The Others: How Animals Made Us Human

Rating:
Summary: Dense, but highly effective
Review: Paul Shepard will probably be viewed as one of the more important philosophers of nature in the future. He more or less created the field of human ecology and his books have had a major influence on the environmental movement. All of his books are worth reading and are recommended. However Shepard is not to be taken lightly. His work is dense, at times difficult, and will shake up your thinking. From his first major work, "Man in the landscape," to the end of his life he threw off ideas like a grinding stone throwing off sparks. If you are really serious about the idea that human evolutionary history is important to our current lives then Paul Shepard is for you. If you are looking for a light read about animals, I'd look elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: A thoughtful commentary on how Animals influence us
Review: Paul Shepherd was a great thinker, and I regret that I only became aware of his work very recently. His thesis throughout most of his work is that civilization as we know it is the true enemy of human beings. We have insulated ourselves from nature and from our teachers the animals. I do not always agree with his point of view, but he presents his ideas in such a way as to allow you to grasp and test them, and certainly not to shove them down your throat or tell you that this is the absolute truth. He really gets you to think.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing. Hunter perspective.
Review: The layout is attractive and promising, with the beginning of each chapter accompanied by an 1800's steel-engraving of anthropomorphic animals (from children's books or political cartoons) and an appropriate quote or two, some of which are very wise. However, it is completely different from my expectations.

In the introduction, the author greets us as being a masculine hunter, fascinated by the concept of "sacred prey," who views animals in a very utilitarian fashion ("user and the used") despite how his boyhood was spent in not a farm (where a utilitarian viewpoint usually results from) but a suburb (where he grew fond of animals through hobbies such as butterfly collections, egg collecting, and something about small animals and a BB gun.)

Quote from page 7: "The only way I could resolve this contradiction of both loving and killing animals was, on the one hand, to try to understand 'native' cosmologies (or their traces in the modern unconcious) in which killing and eating animals was a positive quality and, on the other hand, to seek the flaws in the 'humane' movement in all its forms."

At this point I can say with certainty that this is, without a doubt, NOT a book for PETA or vegetarians, since clearly he'll be attacking those viewpoints. It is also not for those who want to view animals as sacred in a happy, friendly everyone-gets-along sort of way, since this is quite dark and grotesque with some troubling mental images that you might not be comfortable with. (Poetic descriptions of death throes, for example.) If you are the sort of person who resonates with the concept of "sacred prey" and wants to learn more about it, and can deal with the gritty reality of predation, go ahead and read it.