Becoming Wild

How Animals Learn to be Animals

By: Carl Safina

Narrated by: Carl Safina

This audiobook 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. You receive it from thousands of individuals, from pools of knowledge passing through generations like an eternal torch. You, too, may raise young, know beauty, or struggle to negotiate a peace. And your culture, too, changes and evolves. The light of knowledge needs adjusting as situations change, so a capacity for learning, especially social learning, allows behaviors to adjust, to change much faster than genes alone could adapt.

Becoming Wild offers a glimpse into cultures among nonhuman animals through looks at the lives of individuals in different present-day animal societies. By showing how others teach and learn, Safina offers a fresh understanding of what is constantly going on beyond humanity. With reporting from deep in nature, alongside individual creatures in their free-living communities, this audiobook offers a very privileged glimpse behind the curtain of life on Earth and helps inform the answer to that most urgent of questions: Who are we here with?

©2020 Carl Safina (P)2020 Tantor

Beautifully written, Beautiful thinking

I thoroughly enjoyed Becoming Wild. Helped me see a little differently too. Enjoy. Not only scientific but Carl’s use of word is different and beautiful.