Everything that supposedly makes us human is shared with other creatures.

A new book traces how humans became disconnected from wild animals, wrongly thinking of ourselves as superior.

The author focuses on animals in human psychology and how they have influenced our minds.

In his beautifully written, wide-ranging, and impeccably researched book Animate: How Animals Shape the Human Mind, acclaimed author Michael Bond carefully traces how we, humans, arrived at where we are today, disconnected from wild animals and their homes and wrongly thinking of ourselves as superior to other animals and separate from and above them.1 This humancentric arrogance is driven by indifference and the fear of seeing ourselves in other animals, resulting in an era called the Anthropocene, often called "the age of humanity," when, in fact, it's more appropriately called "the rage of inhumanity." Bond aptly and correctly concludes that, without other animals, "we can hardly be human." Animate will make you rethink who they (other animals) truly are and who we truly are, and we can only hope it will result in people changing their speciesist ways of interacting with our animal kin, with whom we actually share a large number of traits.

Marc Bekoff: Why did you write Animate, and why did you decide on this title?

Michael Bond: In the middle of an ecological crisis, it seems like a good time to explore the psychological relationship between humans and the natural world and animals in particular: how they have influenced our development and culture, and how the way we think about them has changed over time, because the way we think about them profoundly affects the way we treat them. Our knowledge about the sentience and intelligence of animals has grown hugely in recent years, and we can no longer hide behind the conceit that they are categorically different from us. The title Animate, which can be read as an adjective or a verb, is meant to evoke the bustle and drama of the natural world, and the idea that animals are alive in our........

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