From the time of our earliest childhood encounters with animals, we casually ascribe familiar emotions to them. But scientists have long cautioned against such anthropomorphizing, arguing that it limits our ability to truly comprehend the lives of other creatures. Recently, however, things have begun to shift in the other direction, and anthropologist Barbara J. King is at the forefront of that movement, arguing strenuously that we can—and should—attend to animal emotions. With How Animals Grieve, she draws our attention to the specific case of grief, and relates story after story—from fieldsites, farms, homes, and more—of animals mourning lost companions, mates, or friends. King tells of elephants surrounding their matriarch as she weakens and dies, and, in the following days, attending to her corpse as if holding a vigil. A housecat loses her sister, from whom she's never before been parted, and spends weeks pacing the apartment, wailing plaintively. A baboon loses her daughter to a predator and sinks into grief. In each case, King uses her anthropological training to interpret and try to explain what we see—to help us understand this animal grief properly, as something neither the same as nor wholly different from the human experience of loss. The resulting book is both daring and down-to-earth, strikingly ambitious even as it’s careful to acknowledge the limits of our understanding. Through the moving stories she chronicles and analyzes so beautifully, King brings us closer to the animals with whom we share a planet, and helps us see our own experiences, attachments, and emotions as part of a larger web of life, death, love, and loss.

How Animals Grieve

Self-Help

King, Barbara J.

Death & Grief

University of Chicago Press

In recent years, scientific advances in our understanding of animal minds have led to major changes in how we think about, and treat, animals in zoos and aquariums. The general public, it seems, is slowly coming to understand that animals like apes, elephants, and dolphins have not just brains, but complicated inner and social lives, and that we need to act accordingly. Yet that realization hasn’t yet made its presence felt to any great degree in our most intimate relationship with animals: at the dinner table. Sure, there are vegetarians and vegans all over, but at the same time, meat consumption is up, and meat remains a central part of the culinary and dining experience for the majority of people in the developed world. With Personalities on the Plate, Barbara King asks us to think hard about our meat eating--and how we might reduce it. But this isn’t a polemic intended to convert readers to veganism. What she is interested in is why we’ve not drawn food animals into our concern and just what we do know about the minds and lives of chickens, cows, octopuses, fish, and more. Rooted in the latest science, and built on a mix of firsthand experience (including entomophagy, which, yes, is what you think it is) and close engagement with the work of scientists, farmers, vets, and chefs, Personalities on the Plate is an unforgettable journey through the world of animals we eat. Knowing what we know--and what we may yet learn--what is the proper ethical stance toward eating meat? What are the consequences for the planet? How can we life an ethically and ecologically sound life through our food choices? We could have no better guide to these fascinatingly thorny questions than King, whose deep empathy embraces human and animal alike. Readers will be moved, provoked, and changed by this powerful book.

Personalities on the Plate: The Lives and Minds of Animals We Eat

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

Religion has been a central part of human experience since at least the dawn of recorded history. The gods change, as do the rituals, but the underlying desire remains—a desire to belong to something larger, greater, most lasting than our mortal, finite selves. But where did that desire come from? Can we explain its emergence through evolution? Yes, says biological anthropologist Barbara J. King—and doing so not only helps us to understand the religious imagination, but also reveals fascinating links to the lives and minds of our primate cousins. Evolving God draws on King’s own fieldwork among primates in Africa and paleoanthropology of our extinct ancestors to offer a new way of thinking about the origins of religion, one that situates it in a deep need for emotional connection with others, a need we share with apes and monkeys. Though her thesis is provocative, and she’s not above thoughtful speculation, King’s argument is strongly rooted in close observation and analysis. She traces an evolutionary path that connects us to other primates, who, like us, display empathy, make meanings through interaction, create social rules, and display imagination—the basic building blocks of the religious imagination. With fresh insights, she responds to recent suggestions that chimpanzees are spiritual—or even religious—beings, and that our ancient humanlike cousins carefully disposed of their dead well before the time of Neandertals. King writes with a scientist’s appreciation for evidence and argument, leavened with a deep empathy and admiration for the powerful desire to belong, a desire that not only brings us together with other humans, but with our closest animal relations as well.

Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion, Expanded Edition

History

World

From the time of our earliest childhood encounters with animals, we casually ascribe familiar emotions to them. But scientists have long cautioned against such anthropomorphizing, arguing that it limits our ability to truly comprehend the lives of other creatures. Recently, however, things have begun to shift in the other direction, and anthropologist Barbara J. King is at the forefront of that movement, arguing strenuously that we can—and should—attend to animal emotions. With How Animals Grieve, she draws our attention to the specific case of grief, and relates story after story—from fieldsites, farms, homes, and more—of animals mourning lost companions, mates, or friends. King tells of elephants surrounding their matriarch as she weakens and dies, and, in the following days, attending to her corpse as if holding a vigil. A housecat loses her sister, from whom she's never before been parted, and spends weeks pacing the apartment, wailing plaintively. A baboon loses her daughter to a predator and sinks into grief. In each case, King uses her anthropological training to interpret and try to explain what we see—to help us understand this animal grief properly, as something neither the same as nor wholly different from the human experience of loss. The resulting book is both daring and down-to-earth, strikingly ambitious even as it’s careful to acknowledge the limits of our understanding. Through the moving stories she chronicles and analyzes so beautifully, King brings us closer to the animals with whom we share a planet, and helps us see our own experiences, attachments, and emotions as part of a larger web of life, death, love, and loss.

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Pets & Animal Care

"King's Animals' Best Friends is the most comprehensive exploration I've read of the complex relationship between the human and nonhuman, full of great insights and practical information."--Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times Book Review, "By the Book" As people come to understand more about animals' inner lives--the intricacies of their thoughts and the emotions that are expressed every day by whales and cows, octopus and mice, even bees--we feel a growing compassion, a desire to better their lives. But how do we translate this compassion into helping other creatures, both those that are and are not our pets? Bringing together the latest science with heartfelt storytelling, Animals' Best Friends reveals the opportunities we have in everyday life to help animals in our homes, in the wild, in zoos, and in science labs, as well as those considered to be food. Barbara J. King, an expert on animal cognition and emotion, guides us on a journey both animal and deeply human. We meet cows living relaxed lives in an animal sanctuary--and cows with plastic portals in their sides at a university research station. We observe bison free-roaming at Yellowstone National Park and chimpanzees confined to zoos. We learn with King how to negotiate vegetarian preferences in omnivore restaurants. We experience the touch of a giant Pacific octopus tasting King's skin with one of his long, neuron-rich arms. We reflect on animal testing as King shares her own experience as the survivor of a particularly nasty cancer. And in a moment all too familiar to many of us, we recover from a close encounter with two spiders in the home. This is a book not of shaming and limitation, but of uplift and expansion. Throughout this journey, King makes no claims of personal perfection. Though an animal expert, she is just like the rest of us: on a journey still, learning each day how to be better, and do better, for animals. But as Animals' Best Friends makes clear, challenging choices can bring deep rewards. By turning compassion into action on behalf of animals, we not only improve animals' lives--we also immeasurably enrich our own.

Animals' Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity and in the Wild

This cutting-edge book—with echoes of both Jane Goodall and Joseph Campbell—adds a fascinating new dimension to the debate about the origins of religion. The study of evolution has uncovered invaluable information about many aspects of human behavior and culture, from the physiology of our bodies and brains to the development of hunting, technology, and social groups. But an understanding of the intangibles of human experience, especially religion, lags far behind. Attempts to discover the source of religiosity through genetic analysis and neuroscience have so far yielded intriguing but incomplete insights. Evolving God represents an exciting breakthrough. Drawing on her own extensive investigations into the behavior of our closest primate relatives and the most up-to-date research in archaeology, anthropology, and biology, Barbara King offers a comprehensive, holistic view of how and why religion came to be. King focuses on how the Great Apes, our human ancestors, and modern humans relate to one another socially and emotionally, and she traces the growing complexities of communication throughout the course of evolution. She shows that, with increased brain capacity, the scope and nature of socio-emotional ties began with one-to-one relationships and expanded to group relationships (families and communities) and then to connections with long-dead ancestors, animal spirits, and “higher beings.” Her incisive, highly readable narrative takes readers from the earliest common relative of humans and apes (more than 6 million years ago), through the Neandertal period and the Stone Age, to the dawn of religion in early human societies. Evolving God explores one of the greatest mysteries in human history—the question of whether humankind is innately religious—and provides evidence that will have a tremendous impact on current debates about evolution, creationism, and intelligent design.

Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion

Doubleday Religion

This cutting-edge book—with echoes of both Jane Goodall and Joseph Campbell—adds a fascinating new dimension to the debate about the origins of religion. The study of evolution has uncovered invaluable information about many aspects of human behavior and culture, from the physiology of our bodies and brains to the development of hunting, technology, and social groups. But an understanding of the intangibles of human experience, especially religion, lags far behind. Attempts to discover the source of religiosity through genetic analysis and neuroscience have so far yielded intriguing but incomplete insights. Evolving God represents an exciting breakthrough. Drawing on her own extensive investigations into the behavior of our closest primate relatives and the most up-to-date research in archaeology, anthropology, and biology, Barbara King offers a comprehensive, holistic view of how and why religion came to be. King focuses on how the Great Apes, our human ancestors, and modern humans relate to one another socially and emotionally, and she traces the growing complexities of communication throughout the course of evolution. She shows that, with increased brain capacity, the scope and nature of socio-emotional ties began with one-to-one relationships and expanded to group relationships (families and communities) and then to connections with long-dead ancestors, animal spirits, and “higher beings.” Her incisive, highly readable narrative takes readers from the earliest common relative of humans and apes (more than 6 million years ago), through the Neandertal period and the Stone Age, to the dawn of religion in early human societies. Evolving God explores one of the greatest mysteries in human history—the question of whether humankind is innately religious—and provides evidence that will have a tremendous impact on current debates about evolution, creationism, and intelligent design.

Social Sciences

What do Mickey Mouse, Ganesh, a leopard-skin pillbox hat, A Lion Called Christian, and the Aflac duck have in common? They all represent human beings' deeply ingrained connection to the animal kingdom. In Being With Animals, anthropologist Barbara King unravels the complexity and enormous significance of this relationship. Animals rule our existence. You can see this in the billions of dollars Americans pour out each year for their pets, in the success of books and films such as Marley and Me, in the names of athletic teams, in the stories that have entertained and instructed children (from The Cat in the Hat back to well before Aesop created his fables), in the animal deities that pervade the most ancient forms of religion (and which still appear in sublimated forms today), to the paintings on the cave walls of Lascaux. The omnipresence of animal beings in our lives--whether real or fictional--is something so enormous that people take often it for granted, never wondering why animals remain so much a part of human life. It has continuously maintained a powerful spiritual, transcendent quality over the tens of thousands of years that Homo sapiens have walked the earth. Why? King looks at this phenomenon, from the most obvious animal connections in daily life and culture and over the whole of human history, to show the various roles animals have played in all civilizations. She ultimately digs deeply into the importance of the human-animal bond as key to our evolution, as a significant spiritual aspect of understanding what truly makes us human, and looks ahead to explore how our further technological development may, or may not, affect these important ties. BARBARA J. KING is Chancellor Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary. She has studied monkeys in Kenya and great apes in various captive settings. She writes essays on anthropology-related themes for bookslut.com and the Times Literary Supplement (London). Together with her husband, she cares for and arranges to spay and neuter homeless cats in Virginia.

Being With Animals: Why We Are Obsessed with the Furry, Scaly, Feathered Creatures Who Populate Our World

Religion & Spirituality

Harmony

Mother and infant negotiate over food; two high-status males jockey for power; female kin band together to get their way. It happens among humans and it happens among our closest living relatives in the animal kingdom, the great apes of Africa. In this eye-opening book, we see precisely how such events unfold in chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas: through a spontaneous, mutually choreographed dance of actions, gestures, and vocalizations in which social partners create meaning and come to understand each other. 
Using dynamic systems theory, an approach employed to study human communication, Barbara King is able to demonstrate the genuine complexity of apes' social communication, and the extent to which their interactions generate meaning. As King describes, apes create meaning primarily through their body movements--and go well beyond conveying messages about food, mating, or predators. Readers come to know the captive apes she has observed, and others across Africa as well, and to understand "the process of creating social meaning."
This new perspective not only acquaints us with our closest living relatives, but informs us about a possible pathway for the evolution of language in our own species. King's theory challenges the popular idea that human language is instinctive, with rules and abilities hardwired into our brains. Rather, The Dynamic Dance suggests, language has its roots in the gestural "building up of meaning" that was present in the ancestor we shared with the great apes, and that we continue to practice to this day.

The Dynamic Dance: Nonvocal Communication in African Great Apes

Africa

Harvard University Press

The Information Continuum creates a synthetic view of the evolution of communication among primates. King contends that the crucial element in the evolution of information acquisition and transfer is the acquired ability to donate information to others.

Information Continuum: Evolution of Social Information Transfer in Monkeys Apes and Hominids : Evolution of Social Information Transfer in Monkeys, ape

School for Advanced Research Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by King, Barbara J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by King, Barbara J.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by King, Barbara J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

How Animals Grieve

Personalities on the Plate: The Lives and Minds of Animals We Eat

Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion, Expanded Edition

How Animals Grieve

Animals' Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity and in the Wild

Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion

Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion

Being With Animals: Why We Are Obsessed with the Furry, Scaly, Feathered Creatures Who Populate Our World

The Dynamic Dance: Nonvocal Communication in African Great Apes

Information Continuum: Evolution of Social Information Transfer in Monkeys Apes and Hominids : Evolution of Social Information Transfer in Monkeys, ape