Books like When Elephants Weep — picked by fans

I sought out this book after watching the documentary that brought me to tears: My Octopus Teacher.

This book was every bit as inspiring. The narrator recounts her interaction with octopuses at an aquarium as she begins to recognize aspects that mirror human traits: curiosity, warmth, individuality, and humor. But the author never anthropomorphizes the octopuses; they remain a mysterious, complicated species.

This book happily left me with more questions than answers, which is why I love it and why I will never eat octopus.

I will read anything by Mary Roach because she’s hilarious.

But in particular, she’s an expert at uncovering the unexpectedly bizarre, surreal hidden side of any topic: death, astronaut training, digestion, and… human-animal conflicts.

Animals do what they do, and many a time, humans want to arrest (and even kill) them for it. And we have tried. For centuries. With wildly uneven results. And with each story of people going to battle—vainly, quixotically—with vandalous seagulls and crows, hungry bears, uninvited elephants, poisonous beans, and home-invading macaques, I think, Holy sh*t!

There’s a line near the beginning of Berwald’s book where she mentions that jellyfish came into her life “when the haze of sleepless nights” brought on by early parenthood had begun to lift, and she was beginning to once again have an existence beyond parenting. What follows is a chronicle of Berwald’s deep dive into all the fascinating aspects of her new passion and the people and places she experienced because of it.

I read this book while I was living in that very haze, and enjoyed both following Berwald’s adventures and imagining those that I’d have once my haze had lifted.

Are you ready to change the way you see the world forever? Reading Peter Wohlleben’s three-book Mysteries of Nature series will do just that.

This second volume focuses on animal emotions and making connections with human behavior. Until fairly recently, most serious scientists focused only on observable behavior and didn’t try to imagine or determine what animals’ actions tell us about their feelings.

However, all animal lovers can benefit, as I did, from questioning our assumptions, better understanding our similarities, and becoming more aware of how much there is to learn about the inner life of animals. Get ready for some surprises!

This is a favorite of mine. Masson’s keen observations into what we emotionally need from cats and what they need from us are not only heart-warming but insightful: ‘We need cats to need us,’ he writes. ‘It unnerves us that they do not. However, if they do not need us, they nonetheless seem to love us.’ Beautifully written and drawing from both literature and scientific research, the book brings to life the delights and mysteries of the feline heart.

Normally the word "spirituality" in a book title would have me running for the door. Dr. Pribac is so smart, so insightful, and so different in her way of approaching everything, that I was struck with wonder. Warning: A full-throated endorsement of veganism (to my delight).

Normally I do not like academic books about animals. But this book is an exception. The author is different than ordinary academics. For one thing, she really adores her subject. For another, she writes with heart. She is also whip-smart, so just about every sentence is worth reading twice or even three times. I truly believe she will revolutionize the field with her next books. Anyone interested in animals should keep an eye on for this author.  

I met Jane Goodall in Washington on her birthday 25 years ago. At that time, all I knew of her came from her beginnings as a chimpanzee researcher. It was hard to believe this slight, elderly woman had found the courage to strike out alone into the deepest part of the African forest and even harder to believe her discovery there had changed the world.

This draws on her decades of work since that time by the world’s most famous living ethologist and environmentalist. It’s an uplifting journey around the globe that highlights the good work that will inspire people to make a difference in the world around them. As one of the UN’s Ambassadors of Peace, she offers four pillars of hope drawn from her unique experience: the amazing human intellect, the resilience of nature, the power and dedication of young people, and the indomitable human spirit.

If you… show more.

I read this book when I was a new mom myself, and I was fascinated to learn how much I had in common with animal parents all over the world. In the process of birthing, feeding, protecting, cleaning, and teaching our offspring, we all face similar challenges and tradeoffs and reap remarkable rewards.

Several stories from this book have stuck with me for years, like the one about breastfeeding bat moms needing to offload their milk into any willing mouth, whether it’s their own baby or someone else’s, just to lighten their load enough to fly!

This book brilliantly and entertainingly crystallized my thoughts about the role of animals in ecosystems and the shortcomings of how they are too often perceived by policy makers.

These ideas had been fermenting while I worked on wildlife issues in the Vermont Statehouse. The hunting lobby took the legitimate issue of overpopulating deer and applied it to all wildlife, arguing for greater license to kill everything, while advocacy groups tried to make the case that “wildlife watching” was broader based and generated more money than hunting license fees.

I didn't disagree with that last argument, but to my mind, both arguments trivialized wildlife, missing the essential role they played in building and maintaining ecosystems. But I couldn’t express it as authoritatively, clearly, or humorously as Joe Roman does in his wonderful book. The humor is hinted at in the title. The essence of his argument is in the subtitle, “…… show more.

I like Temple Grandin’s Animals Make Us Human because it points the way to improved animal welfare and understanding.

Most animal cognition books and scientific studies focus on predator animals, like dogs, cats, whales, dolphins, and apes. Grandin’s work focuses instead on prey animals, primarily horses and cattle.

Prey and predator brains behave very differently from each other, so it’s important for our safety, pleasure, and love for animals to understand those differences.