Showing titles in Animals

At the start of this remarkable story of recovery, healing, and redemption, Ginger Gaffney answers a call to help retrain the troubled horses at an alternative prison ranch in New Mexico, a facility run entirely by the prisoners. The horses are scavenging through the dumpsters, kicking and running down the residents when they bring the trash out after meals. One horse is severely injured. The horses and residents arrive at the ranch broken in one way or many: the horses are defensive and terrified, while the residents, some battling addictions, are emotionally and physically shattered.

Insects are the most successful group of animals ever to have lived. They comprise a million species and perhaps 10 quintillion individuals: one in every four animals on the planet is a beetle; one in every ten is a butterfly or moth. Much of life on earth depends on the activities of these busy, teeming arthropods, from pollination to the breaking down of waste matter. In Alien Worlds, Steve Nicholls draws on a lifetime of writing about, photographing and filming the natural world to create an ambitious account of insect evolution and biology

For the past year, veteran journalists Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal traveled more than 25,000 miles across the Americas, chronicling costly experiments, contentious politics, and new technologies to save our beloved birds from the brink of extinction. Through this compelling drama, A Wing and a Prayer offers hope and an urgent call to action: Birds are dying at an unprecedented pace. But there are encouraging breakthroughs across the hemisphere and still time to change course, if we act quickly.

Yellowstone National Park was once home to an abundance of wild wolves - but park rangers killed the last of their kind in the 1920s. Decades later, the rangers brought them back, with the first wolves arriving from Canada in 1995. This is the incredible true story of one of those wolves.

Our precious archipelago is ravaged by climate change, bereft of natural ecosystems and lies at the mercy of global warming, flooding, drought and catastrophic biodiversity loss. But could restoring species that once helped protect our islands help turn this crisis around? From familiar yet imperilled honeybees and ancient oak woods to returning natives like beavers and boars, Britain’s cornerstone species may hold the key to recovering our biodiversity on land and in our seas.

Mother nature has a lot to teach us, if only we open our eyes. Pigeons and dolphins offer creative strategies for preserving our memories and warding off dementia, while squirrels and pigs harbor secrets for managing chronic pain. In The Book of Animal Secrets, visionary physician and biomedical researcher David B. Agus, MD, explores all these ways—and more—that we can harness the wonders of the animal kingdom in our own, very human lives.

History is full of strange animal stories, invented by the brightest and most influential, from Aristotle to Disney, and they reveal as much about us and the things we believe as they do about the animals they misrepresent. We once thought that eels were born from sand, that swallows migrated to the moon, and that bears gave birth to formless lumps that were licked into shape by their mothers.

Remarkable new discoveries affirm the octopus as one of nature’s most intelligent and complex animals. This new book brings us closer than ever to these elusive creatures. The companion to the highly anticipated National Geographic television special, this book explores the alluring underwater world of the octopus—a creature that resembles an alien lifeform, but whose behavior has earned it a reputation as one of the most intelligent animals on the planet.

As historian Mark Essig reveals in Lesser Beasts, swine have such a bad reputation for precisely the same reasons they are so valuable as a source of food: they are intelligent, self-sufficient, and omnivorous. What's more, he argues, we ignore our historic partnership with these astonishing animals at our peril.

Picking up from where the Sunday Times best-selling How Animals Saved My Life left off, Noel shares the moving, heart-warming and often surprising stories of the animals that he has treated in his remarkable career. As he explores how our relationships with animals can bring out the best in each of us, we meet some of the wonderful animals he has tried to help, the families who love them and the deeply personal challenges Noel has faced along the way. It is animals like these who have taught Noel the valuable lessons of love, hope and faith.

Birdsong in a Time of Silence is the story of a man rediscovering his passion for birdsong and nature. Narrated against the backdrop of the current pandemic, the book opens by acknowledging the new awareness of birds and birdsong that was made possible by the coincidence of spring and the experience of lockdown. Starting with a portrait of the blackbird - most prominent and articulate of the early spring singers - the book proceeds through 10 chapters to explore how birds sing, the variety of singing birds and more.

Is there any bird more mysterious than the cuckoo? It is invariably heard, and not seen. And if seen, it is mistaken for a sharp-winged hawk. The female cuckoo—by a trick that borders on alchemy—is able to disguise its egg as another's. In Greek myth the god Zeus assumed the form of a cuckoo to seduce Hera. In The Curious Life of the Cuckoo, John Lewis-Stempel explains one of nature's greatest enigmas in vivid, lyrical prose, and celebrates this iconic bird.

Elephants are as unique as people. They can be clever and curious or headstrong and impulsive, shy or sociable. Learn to know them as individuals as well as a species in this evocative account of years spent studying elephant behaviour in the wild. Watching a family out for a swim on a hot day, Dr Hannah Mumby notes grandmothers, mothers, sisters and children exchanging noisy greetings, a consistent stream of close-range vocalisations, intermittent touching, co-operative herding of babies and frequent stopping for snacks. A close and interconnected family.

Revered as a symbol of fertility, sexuality, purity and childhood, beloved as a children’s pet and widely represented in the myths, art and collectibles of almost every culture, the rabbit is one of the most popular animals known to humans. Ironically, it has also been one of the most misunderstood and abused. Indeed, the rabbit is the only animal that our culture adores as a pet, idolizes as a storybook hero and slaughters for commercial purposes.

Does your dog get sad when you leave for the day? Does your cat purr because she loves you? Do bears attack when they’re angry? You can’t very well ask them. In fact, scientists haven’t been able to reach a consensus on whether animals even have emotions like humans do, let alone how to study them. Yet studies of animal emotion are critical for understanding human emotion and mental illness. In The Nature of the Beast, pioneering neuroscientist David J. Anderson describes a new approach to solving this problem.

A paradigm shift is roiling the environmental world. For decades people have unquestioningly accepted the idea that our goal is to preserve nature in its pristine, pre-human state. But many scientists have come to see this as an outdated dream that thwarts bold new plans to save the environment and prevents us from having a fuller relationship with nature. Humans have changed the landscapes they inhabit since prehistory, and climate change means even the remotest places now bear the fingerprints of humanity.

Bringing Back the Beaver is farmer-turned-ecologist Derek Gow’s inspirational and often riotously funny firsthand account of how the movement to rewild the British landscape with beavers has become the single most dramatic and subversive nature conservation act of the modern era. Since the early 1990s - in the face of outright opposition from government, landowning elites, and even some conservation professionals - Gow has imported, quarantined, and assisted the reestablishment of beavers in waterways across England and Scotland.

The essential guide to developing your natural ability to communicate with your pets and all animals. Every animal lover has the ability to become a confident Animal Communicator. With this practical guide from expert animal communicator Dr. Cara Gubbins, you will unlock your full potential for intuitive interspecies communication.

Susanne Schötz is hard at work on breaking the cat code. She is a professor at Lund University in Sweden, where a long-standing research program is proving that cats do actually use vocal communication-with each other and with their human caretakers. Understanding the vocal strategies used in human-cat communication will have profound implications for how we communicate with our pets and has the potential to improve the relationship between animals and humans within several fields, including animal therapy, veterinary medicine, and animal sheltering.

Growing up on the Cambridgeshire Fens, Will Millard never felt more at home than when he was out with his granddad on the riverbank whiling away the day catching fish. As he grew older his competitive urge to catch more and bigger fish led him away from that natural connection between him, his grandfather and the rivers of his home and into large commercial fisheries catching fish after fish.