Beasts: What Animals Can Teach Us About the Origins of Good and Evil
By: Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson / Narrated By: Edoardo Ballerini
Length: 5 hrs and 14 mins
Soooo good, but DEFinitely a mixed bag of emotions
I dunno: Maybe it’s that I’d just finished off a week of Pandemic Listening and was all burnt by the horrific scapegoating of people during times of fear. Or maybe it’s that I’ve been reeeeeally reading the news, like, obsessing over it and how terribly terribly TERRIBLY wretched things are.
Whatever the case, I’ve gotta say that it made listening to Beasts rather complicated.
It’s all about good and evil and how we’ve associated other living creatures with our baser natures. We’ve words to hurl at other people such as: Beast! Chicken! You pig! We’ve given them an unutterably bad rap.
Trust author Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson to turn that all on its head. The author of The Dog Who Couldn’t Stop Loving brings fascinating and compassionate insights into his study of the origins of good and evil and to his arguments that we humans are the lowest of the low.
Wait! Does he actually call us the lowest of the low?
Wellllll, not really, but he repeatedly points out how the way we live our lives, the way we treat each other, the way we treat other animals, the atrocities we perpetrate against our own environment, are indeed: The lowest of the low. My own words.
And that’s all cuz I’ve been in a poor frame of mind, horrified with what’s been going on in the world.
Now, please ignore some of this here: It’s obviously that I’m not in a good place. This book is NOT all human bashing. Rather, there are tremendous and lovely stories of just how incredibly wonderful animals are. Jeffrey (And I feel I can call him Jeffrey after listening to an entire earlier book about his dog, Benjy) writes with such love and affection, such respect for our fellow creatures who also happen to inhabit this earth. He shows how wise and loving they are, how they care for their own, how they’ll even care for those of a different species. Awesome!
But then he gets to documented episodes of animal violence, say of bull elephants raping and killing rhinos. Awful, right? Welllll, it turns out that these elephants saw their families slaughtered by poachers and could be suffering PTSD, in addition to not learning normal elephant society behavior due to a lack of fellow elephants to model for them. It turns out that chimps getting violent with each other didn’t happen until humans began interacting with them, giving them fruit. Suddenly they had something to fight over.
And that’s when the author posits that war amongst humans didn’t exist until Hunter Gatherers turned into agrarian societies: I have a field, I have produce, I now have something to lose: I will fight for it. War goes hand and hand with torture, and basically you’ve just got a total setup for loss, mayhem, and atrocities. At best, having a field to work can lead to exploiting human labor. At worst, attacking to gain what you covet leads to all out war.
See?!? Amidst all the stories of the magnificence of animals are stories of our own appalling natures. So I loved the book, but boy did I get frustrated and indignant with my own species. The only thing keeping me from pulling my hair out was that there are wonderful researchers out there who care mightily about this world around us.
Plus, Edoardo Ballerini narrates it, so we get his melodious tones even as he relays what absolute gits humans can be. Masson really has some winning narrators for his audiobooks what with John Lee doing the honors for the last audiobook of his that I listened to. Add Ballerini to this list! Tho’ I read that he kinda doesn’t go back and forth over the material, thereby leaving himself a little room to be surprised and delighted, I gotta say it sounds like the man wallows in it, he knows it so well. Nary a blip, nary a falter: Jolly decent audio production.
It’s just that I felt SUUUUUCH despair whilst listening. Good book, but if you think humans generally get a bad rap and you don’t like that, stay away from this one. We like to think we’re the apex predators, but actually? We’re just one crocodile away from being lunch.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to go be a good steward of this earth, a friend to animals on the planet.
I’m gonna go hug my cats…
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