Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves

Eschewing statistics and experimental data in favor of her own stories and historical anecdotes, Braitman, a trained historian of science, appeals directly to her readers' emotions with tales of anguished elephants and heartsick gorillas. The writing, informed by the author's academic background, relies heavily on the views of 19th-century naturalists, e.g., Charles Darwin and William Lauder Lindsay, although Braitman does cite such modern ethologists and psychologists as Mark Bekoff and Jaak Panskepp. Braitman highlights the similarities between human and nonhuman emotion but seems focused on proving that nonhuman animals can feel. The author's book is more overtly evangelical than Virginia Morell's Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures, but both titles make similar arguments: that the time has come to rethink our ban on anthropomorphism, that beasts can indeed think and experience other senses, and that we ought to do more for (and less to) our furry and feathered cousins.