Beasts
What Animals Can Teach Us About the Origins of Good and Evil
-
- $17.99
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
Bestselling author Jeffrey Masson shows us what the animals at the top of the food chain-orca whales, big cats, etc.-can teach us about the origins of good and evil in ourselves.
In his previous bestsellers, Masson has showed us that animals can teach us much about our own emotions-love (dogs), contentment (cats), and grief (elephants), among others. In Beasts, he demonstrates that the violence we perceive in the "wild" is a matter of projection.
Animals predators kill to survive, but animal aggression is not even remotely equivalent to the violence of mankind. Humans are the most violent animals to our own kind in existence. We lack what all other animals have: a check on the aggression that would destroy the species rather than serve it. In Beasts, Masson brings to life the richness of the animal world and strips away our misconceptions of the creatures we fear, offering a powerful and compelling look at our uniquely human propensity toward aggression.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Animal emotions expert and ex-psychoanalyst Masson (When Elephants Weep) looks to redeem animals, especially apex predators, from the reputation of being "cruel." He claims that the evidence mostly suggests that in the wild, interspecies and intraspecies violence is purposeful whether as a means to eat or maintain territory or that its origins lay in human-instigated trauma or interference in habitats, and that in fact humans "persist in self-destructive violent behavior typical of the animal kingdom." He goes to the early origins of civilization to explain our obsession with "othering" treating other persons or groups as intrinsically different from and alien to one's self blaming for this the development of social hierarchy, the idea of property that evolved through the rise of agriculture, and the idea of living things as property that arose from domestication of livestock. Masson's writing proves fascinating to read, but this round of animal ethology feels bogged down by his explicit agenda to convince the reader that human intellectual capacity allows us to make the morally correct choice to embrace kindness and altruism, to embrace vegetarianism, to stop animal exploitation, and to stop claiming human superiority over the rest of the animal world.
