jerihurd's review against another edition
4.0
Super interesting look at the complexity of animals' emotional lives, and what that tells us about our own. Of course, as someone who has lived around pets since a toddler, it has always boggled the mind that anyone could deny that animals have a rich array of emotional responses. Just try giving one dog a treat and NOT giving one to the other, and see how they react!
atamano's review against another edition
informative
medium-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual content, Animal death, and Violence
alex_wordweaver's review against another edition
5.0
Great read for anyone interested in the science of emotions and has a great definition to boot of what free will actually means in the context of consciousness and sentience.
simlish's review against another edition
3.0
Mama's Last Hug is about exactly what its subtitle says: animal emotion and the evolutionary reasons for emotion, and why there's not as big a difference between us and other animals as we tend to think. There wasn't a single emotion, in de Waal's estimation, that humans have that animals don't. Although I don't think of myself as being particularly wedded to human difference as sign of supremacy, that was a surprisingly hard concept for me to get my mind around.
de Waal is obviously an excellent behaviorist, but he has an awful blind spot about gender -- I'm going to talk about humans, here, but de Waal extrapolated these pieces to the rest of the animal kingdom. Two moments stood out to me, and they were each bad enough that I had to reconsider how much I trusted the rest of the information around them:
The first, de Waal quoted a study that found female infants are more likely to look at human faces, and male infants more likely to look at mechanical objects. If I hadn't read Inferior by Angela Saini, I would have just paused at that, since it sounds like gender essentialist hooey, but since I HAVE read Inferior I got treated to a long breakdown of every single problem with the experiment (there were many), and that it has never once been replicated. Given de Waal's criticisms of animal studies that have poor experimental design and the widely repeated claims they generate (he goes after the alpha myth in quite a bit of detail), it was astonishing to me that he accepted this one without question.
The second moment that I had a great deal of trouble with was that he claimed there was a biological deterrent against male violence against females, since male chimps often fight amongst themselves, but do not attack females at the same rates. He then claimed that the social taboo in humans against publicly striking women was related to that, and given the amount of women that are beaten and killed by their husbands each year, I just cannot possibly take that seriously. If there was a biological deterrent against striking women, there would be a hell of a lot more women alive today.
But when he was talking about non-human animals, de Waal had a pretty good grasp of things.
de Waal is obviously an excellent behaviorist, but he has an awful blind spot about gender -- I'm going to talk about humans, here, but de Waal extrapolated these pieces to the rest of the animal kingdom. Two moments stood out to me, and they were each bad enough that I had to reconsider how much I trusted the rest of the information around them:
The first, de Waal quoted a study that found female infants are more likely to look at human faces, and male infants more likely to look at mechanical objects. If I hadn't read Inferior by Angela Saini, I would have just paused at that, since it sounds like gender essentialist hooey, but since I HAVE read Inferior I got treated to a long breakdown of every single problem with the experiment (there were many), and that it has never once been replicated. Given de Waal's criticisms of animal studies that have poor experimental design and the widely repeated claims they generate (he goes after the alpha myth in quite a bit of detail), it was astonishing to me that he accepted this one without question.
The second moment that I had a great deal of trouble with was that he claimed there was a biological deterrent against male violence against females, since male chimps often fight amongst themselves, but do not attack females at the same rates. He then claimed that the social taboo in humans against publicly striking women was related to that, and given the amount of women that are beaten and killed by their husbands each year, I just cannot possibly take that seriously. If there was a biological deterrent against striking women, there would be a hell of a lot more women alive today.
But when he was talking about non-human animals, de Waal had a pretty good grasp of things.
adinatantalo's review against another edition
4.0
I’ve always assigned emotions to non-human animals, so to read scientific evidence of this is so exciting to me! This is well written and isn’t unnecessarily weighted down by too many terms that could otherwise make it a dull read. I love when an author can inject bits of humor while maintaining relevance to the topic. The research of de Waal and of other scientists cannot be denied and is incredibly important. I would recommend this book to any of those people I’ve encountered in my life time who have said they hate animals, and to those who already do appreciate the complexity of other animals. Mostly so that they can now all love Bonobos as much as I do!
raincorbyn's review against another edition
3.0
A powerful and insightful account of animals' emotional lives and their proximity to our own, with a really disappointing conclusion from an animal rights perspective.
de Waal rightly criticizes a longheld but arbitrary and solipsistic scientific claim: animals' behavior is not emotion, but pure evolutionary instincts, like an in-out machine. He does so scientifically, and drawing on his decades of experience as a primatologist, and extends these ideas to other animals, positing that the evolutionary benefits of core instincts amongst social animals (read: all vertebrates) likely carry an emotional experience as well.
All this good stuff leads up to a confounding, baffling conclusion as to what our responsibilities are towards our emotional cousins. The last 50 pages are just as maddening as the human-centric anti-science scientists he criticizes, who chose to hold massive cognitive dissonance rather than change their conclusions and behavior based on good evidence. To put it bluntly, he mocks veganism and animal rights (as opposed to welfare) in ways that are failures both of scientific rigor and of empathy, using such feeble arguments as "circle of life tho," "animals are "meant" to be human food," "vegan diets are impossible," without suggesting why, and even the dreadful "plants might have something like feelings too, so harming animals who definitely have feelings is fine."
All in all, this massive failure of an ending, this choosing of one's own human supremacy rather than taking the lessons he has just taught us all, and applying them towards a better life for non-human emotional beings, is perhaps what the book's subtitle unintentionally reveals. Animals' obviously real, deep, and important emotional lives have much to teach us about ourselves, and sometimes what is taught is incriminating.
de Waal rightly criticizes a longheld but arbitrary and solipsistic scientific claim: animals' behavior is not emotion, but pure evolutionary instincts, like an in-out machine. He does so scientifically, and drawing on his decades of experience as a primatologist, and extends these ideas to other animals, positing that the evolutionary benefits of core instincts amongst social animals (read: all vertebrates) likely carry an emotional experience as well.
All this good stuff leads up to a confounding, baffling conclusion as to what our responsibilities are towards our emotional cousins. The last 50 pages are just as maddening as the human-centric anti-science scientists he criticizes, who chose to hold massive cognitive dissonance rather than change their conclusions and behavior based on good evidence. To put it bluntly, he mocks veganism and animal rights (as opposed to welfare) in ways that are failures both of scientific rigor and of empathy, using such feeble arguments as "circle of life tho," "animals are "meant" to be human food," "vegan diets are impossible," without suggesting why, and even the dreadful "plants might have something like feelings too, so harming animals who definitely have feelings is fine."
All in all, this massive failure of an ending, this choosing of one's own human supremacy rather than taking the lessons he has just taught us all, and applying them towards a better life for non-human emotional beings, is perhaps what the book's subtitle unintentionally reveals. Animals' obviously real, deep, and important emotional lives have much to teach us about ourselves, and sometimes what is taught is incriminating.