The Social Lives of Animals by Ashley Ward

The Social Lives of Animals 
By Ashley Ward
Basic Books, 2022

Considering the fact that humanity is wiping out nonhuman animal species even faster than humanity is advancing its understanding of those nonhuman animal species, one of the worst things a reader can encounter in any book of popular natural history or ethology intended for adults is whimsy. Since these books are appearing during one of the worst species-extinction events in history, any hint of giggling is grating. 

So The Social Lives of Animals by Ashley Ward, who’s Director of the Animal Behavior Lab at the University of Sydney, gets off to a rocky start. Not only does Ward indulge in the kind of navel-gazing that whimsy absolutely requires (“Forced to find a new direction in life, I pondered what to do next,” etc.), but he indulges the very signature of whimsy: the inclusion of direct-address “dear reader” in non-ironic prose. 

Fortunately, he mostly gets it out of his system early. The bulk of The Social Lives of Animals turns the focus exactly where it belongs: on the social lives of animals. Those social lives depend almost entirely on communication, of course, as Ward points out repeatedly. “Being able to communicate is clearly important for the cohesion of animal societies,” he writes at one point, and at another, “The more complex the web of relationships, the more important language becomes.”

One impression that’s unavoidable when reading Ward’s many examples, from vampire bats to Caledonia crows and all over the rest of the animal kingdom, is that gradations are probably pointless here: all relationship-webs are complex, probably more complex than humans have traditionally credited. Ward aptly describes many examples hinting at this, and many of his cases are strengthened because he’s intentionally chosen animals with bad PR:

In a recent experiment, pairs of rats were housed in adjacent quarters. One living space was dry and pleasant; the other was wet and less pleasant. Though rats can swim, by and large they’d rather not. Connecting the two areas was a door that could only be opened by the rat in the dry housing. The result is two rats, one bedraggled wet rat and a dry rat with a decision to make: Should it open the door to let the other in? The dry rats in the experiment did, and what’s more, they were quicker to open the door if they’d suffered in the same situation themselves. This result seems to suggest that they can identify with the discomfort of another rat and that they’re quick to lend a paw to help it out. 

Readers who were generally unaware of the extent and complexity of the “web of relationships” in nonhuman animals (much less those who were indoctrinated in childhood to believe such relationships are the sole province of humans) will find Ward’s book eye-opening. It’s also more than a little bittersweet, learning so much about how complex our fellow Earthlings are just as we’re herding so many of them into extinction, but although Ward’s tone throughout is one of upbeat, fascinated involvement, it’s thankfully not blithe. Readers will be likewise fascinated by how much we’ve learned. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.