Verwandte Artikel zu The Science of Pets

The Science of Pets - Hardcover

Ingram, Jay

 
9781668069264: The Science of Pets
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1668069261 ISBN 13: 9781668069264
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

In the tradition of The Inside of a Dog, top science writer and TV personality Jay Ingram shares new insights into the hearts, minds, and bodies of the animals who love us (or do they?).

More than one billion pets live in homes around the world, sleeping on dog beds, clawing at cat trees, swimming in bowls, crawling around in aquariums. Canada, the United States, Brazil, the EU, and China make up half of those households, with half of the world’s population owning a pet of some sort. Yet despite the ubiquitous animals that lick our faces and steal food off the counter, we really don’t know a lot about the scientific side of their existence: why do dogs spin around when excited, do our cats really love us, do lizards make good pets, can single-celled organisms be considered pets (you can cut the hydra in two and have two pets!), what are parrots thinking, and can a horse be considered a pet? Or pigs (even those sent to market)? Or praying mantises? Or how about robot pets in Japan, caring for the elderly?

Veteran science broadcaster and journalist Jay Ingram, author of twenty popular science titles, including the bestselling Science of Why series, has researched the latest science behind our beloved furry, and not-so-furry, creatures that sleep on our sofas and eat our pizza crusts. Along the way, he discusses the myths and misconceptions about our companions: do dogs always do their business facing north? Why are we seeing a rise in exotic pets such as tigers and bears? Are the deer and foxes we see “rescued” on Instagram considered pets and could they be domesticated? Did dogs entirely evolve from wolves, and why? Can you communicate with a turtle? Do highly intelligent octopi make good pets? And why are baby animals, like baby humans, so darned cute: have they evolved to be born cute as a survival mechanism, and would that cuteness matter to others of their own kind who might consider them their next lunch?

Full of fabulous insights, humorous asides, and the wisdom of decades in science reporting, The Science of Pets will elucidate as it entertains. You will never look at your pets the same way again (but be sure they’re watching you closely).

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jay Ingram has hosted two national science programs in Canada, Quirks & Quarks on CBC radio and Daily Planet on Discovery Channel Canada. He is the author of twenty books, which have been translated into fifteen languages, including the bestselling five-volume The Science of Why series. In 2015, he won the Walter C. Alvarez Award from the American Medical Writers’ Association for excellence in communicating health care developments and concepts to the public, and from 2005 to 2015 he chaired the Science Communications Program at the Banff Centre. Jay has seven honorary degrees, was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, and is a Member of the Order of Canada. He is a cofounder of the arts and engineering street festival called Beakerhead in Calgary. He lives in Victoria, British Columbia. Connect with him on X @JayIngram.

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Chapter 1: Biophilia – CHAPTER 1 – Biophilia
In 1984, the renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson, already famed for his studies of ant societies, published a slim book called Biophilia.I Subtitled The Human Bond with Other Species, the book has had a profound impact on how we think about life on earth. Blending his own world travels with the history of biology and the bond between science and the humanities, Wilson built the case that humans are uniquely attracted to all other species, plant and animal.

He wasn’t shy about it either. In the first edition of the book, Wilson made statements that strongly suggest he believed biophilia was innate; that is, genetic: “Biophilia… I will be so bold as to define as the innate tendency to focus on life and life processes.”1

Did he really mean that we have genes that underlie our “focus on life”? If so, they are there because they promoted survival in the past—they’ve been naturally selected. You don’t have to rack your brain to think of what might look like obvious examples: being attentive to the movements of prey like deer, or the calls of the wolf, or knowing through learned experience (tuned by genes) where to find food—plants, insects, other animals—as challenging as that might have been. Yet the idea of biophilia being a genetic trait seemed an overreach to some, and concrete evidence for the genes of biophilia has been hard to come by. Wilson himself changed his stance somewhat nine years later, with this statement: “Biophilia is not a single instinct, but a complex set of learning rules.”2 That either muddied the waters or opened the door to new ideas, depending on your point of view. A surprise twist to this? You could even use the exact opposite—biophobia—to argue that the much better evidence for the genetic basis of fear of spiders and snakes shows that emotional attitudes toward nature, positive or negative, can be genetic, as Wilson himself believed: “We need to include biophobia under the broad umbrella of biophilia.”3

Whether biophilia is indeed genetic or, more likely, some combination of genes, culture, and individual variation, it plays a supremely important role in pet-keeping. “Pet-keeping” is a broad term; you’d expect it to manifest in a myriad of ways, and indeed, there’s a huge variety of relationships between people and pets. We all know pet owners who treat their pet as a member of the family, but even E. O. Wilson seems to have treated his pet lizard Methuselah as just another piece of lab equipment on the table: “It would often remain in the same spot for hours or even days without changing its position.”4

Beyond pets, there’s no question that we have a special interest in, and focus on, other forms of life, but sometimes that interest can go a little haywire. Given the interest is expressed by humans, it’s not surprising that it can be used to influence humans. Here are two examples, one ancient, one contemporary; one used animals for political purposes, the other for boosting self-image. But first, a brief history of the artistic origins of biophilia.

The inner walls of European caves at Chauvet and Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain are enlivened by hundreds of vividly colored images of animals and people. The Chauvet cave art is the oldest, estimated to date to about 35,000 years ago. It is Ice Age art. Several of the animals are long gone, like the aurochs, cave lion, cave hyena, and woolly rhino. Altamira, in Spain, is nearly the same age, with its own array of animals, like horses, goats, and bison. Lascaux, an elaborate series of chambers, is more recent, about 20,000 years old, but again devoted to depictions of local wildlife. The discovery of these caves in the nineteenth century led to a radical new appreciation of early modern humans and their culture—these people were clearly obsessed by large animals, some dangerous predators, others potential dinner.

There is actually evidence of a much earlier connection between art and the animals that surrounded these ancient humans. The Neanderthal people were fascinated by birds’ feathers and talons. One example is an arrangement of eight white eagle talons that were cut and polished, presumably intended to make a bracelet. That was an incredible 130,000 years ago. That and the much later Ice Age art in France and Spain confirm an all-consuming fascination with wildlife. Exactly what that fascination meant is still uncertain, but the existence of images of what appear to be human-animal hybrids suggests imaginative, visionary thinking about humans, animals, and nature. At the very least, the relationship went beyond hunting or being hunted: ancient biophilia. But change was on its way.

Move forward millennia to the great kingdoms of three, four, or five thousand years ago and our knowledge of what transpired is much more detailed and authenticated, and it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. Wildlife continued to play a central role not in the way it did in the lives of ordinary people as the cave paintings arguably suggest, but for the very rich and very powerful. And the role of the wildlife was integral to that social standing.

There were menageries, similar to zoos in the sense that they were collections of wildlife unfamiliar to the people who would see them, but with a very different purpose from the zoos of today. Hierakonpolis is a good example.

Hierakonpolis was an important city in ancient Egypt about 5,500 years ago, long before the reigns of the pharaohs. A series of archaeological excavations have revealed what has been called the first zoo, including the bones of baboons, elephants, hippos, wildcats, crocodiles, and a hartebeest—even some dogs. The animals were buried beside some of the most celebrated humans of the time, and there might have been a connection: that is, that the death of a ruler prompted the sacrifice of exotic animals as tribute. If so, this wouldn’t be the last time the demonstration of power and influence would be realized by the death of exotic animals. At the same time, though, there was respect; one elephant was buried on a reed mat and covered with linen.

The Egyptian fascination with wild animals continued through the following millennia. Most of the later pharaohs maintained gardens and zoos with animals mostly imported from far up the Nile River. (In fact, recent DNA analysis of the remains of baboons buried in ancient Egypt has located the formerly mysterious Land of Punt as being in or near modern-day Eritrea.) It might not be a step too far to make a connection between the Ice Age paintings of large animals on cave walls to their burial with powerful humans thousands of years later; they might be comparable gestures of respect, awe, and control. We don’t really know, but of those three, control soon took over.

In ancient Assyria and Babylon, a mix of conquest, wealth, the need to promote and celebrate a leader’s power, and the ability to do that by seizing foreign territory, animals, and human labor conspired to make possible jaw-dropping exhibitions of wild animals.

It wasn’t enough just to display the animals. Yes, bringing back a variety of species of deer implied the king’s dominance over foreign lands, but it would be even better if he dominated the animals themselves. The Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II once bragged that, at the behest of the gods, he killed 30 elephants, 257 wild oxen, and 370 lions. These likely weren’t what you’d call free-range lions, though.

A series of carved reliefs found in the excavated ruins of the ancient city of Nineveh detailed the hunting prowess of the last king of Assyria, Ashurbanipal. Lions...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668069261
ISBN 13 
9781668069264
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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