The Inner Life of Animals by Peter Wohlleben

Astute and endearing insights into the lives of sentient beings, treasured friends and mentors helping us to navigate our wilder inner being

Hi, I’m Sue and I write about the beauty and ingenuity of Nature, and how we can deepen our connection for our optimum health and wellbeing. Discover more Nature-inspired content on Spiral Leaf, Twitter and my video Nature Channel.

If you love animals, or you are curious about the cognitive, intuitive and sentient aspects of animals, fish and birds, this is a book you will want to read, probably more than once.

The Inner Life of Animals by Peter Wohlleben is nothing less than delightful, remarkable, informative and beautifully written with observations and information that will, in equal measures, delight, concern and fascinate you.

In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that, having read this book, you will never think of animals or birds (and others) in quite the same way again.

Emotional sense and sensibility

Peter starts out with the premise that, as scientists have long maintained, animals (and birds and fish, etc) are capable of enjoying a full range of emotions.

Every chapter in the book provides explanations with scientific findings made easy to understand and fun to read) with stories so well told. Peter is so observant and has such a gentle humour, it is impossible not to be enchanted and keen to know more.

Topics discussed in this heart-warming list of fascinating chapters includes animal attributes and traits as follows:

• motherly love

• instinct

• loving people (because they do, unconditionally, which is why this is my favourite)

• consciousness

• intelligence

• gratitude

• deception

• courage

• design

• seasonal cycles

• crowd control

• play

• desire

• death

• grief

• shame

• regret

• altruism

• parenthood

• comfort

• survival

• pain

• fear

• family

• ageing

• environments

• communication

• soul

• service to humanity

Taking in this list of topics which apply to most animals, makes you realise just how similar they are to us after all. It’s because we are all made of the same stuff and created and interwoven according to Mother Nature’s grand design.

Books like this help us to remember that we are each created by Nature, dependent upon Nature, an integral part of Nature, just as are fellow inhabitants of this beautiful planet Earth are too.

[Above: How could you not adore this friendly and inquisitive Dartmoor Pony? Quite happy to have his photograph taken. Gentle inhabitants of the moor whose ancestors pulled wagons of granite stones or carried goods to and from the markets].

Remarkable revelations

There are too many favourite revelations throughout The Inner Life of Animals to mention and I am sure this will be the case for anyone who reads this wonderful book. Here are a few incredible stories that spring to mind.

Motherly love

A mother squirrel places a higher value on the lives of her offspring than she does her own - as is the case with most wild animals. This brings into question the concept of Imaternal loveI and to what extent it is innate, in animals and in human beings.

The remarkable finding is that before any natural human birth, the hormone oxytocin flows through the mother’s system, which helps her develop a strong bond with her child. In addition, large quantities of endorphines remain in the mother’s bloodstram after the birth.

The same thing happens in many animals which means the conditions required for maternal love to take place are provided by Nature, the impulse to look after newborns being innate.

Trust and Loving People

In places where animals are not hunted such as the Galapagos Islands or out on the tundra far north, animals trust humans and allow visitors to get very close to them. These encounters make people really happy when they can meet and interact with wild animals on a mutually voluntary basis.

The story of when Peter reared a chick hatched from a chicken’s egg, described as incredibly adorable with its yellow feathers sprinkled with tiny black spots and its black button-eyes gazed straight at me. It never wanted to leave my dide, and every time it lost sight of me, it began to cheep frantically.

Gratitude

I wrote a post recently, The Healing Nature of Gratitude, and was delighted to find an entire chapter dedicated to this subject in The Inner Life of Animals.

This animal attribute links very closely with Trust and Loving People (above) whereby owners of dogs in particular understand the width and depth of gratitude expressed when they are rescued, talked to, listened to and made to feel part of the family just like everyone else.

You only have to listen to an animal whisperer to know that domestic animals and pets defnitely have feelings and much can be done to improve relations and establish a friendly equilibrium with our beloved sentient friends when we understand how they might be feeling and know what they need from us.

Here we melt as Peter tells the story of the moment his dog, home for the first time after being rescued from the shelter, as this happiest of animals sat down on his feet wagging his tail as if his life depended on it, looking up and smiling as dogs do at the same time, so grateful that his long and arduous journey had finally ended.

Lifelong friends

Ravens and Wolves form lifelong partnerships and work together to find and share food. They are both highly intelligent, intuitive and sentient, creating lifelong bonds with their partners, friends, parents and children.

I am going to share a review for The Wisdom of Wolves (affiliate link). It’s a beautiful book where Peter mentions Elli Radinger explains:

Ravens enjoy living with Wolf Packs, and the Wolf Cubs even engage with the Blackbirds in play.

Ingenius methods

In high Summer, a colony of bees brings water into the hive to cool it down as thousands of fast beating bees-wings circulate a cool breeze between the honey combs.

There is no better way to understand crowd intelligence than to observe how social insects intuitively divide their work load whilst maintaining their purpose as a super organism of individual parts in a holistic whole.

Ants can create underground cities with hills up to 5 meters tall. They have their own wood police that protect their anthills from troublesome pests which in turn protect the forest from the same intruders.

Feeling the pain

On the more distressing side of things, when you find out that animals feel pain and miss each other, feel frightened, and love with a passion to protect their own, it's hard to justify ever treating animals (birds, fish, etc) so badly.

In this regard, The Inner Life of Animals is the kind of book that opens eyes, touches hearts and changes minds!

Peter provides unequivocal evidence that animals feel things, work things out, know things, make instinctive decisions and have emotions - just like us! It gives us the impetus to do think about our relationship with the Animal World - and work out how we can communicate, work together and stop the cruelty that is taking place.

Here are just two examples of how pain is felt and which cannot be denied:

• Fish have more than twenty pain receptors around their mouth, meaning that fishing injuries cause them to suffer.

• Mice demonstrate empathy in the sight of suffering companions and in adverse laboratory conditions are known to communicate their suffering to each other to provide each other with some comfort.

As Peter so rightly says: It is not a pleasant thought that the majority of animals living around us are traumatised.

Returning the love

There is no question that at best animals love us to pieces and want to communicate with us - they want us to be happy - and as a minimum, would want us to respect them and leave them (and their natural environment) alone so that we can all live together in harmony as Mother Nature intended.

This book is a wake-up-call for us to be more compassionate when it comes to animals and wild creatures of any kind, and for us to work towards building and evolving a world according to the principles of Natural Law where cruelty of any kind simply isn’t an option.

The ideal and perfect world we are co-creating, is one where all humans treat all living and sentient beings as friends so that we can grow up, live life and flourish on this beautiful planet Earth - together.

It is our responsibility as conscious beings to understanding the needs of the Animal World and the needs of the living Earth so that we can make it as perfect as it can be for the highest good of all.

I hope you enjoyed this book overview and recommendation which comes with a shout-out to you and all animal lovers like you! Thank you for being here and I look forward to seeing you again soon.

BUY A BOOK!

The Inner Life of Animals by Peter Wohlleben - Surprising Observations of a Hidden World

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