhere. Before humans could be assembled, evolution needed to have most of the parts in stock, and those parts were developed for earlier models. We inherited them.”Not just language, but such evolutionary success-conferring behaviors like the ability to form deep social bonds developed through time: “parental care, satisfaction, friendship, compassion, grief - all began their journey in pre-human beings.”He reviews data on the behavior of all kinds of animals including lions, crows, wolves, and whales, inter alia. In each case, he provides an abundance of evidence that these animals experience consciousness, but that it is in the interest of greedy humans to deny this fact. He wants to wake us up however to “how other animals experience the lives they so energetically and so determinedly cling to.” He does a great job, concluding with an argument not just for human civilization, but for humane civilization, for all life on earth:“The greatest story is that all life is one. The world will be saved not be calculation but by compassion. I wish everyone understood this. It has at times seemed to me that killer whales and elephants are among the few who do.”But you cannot come away from this book without also understanding this simple concept. I wish it were required reading for all of earth’s citizens.

[grammargoddess · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If you were not sure before reading this book that animals think and feel (I already knew that from living with pets—well, of course!), you will surely be won over to that opinion after doing so. Not only that; you will be awed by what you learn from the research presented about animals’ analytical, memory, emotional, and sensory capabilities that you may not have previously been aware of.Your human species ego will also be jolted in regard to our insecurities, as we’ve strived over the centuries to make sure we can prove that we are special, unique, and set apart from all other living things, when in fact, we share so many qualities and capabilities presently as well as in our evolutionary past with other creatures. Close to the conclusion, in the section on whales, the author says, “I don’t see evidence that whales—even if they are more intelligent than us…would be ‘sending us a message,’ as one friend of mine believes…Who wouldn’t like to believe [that]? That would make them special. But most important, it would make us very special. And how very special we are is our favorite story. If humans have one overriding conceit and one universally shared delusion, it is that the world owes us for being so special.”The book is very well written in an appealing and somewhat familiar style—not at all in stiff “scientist-ese,” although it contains loads of data from scientific studies and long-term field observations. Readers will easily be able to follow the author’s line of thinking and be able to mentally visualize the animal societies described (partly because they ring such a bell with our own societies).The in-depth description of a particular handful of animals deeply moved me, and brought me to tears, as usually happens when I watch PBS “Nature” episodes or other animal documentaries on TV. That brings me to one of my only qualms with the book, which isn’t really with the book so much as its title. The subtitle suggested (in my head, before reading it) that it is about all animals, so I expected great breadth, that is, examples from dozens or hundreds of different species. It turned out to be very detailed and deep depictions of the life and times of Kenyan elephants, Yellowstone wolves, and Vancouver coastline killer whales, with other species given cameo appearances as well. The book doesn’t need to be my preconceived notion to achieve its goal, however.Also based on the title, as someone with a graduate degree in linguistics, I was perhaps expecting that many more pages proportionately would directly relate to the methods animals use to communicate other than using human-style words and syntax (as Steven Pinker put it in the title of one of his books, “Words and Rules”). Near the beginning of the book, I recall feeling my entire field that I spent years working to absorb, was dismissed—that is, that the term “language” as defined by human linguists to describe human language had no merit and other animals could be said to have language. So initially, I had my “hackles” up on that count; later, the author did make more of an effort to define the difference between human syntax and animals language, and I relaxed on that point. I do hope that he is aware that--at least when I was in school--linguists not only recognize that non-human species have communication systems (e.g., honeybee dance, vervet monkey words for bird or snake, great apes learning sign language and abstract word symbols, etc.), but in graduate programs, these systems are discussed quite seriously in courses.I could go on and on, as this book affected me so very deeply in how *I* think and feel. Especially in our age of the world, descriptions of the life and times of a species always have a deeply sad component, because so much is broken in the environment, so much of it due to our hubris that we are so very special and more important than all the rest of the species on Earth. Upon reading it, I immediately had to look up how I might support conservation organizations. The last section is about Pacific Ocean whales and includes a description of their precarious existence and numbers. I finished the book two days before I learned in the news about the Santa Barbara County, California oil pipeline spill, and have been in a state of devastation since.

[beecharmer_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Beyond Words What Animals Think And Feel by Carl Safina was an incredibly insightful study of animals and the way they think and the emotions they go through. It started out with elephants which I have a huge affinity for. I learned so much about them but it was hard to read about the hardships they are going through. There was a chapter on wolves that told of the hardships they face and how the pack works. There were several examples of different animals and examples of their sense of fairness, empathy for others, their ability to use tools and figure out problems. Very interesting read.

[hardlyhardy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Carl Safina's new book "Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel" would once have been unthinkable for any scientist who hoped to maintain the respect of his colleagues. Until recently, questions about what animals might think or feel were off limits for scientists to even contemplate, let alone write books about. That attitude has changed slowly, thanks to the work of Jane Goodall and a few others.Safina discusses many species, including the human one, in his book, but he focuses mainly on elephants, wolves, dogs (domesticated wolves) and killer whales. What these animals have in common is their complex social relationships, and this requires more developed brains. "Dolphins, apes, elephants, wolves, and humans face similar needs: know your territory and its resources, know your friends, monitor your enemies, achieve fertilization, raise babes, defend, and cooperate when it serves you," he writes.He ridicules scientists past and present who fail to see the evidence of animals thinking and feeling that is right in front of their eyes, evidence that most pet owners notice every day. "People who don't see the evidence aren't paying attention," he says. Safina's research took him to scientists who are paying attention, those who have devoted their lives to observing elephants, wolves and killer whales. The scientists tell amazing stories about these creatures mourning the loss of family members, heroically risking their own lives in defense of others, solving difficult problems and, especially in the case of elephants and killer whales, communicating complex messages over long distances.The author may spend too much time on the soapbox for his own good. He is right to explain how these intelligent and sensitive animals are endangered by shortsighted human behavior, but his repeated slams against humans (such as, "Creating problems seems to be one of the things that 'make us human.'") seem to go too far in the other direction. Instead of claiming animals are far inferior to human, he argues humans are far inferior to animals. Yet humans are the ones he expects to buy his book.