We don’t really know what makes animals behave the way they do, but several writers have had a stab at trying to work it out. These books include Marc Hauser’s Wild Minds in 2000, Jonathan Balcombe’s Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals in 2010, Carl Safina’s fascinating Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel in 2015, and Frans de Waal’s excellent Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? in 2016. To this list we can now add Peter Wohlleben’s The Inner Life of Animals: Surprising Observations of a Hidden World.
Wohlleben’s name became familiar with the explosive global success of The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate when it was published in English in September 2016. His new book, The Inner Life of Animals: Surprising Observations of a Hidden World, sold over 250,000 copies in hardback when it was published in Germany and became an overnight No 1 bestseller.
Now, translated into English, it looks set to do the same here. The success of Trees seemed to be attributable to a number of elements: the fascinating scientific research of Suzanne Simard, who introduced us to the idea of ancient “mother trees” and “the wood-wide web”, the means of communication trees use to transmit their needs to one another. Wohlleben added to this his vast anecdotal knowledge of “how woods work”, acquired over many decades working as a German forester. He has a conversational writing style, which is comparable to that of the chatty and accessible ecstatic saint, Teresa of Avila (who is still a bestseller 400 years after her death).
Wohlleben presents short chapters in bite-sized portions, so the reader has a constant sense of learning something new almost with every page, and he employs this same model with The Inner Life of Animals. The formula is provably winning. I still felt I was on a robust learning curve as subjects as diverse as motherly love, gratitude, deception, desire, shame and knowledge of good and evil were explored one by one. Many of his stories are fascinating. The tale of an “abandoned” faun, brought home by children when it had been carefully hidden by its mother, so that she could graze and replenish her milk reserves seems, on the surface, no different from the countless tales of fledglings brought home by well-meaning children and raised as pets. But the deer, when it matured, far from becoming tame, tried to chase away its human “parents”, which now encroached on its “land”, resulting in violent attacks on its human foster parents. An exploration into the intelligence of pigs asks: “If researchers know so much about the intelligence of pigs, why isn’t the image of the smart pig publicised more? I suspect it has to do with eating pork.”
Wohlleben’s candid observations invite scrutiny of our dietary habits, although, as David Attenborough pointed out, we don’t feed lions grass. In other places I found myself struggling with Wohlleben’s theories. In part this is because most of us have some knowledge of living with, or working alongside, animals and we have already formed our own ideas of how we interact, from our pet dogs and cats, to the garden birds that come back year after year or the sheepdogs made accessible by writers such as James Rebanks. But there is also a slight “two-book deal” feel here, and the manner in which Wohlleben attributes human feelings and morality to animals is spurious.
There’s a lot of anecdote, not quite enough scientific rigour, and one too many references to YouTube for The Inner Life of Animals to be entirely satisfying.
• The Inner Life of Animals by Peter Wohlleben is published by The Bodley Head (£16.99). To order a copy for £12.55 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
