When Elephants Weep : The Emotional Lives of Animals

Rating:
Summary: Pseudo-scientific nonsense
Review: A great disappointment! The author proposes to prove that animals have a rich emotional range that humans can understand and interact with, but offers no rigorous evidence whatever! His argument is to repeat again and again assertions along the lines of "People who work with animals a LOT will certainly tell you that animals really do experience emotions". Well, there it is: the whole book in a nutshell. Anyone hoping for revealing research and authoritative insights will be left wanting. What drivel! Save your money and watch some pop-expose on E! instead -- it'll be more engaging and far more scientific.

Rating:
Summary: As guilty as the other side!
Review: To start with, I agree with much of the authors' concerns about those who equate the scientific caution against anthropomorphizing with the notion that animals do not possess emotions at all. The problem? The authors point at anecdotal evidence for emotion in animals and simply ask the reader if an emotional explanation for the observed behavior isn't reasonable. That's it! There's no science here, and in fact it could be said there's anti-science here. This does a disservice to the promotion of this field of study and rightly brings the scorn of working scientists.

I'm focusing on the negatives here because I had high expectations for a more objective approach to this discussion. If emotional people focus on animal emotions with nothing more than anecdotal evidence, and objective scientists focus on animal behavior in terms of only environmental factors, why should it be a surprise that there is disagreement? The one way to break the deadlock is for the emotionalists to design and carry out experiments that will develop evidence for an emotional basis for behavior, because scientists will respond to that. There's little reason for them to respond to anything in this book.

So, if you're looking for science don't read this book. If you're looking for some interesting stories about animals and disposed to read some ranting about those who give animals little regard, you'll like this book.

Rating:
Summary: Animals have emotions and souls, but this book was terrible!
Review: I love animals. Anyone who has ever lived with a dog, cat, horse, or any other species know animals have emotions. Some humans just don't have the time or the heart to recognize them and respond to them. This book deserved to be so much better than it actually was. Great idea executed poorly. "When Elephants Weep" ended up being too much of an intellectual discussion about what is wrong with the human race and is written from a sophomoric slant enough to bore all but the most devout pop psychology buff to complete and utter insanity. In the first two chapters, authors Susan McCarthy and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson just rail on unfeeling humans (there is actually a chapter entitled "Unfeeling Brutes") and all we get for over 40 pages is a diatribe against the scientific community. The author even goes so far to discuss the deficiencies in Freudian psychology in the area of human child sexual abuse, but never fully explains why this is relevant to the topic of the book.

Opinions, opinions, and more opinions. I kept waiting for even moderately detailed, heartwarming accounts of animal emotions and all I got were short burst of dry, clinical accounts of various animals followed by paragraphs and paragraphs of human psychology. The main author Masson has a PhD in Sanskrit. Maybe he should stick to something he knows about, because he doesn't demonstrate that he knows anything about emotion in this book - animal or otherwise. This book is overwrought, poorly written, not well thought out, disorganized, doesn't make a good argument for animal emotions (which deserves one), and doesn't do anything to seriously convince the scientific community why they should study this subject more closely. Books like this actually hurt the cause more than they promote it. I just can't believe he got this published. I don't care what the critics say, or the fact that this was a New York Times best seller. Don't waste your money on this book. The authors come off like raving lunatics, making a respectable topic for research and further study look like it belongs on the magazine rack with the tabloids.

I have learned more about being human from my dog than I have ever learned from another human being. Animals have emotions - and I believe they have souls. Most humans know that by instinct and we'll have to rely on instinct until better written books and thorough research on this subject are published.

Rating:
Summary: Misleading & ignorant but well meaning
Review: The authors of this book clearly meant well. Their basic premise is one that I agree with- that animals are more than non-feeling automations.
They do a good job of making their case- if you don't know much about their sources or the scientific process. They misundersand and misinterperet much of their evidence and to add to it I caught them in one boldfaced lie.
The brunt of their argument relies on the use of annedotes. Many of these stories are compelling but deal more with the opinions of the witnesses which in some cases are highly questionable.
The authors site some well known scientific researchers. I have read a few of the works sited and can tell you that the authors often "forget" to include the words of caution the researchers included about the dangers of anthropomorphizing their subjects and about the fact that although we may guess about an animals emotions we cannot know about them.
The authors of this book have a big problem with anthropomorphization, and do not understand the very real need to avoid it. If scientists are to be allowed to guess and assume things instead of prove them through research, then many would be able to declare that there is life on Mars or that evolution does not exist. We can theorize about these things and try to find proof of them but we cannot SCIENTIFICALLY declare them to be so. If you doubt the fact that people are capable of making big errors in judgment when trying to read animal emotions read the prologue of this book.
While there are scientists and animal researchers out there who claim that animals cannot have emotions, there are plenty of others who believe that they probably do. However, just because we think something is true doesn't mean we can say it is scientific fact.
The authors make the claim that zookeepers don't ask if the animals in their care are "happy", only if they are well fed etc. This is a blatant lie- ask a zookeeper yourself.
Finally, the authors do not seem to understand that just because there is an evolutionary advantage for an emotion does not invalidate that emotion. They continually attack biologists who seem open to the idea of animal emotions. I found this puzzling and it did not help their case.
A number of good points are made in this book, however knowing that the authors lied at least once and misinterpeted/misunderstood so many of the stories they cite as evidence, I am left to wonder about anything they say.
I picked up this book with the hope of enjoying it and learning more about the emotional lives of animals but I was deeply disappointed. This book did more to discredit the idea of animal emotions than it did to support it.
If you really are interested in the subject please do yourself a favor and read the works they cite for yourself.