Animal Madness: Inside Their Minds

Description

Animal Madness: Inside Their Minds

by Laurel Braitman

ISBN:  9781451627015

Publisher:  Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

Publication Year:  2014

Format:  Trade Paperback

Pages:  379

From the back cover:

“Will zoo gorillas laugh if you make faces at them?  Can a dog develop Alzheimer’s?  Are some cats as anxious as their owners?  Will a parrot feel better on antidepressants?  Can a goat cheer up a horse?  Laurel Braitman, a historian of science, answers these questions and many more as she takes the reader on a tour of the inner lives of animals, showing the surprising ways their emotional and mental health so often mirrors our own.  Animal Minds tells the compelling history of our efforts to make sense of animals minds, from Charles Darwin to today’s Harvard psychiatrists’ work with gorilla patients.  But it also tethers that history to accounts of her rescue dogs and their progress toward happiness, of contemporary elephants whose hearts are healed by new love, and of canine and human war veterans working to overcome PTSD together.

Every being with a mind has the capacity to lose hold of it from time to time.  Luckily it can almost always be found again.  While this book is far from a training manual, it will change the way you try to help, entertain, play with, watch, and nurture the creatures you care about.  It may even help you understand the most complicated creature of all:  yourself.”