Animals' Best Friends
Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity and in the Wild
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Animals' Best Friends
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Narrated by:
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Karen White
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By:
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Barbara J. King
About this listen
As people come to understand more about animals' inner lives, we feel a growing compassion, a desire to better their lives. But how do we translate this compassion into helping other creatures, both those that are and are not our pets? Bringing together the latest science with heartfelt storytelling, Animals' Best Friends reveals the opportunities we have in everyday life to help animals in our homes, in the wild, in zoos, and in science labs, as well as those considered to be food.
Barbara J. King, an expert on animal cognition and emotion, guides us on a journey both animal and deeply human. We meet cows living relaxed lives in an animal sanctuary - and cows with plastic portals in their sides at a university research station. We observe bison free-roaming at Yellowstone National Park and chimpanzees confined to zoos. We reflect on animal testing as King shares her own experience as the survivor of a particularly nasty cancer.
This is a book not of shaming and limitation, but of uplift and expansion. Though an animal expert, she is just like the rest of us: on a journey still, learning each day how to be better, and do better, for animals. By turning compassion into action on behalf of animals, we not only improve animals' lives - we also immeasurably enrich our own.
©2021 Barbara J. King (P)2021 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 68
A major new exploration of the economics of animal exploitation and a practical road map for how we can use the marketplace to promote the welfare of all living creatures from the renowned animal-rights advocate Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States and New York Times best-selling author of The Bond.
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5 out of 5 stars
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For all lovers of animals--even the most sensitive
- By monique on 05-01-16
By: Wayne Pacelle
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The New Breed
- What Our History with Animals Reveals About Our Future with Robots
- By: Kate Darling
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 9 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 37
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 36
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 35
There has been a lot of ink devoted to discussions of how robots will replace us and take our jobs. But MIT Media Lab researcher and technology policy expert Kate Darling argues just the opposite, and that treating robots with a bit of humanity, more like the way we treat animals, will actually serve us better.
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3 out of 5 stars
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The book is interesting, and makes good points, but Kate darling forgot about slavery in history
- By jeremy on 10-24-21
By: Kate Darling
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This Is Your Brain on Parasites
- How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society
- By: Kathleen McAuliffe
- Narrated by: Nicol Zanzarella
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,113
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 990
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 988
A riveting investigation of the myriad ways that parasites control how other creatures - including humans - think, feel, and act. These tiny organisms can live only inside another animal, and, as McAuliffe reveals, they have many evolutionary motives for manipulating their host's behavior. Far more often than appreciated, these puppeteers orchestrate the interplay between predator and prey.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Entertaining but questionable studies
- By mdkoci on 01-02-17
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Superlative
- The Biology of Extremes
- By: Matthew D. LaPlante
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 91
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 77
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 77
The world's largest land mammal could help us end cancer. The fastest bird is showing us how to solve a century-old engineering mystery. The oldest tree is giving us insights into climate change. The loudest whale is offering clues about the impact of solar storms. For a long time, scientists ignored superlative life forms as outliers. Increasingly, though, researchers are coming to see great value in studying plants and animals that exist on the outermost edges of the bell curve.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fascinating survey of amazing biology
- By Nerd's-eye view on 12-06-19
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The Age of Empathy
- Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society
- By: Frans de Waal
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 140
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 81
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 83
Is it really human nature to stab one another in the back in our climb up the corporate ladder? Competitive, selfish behavior is often explained away as instinctive, thanks to evolution and "survival of the fittest", but in fact, humans are equally hard-wired for empathy. Using research from the fields of anthropology, psychology, animal behavior, and neuroscience, Frans de Waal brilliantly argues that humans are group animals.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A Lot Of Things In Common With Our Animal Friends!
- By James on 08-14-11
By: Frans de Waal
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Becoming Wild
- How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace
- By: Carl Safina
- Narrated by: Carl Safina
- Length: 13 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 159
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 130
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Story5 out of 5 stars 127
Some people insist that culture is strictly a human feat. What are they afraid of? This book looks into three cultures of other-than-human beings in some of Earth's remaining wild places. It shows how if you're a sperm whale, a scarlet macaw, or a chimpanzee, you too experience your life with the understanding that you are an individual in a particular community. You too are who you are not by genes alone; your culture is a second form of inheritance. And your culture, too, changes and evolves.
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5 out of 5 stars
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It all sinks in over the story—highly recommend
- By Knitting Fisherman on 06-13-20
By: Carl Safina
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Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You
- A Lively Tour Through the Dark Side of the Natural World
- By: Dan Riskin
- Narrated by: Dan Riskin
- Length: 5 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 79
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 65
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 65
It may be a wonderful world, but as Dan Riskin explains, it's also a dangerous, disturbing, and disgusting one. At every turn, it seems, living things are trying to eat us, poison us, use our bodies as their homes, or have us spread their eggs. In Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You, Riskin is our guide through the natural world at its most gloriously ruthless. Using the seven deadly sins as a road map, Riskin offers dozens of jaw-dropping examples that illuminate how brutal nature can truly be.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Just a bunch of random animal behaviors.
- By Goddess on 05-18-23
By: Dan Riskin
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The Thing with Feathers
- The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human
- By: Noah Strycker
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 103
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 89
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 88
Birds are highly intelligent animals, yet their intelligence is dramatically different from our own and has been little understood. As we learn more about the secrets of bird life, we are unlocking fascinating insights into memory, relationships, game theory, and the nature of intelligence itself. The Thing with Feathers explores the astonishing homing abilities of pigeons, the good deeds of fairy-wrens, the influential flocking abilities of starlings, the deft artistry of bowerbirds, the extraordinary memories of nutcrackers, and other mysteries.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Interesting book, terrible reader
- By MGM123 on 03-16-18
By: Noah Strycker
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Civilized to Death
- The Price of Progress
- By: Christopher Ryan
- Narrated by: Christopher Ryan
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2,359
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2,063
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 2,060
Most of us have instinctive evidence the world is ending - balmy December days, face-to-face conversation replaced with heads-to-screens zomboidism, a world at constant war, a political system in disarray. We hear some myths and lies so frequently that they feel like truths: Civilization is humankind’s greatest accomplishment. Progress is undeniable. Count your blessings. You’re lucky to be alive here and now. Civilized to Death counters the idea that progress is inherently good, arguing that the "progress" defining our age is analogous to an advancing disease.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Congintive Dissonance
- By Konnor C on 12-06-19
By: Christopher Ryan
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In the Company of Bears
- What Black Bears Have Taught Me About Intelligence and Intuition
- By: Benjamin Kilham
- Narrated by: George Backman
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 50
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 44
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 45
Imagine raising an orphaned bear cub, carefully reintroducing her to the wild, then being welcomed back, almost daily, to observe her wild world for more than 17 years. Imagine visiting her in her feeding spots, watching her with her mates and her young, peering into her den, and, over time, observing the lives of all the other wild bears in her territory and surrounding ones. That is what happened to Ben Kilham.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Best Bear book I have read!
- By Walking With Bears on 06-02-21
By: Benjamin Kilham
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How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog)
- Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution
- By: Lyudmila Trut, Lee Alan Dugatkin
- Narrated by: Joe Hempel
- Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 762
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 685
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 687
Tucked away in Siberia, there are furry, four-legged creatures with wagging tails and floppy ears that are as docile and friendly as any lapdog. But, despite appearances, these are not dogs - they are foxes. They are the result of the most astonishing experiment in breeding ever undertaken - imagine speeding up thousands of years of evolution into a few decades. In 1959, biologists Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut set out to do just that, by starting with a few dozen silver foxes from fox farms in the USSR and attempting to recreate the evolution of wolves into dogs in real time.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Amazing
- By paul on 10-26-17
By: Lyudmila Trut, and others
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Beasts
- What Animals Can Teach Us About the Origins of Good Evil
- By: Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 5 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 85
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 78
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Story4 out of 5 stars 79
There are two supreme predators on the planet with the most complex brains in nature: humans and orcas. In the 20th century alone, one of these animals killed 200 million members of its own species, the other killed none. Jeffrey Masson’s fascinating new book begins here: There is something different about us. In Beasts he demonstrates that the violence we perceive in the "wild" is mostly a matter of projection. We link the basest human behavior to animals, to "beasts" ("he behaved no better than a beast"), and claim the high ground for our species.
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5 out of 5 stars
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This one is a MUST!!! Thought provoking....
- By kristen on 03-10-14
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Perception
- How Our Bodies Shape Our Minds
- By: Dennis Proffitt, Drake Baer
- Narrated by: Angela Dawe
- Length: 7 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 43
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 39
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 39
Perception marries academic rigor with mainstream accessibility. The research presented and the personalities profiled will show what it means to not only have, but be, your unique human body. The positive ramifications of viewing ourselves from this embodied perspective include greater athletic, academic, and professional achievement, more nourishing relationships, and greater personal well-being. The better we can understand what our bodies are - what they excel at, what they need, what they must avoid - the better we can live our lives.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The body-mind connection well explained
- By Lucy A. Pithecus on 12-11-22
By: Dennis Proffitt, and others
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The Wonder of Birds
- What They Tell Us About Ourselves, the World, and a Better Future
- By: Jim Robbins
- Narrated by: Danny Campbell
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 84
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 80
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 78
Birds, Jim Robbins posits, are our most vital connection to nature. They compel us to look to the skies, both literally and metaphorically, draw us out into nature to seek their beauty, and let us experience vicariously what it is like to be weightless. Birds have helped us in so many of our human endeavors: learning to fly, providing clothing and food, and helping us better understand the human brain and body.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Stories about birds with something for everyone
- By D on 07-24-17
By: Jim Robbins
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Coyote America
- A Natural and Supernatural History
- By: Dan Flores
- Narrated by: Elijah Alexander
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 3,890
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 3,414
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 3,415
Coyote America is both an environmental and a deep natural history of the coyote. It traces both the five-million-year-long biological story of an animal that has become the "wolf" in our backyards and its cultural evolution from a preeminent spot in Native American religions to the hapless foil of the Road Runner. A deeply American tale, the story of the coyote in the American West and beyond is a sort of Manifest Destiny in reverse.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Very Enjoyable Book, Subject Matter, and Reader
- By John Townsend on 03-17-17
By: Dan Flores
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The Bonobo and the Atheist
- By: Frans de Waal
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 618
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 551
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 549
In this lively and illuminating discussion of his landmark research, esteemed primatologist Frans de Waal argues that human morality is not imposed from above but instead comes from within. Moral behavior does not begin and end with religion but is in fact a product of evolution. For many years, de Waal has observed chimpanzees soothe distressed neighbors and bonobos share their food. Now he delivers fascinating fresh evidence for the seeds of ethical behavior in primate societies that further cements the case for the biological origins of human fairness.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Great research on apes, bad research on humans
- By Christian Bonnell on 07-18-14
By: Frans de Waal
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Cannibalism
- By: Bill Schutt
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 266
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 237
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Story4 out of 5 stars 236
Eating one's own kind is a completely natural behavior in thousands of species, including humans. Throughout history we have engaged in cannibalism for reasons related to famine, burial rites, and medicine. Cannibalism has also been used as a form of terrorism and as the ultimate expression of filial piety. With unexpected wit and a wealth of knowledge, Bill Schutt takes us on a tour of the field, exploring exciting new avenues of research and investigating questions like why so many fish eat their offspring and some amphibians consume their mothers' skin.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Ruined it at the end
- By Kimberly Ames on 12-07-17
By: Bill Schutt