Exploring Animal Intelligence with Frans de Waal: How Smart Are Animals Really?

chris: arrived quickly v good condition - wouldnt know it was pre-owned

United Kingdom on Nov 01, 2023

smita krishnan: I bought the book as a gift for someone.

India on Sep 04, 2023

Client d'Amazon: This book is simply amazing! You'll learn so many things about the animals and their way of adapting and thinking. We, humans, really ought to be more humble when it comes to the other animals intelligence and behaviour.
Only 4 stars because the book arrived in rough shape, the cover was half torn.

France on May 01, 2022

Bill Rayner: This is a fairly good book. Maybe the Frans de Waal didn't write it for people like me, so I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt and 4 stars. The good thing about the book is that it includes many anecdotes about how animals of various types have demonstrated their mental abilities in experiments and in observations in the wild - chimpanzees, other apes and primates, birds, dolphins, elephants, and more. The down side is that de Wall can't resist doing what professors and researchers love to do - knock the theories and conclusions of other professors and researchers, most of whom predated de Waal's generation. This is probably a decent book for someone who wants to be a professor or researcher in animal cognition, and who cares about alternative academic perspectives. Myself, I learned enough about the misguided professors who preceded de Waal in the first few pages, and I didn't need it hammered into me throughout the book. I didn't even bother to read the last four pages because it was more of the same. And what de Wall was proposing makes perfect sense to me - what was the point of continuing to try to convince the reader that the outdated behaviorist approach is wrong as...

Canada on May 20, 2021

Alex Tee: It's a very interesting book, however there is much more scientific rhetoric than I was expecting. If you are an animal lover, or you have pets yourself, much of what is in this book will already be known to you, especially when it comes to statements about what motivates animals to do what they do.

If you are a student of Animal Behaviour, or Ecology, or any kind of scientific field regarding animals, then this is a valuable and interesting book. Frans de Waal does an excellent job of keeping an unbiased view when it comes to animals and the study of their abilities. He clearly points out the unfairness regarding certain tests - one set of standards for children, and another for apes, and also the importance of ensuring your test fits the natural abilities of the animal in question. A good example of this being the Elephants and the mirror.

The only thing I find disappointing is that even though he defends the social and cognitive abilities of his subjects (apes) he still has a distinctly scientfic, and somewhat cold tone towards them. It's as though he knows they are "good" but not as good as us. Which is a pity, because it seems to be the favoured approach to...

United Kingdom on Nov 14, 2016

Richard Reese (author of Understanding Sustainability): Primatologist Frans de Waal has made a career out of pounding his head against the rugged wall of human exceptionalism — the belief that humans are the only species that is conscious, self-aware, rational, cooperative, goal-oriented, empathetic, and so on. This wall of calcified grandiosity has resisted change for a long time, and has inspired an abusive relationship with the rest of the family of life. With his new book, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, de Waal has launched a new assault on the cult of exceptionalism.

In the 1970s, when de Waal was in college, behavioral psychology was the hot trend. It asserted that animals were mindless, machine-like organisms that did nothing more than robotically respond to stimuli with responses. Animals were incapable of cognition — knowing based on perception and judgment. They could not have desires or intentions. Many scholars remain reluctant to consider the possibility that animals possess various forms of intelligence. Whoops, I meant non-human animals. In our culture, the two categories of fauna are humans and animals (not wombats and non-wombats).

In the last 20 years, new research has been...

United States on Aug 20, 2016

Book Shark: Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? By Frans de Waal

“Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?” is an insightful look at animal intelligence backed up by evidence from controlled experiments. Dutch/American biologist with a Ph.D. in zoology and ethology and author of Our Inner Ape and others, Frans de Waal, takes the reader on a journey of the sophistication of nonhuman minds. This entertaining 352-page book includes the following nine chapters: 1. Magic Wells, 2. A Tale of Two Schools, 3. Cognitive Ripples, 4. Talk to Me, 5. The Measure of all Things, 6. Social Skills, 7. Time Will Tell, 8. Of Mirrors and Jars, and 9. Evolutionary Cognition.

Positives:
1. Engaging and well-written book that is accessible to the masses.
2. A fascinating topic in the hands of a subject matter expert, nonhuman cognition.
3. Entertaining and insightful. The book is easy to follow. Professor de Waal is fair and even handed. He is careful to not oversell nonhuman cognition while providing a mixture of stories, experiments and observations to back his points. “I will pick and choose from among many discoveries, species, and scientists, so as to...

United States on May 03, 2016