Inside the Animal Mind

Do cats get depressed? ""Does the beaver have the dam in mind?"" Can we say animals think and feel as we do? If so, which animals? If not, why not? Such questions, and the relations among them, prompt the wide-ranging essays in this volume, which condense and synthesize, in language meant for laypeople, research on intellection, emotion and learning in species from pigeons to porpoises to people. Following in particular Donald Griffin's Animal Minds, Page also brings in Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's compelling if anecdotal writings on dogs; hummingbirds' ""intentional planning""; cognitive tests (does your dog see itself in the mirror?); mimicry and deception in fireflies' codes; primatologist Jane Goodall's ""reports that chimpanzees sometimes make threatening gestures against thunderstorms""; famous apes who communicate in sign languages; and assorted other evidence that some animals (not just chimps, either) deserve to be considered conscious beings. A brisk final chapter addresses the political and ethical implications of animal minds. Page hosts the long-running PBS TV show Nature, and his book arrives as a tie-in to three Nature episodes that share its title. (The episodes air in January 2000.) Always personable and often casual, Page's writing (like that in most other educational-TV tie-ins) may frustrate his most informed readers. Many more, though, will welcome his surveys of this immense topic, one that appears with increasing frequency as philosophers, ethicists, cognitive scientists, animal-behavior experts and specialists on various species and habitats find themselves asking, and answering, similar questions. (Nov.)