After many months of scratching at its shell, pecking more insistently with each passing day, it finally happened: On Tuesday, Meet the Neighbors hatched!
Since you’re receiving this newsletter you probably know Meet the Neighbors. If so, skip ahead; and if not, it’s my book about animal personhood and our relationships to wild animals and to nature.
It started taking shape more than a decade ago. I was reporting regularly on the scientific study of animal intelligence, which had grown—and continues to grow—by leaps and bounds beyond the 20th century’s conventional scientific wisdom that animals are mostly unintelligent. (Not everyone thought so, of course, and often this attitude was applied selectively. The history is complicated. More on that in the book!)
Nowadays the idea that all animals are conscious, experiencing life in the first person, thinking and feeling and having relationships, has gone from a belief that could be dismissed as soft-minded anthropomorphism to supported by science. For a moment I thought I’d write a book just about the research.
But I also became interested in what we do with this knowledge, and in how the ways I had learned to see nature—beauty, wilderness, transcendence, utility, biodiversity, conservation, even the movement to see humans and nature as joined rather than opposed—rarely engage with animal intelligence. That other animals could be understood as fellow persons isn’t part of the official picture. That’s changing, though, and people are taking this new sensibility onto the landscape.
Out of all that emerged Meet the Neighbors, available now from your favorite bookseller.
In the last couple weeks I had lovely conversations with Cara Santa Maria on the Talk Nerdy podcast; KERA’s Think, hosted by Krys Boyd; and Ana Bradley and Jenny Splitter from Sentient Media’s podcast. The last yielded this clip: a story that’s dear to my heart about a squirrel on the road and how, despite the way animal issues can become polarized, care for animals can transcend what might seem to divide us.
I also did a Q&A with Marc Bekoff and wrote a short essay for Nautilus in which I talk more about Meet the Neighbors’ themes. Nautilus paired the essay with an excerpt from a chapter about a young ecologist named Erick Lundgren who studies feral donkeys in the desert southwest.
Feral is a loaded word: Its narrowest definition signifies an escape from captivity or domestication, but it usually has negative connotations. A feral animal isn’t a properly wild animal. They don’t belong. Which to Lundgren doesn’t make much sense: Why should time in captivity forever disqualify a lineage from being considered an acceptable part of nature? Didn’t people owe those donkeys, who made a home in lands where centuries ago their pack-hauling ancestors were forced to toil, some consideration? And might the donkeys’ official designation as invasive and destructive blind people to their actual ecological roles?
If you enjoy Meet the Neighbors, please spread the word. I’m hugely fortunate to have my publisher’s promotional support—but nothing beats the recommendations of fellow readers. Tell your people & leave a review!
And I’ve still got a few promotional bookplates left, too. If you’d like one signed & stamped with your choice of art from the book, fill out this form.
Many thanks,
Brandon
