In his first book, the well-received The Hidden Life of Trees (2016), German forester Peter Wohlleben made the case for trees as more complex organisms – capable of learning, communicating, and even registering pain – than has generally been acknowledged. Wohlleben attempts something similar for animals in his new book, The Inner Life of Animals (translated into English by Jane Billinghurst), which also draws heavily on his experiences managing woodland near Hümmel in Germany’s Eifel mountain range. Echoing Dennett, Wohlleben writes:

Whenever I’m animal-watching, I wonder whether the individuals I’m observing are consciously aware of what they’re doing. That’s very difficult for a layperson to determine – and that’s what I am, despite my engagement with the topic. But as I explore the subject, I don’t want to rely on studies alone; I also want to experience at first hand what animals are thinking. That might sound like asking for too much – it’s difficult enough to work out what other people are thinking just by watching them – but during a conversation at the breakfast table, my children suggested that I had already experienced something along these lines, albeit only briefly.

The story Wohlleben goes on to tell is of a semi-tame crow he observes one day in his cow pasture, repeatedly pecking holes in the grass and, aware it is being watched, pretending to bury an acorn. Finally the crow drops its acorn into a hole, covers it with grass, and unhurriedly helps itself to the grain Wohlleben has put out for it. As Wohlleben comes to understand with the help of his children, the crow’s cleverness lies not just in its deception with the acorn, but also in its astute forward planning. Returning later to retrieve the acorn, the crow, Wohlleben suggests, ‘must have given thoughtful consideration to the future’ in eating the grain – too small and fiddly to quickly and safely bury – and saving the nut for later.

The Inner Life of Animals is filled with such anecdotes, folksy – Wohlleben likes to refer to animals, whether wild or domesticated, as ‘little scamps’ and ‘little rascals’ – but often affecting, and always in the service of ideas. Many feature one or more of the plethora of animals (Wohlleben calls them his ‘Noah’s ark’) that, at different times, populate his lodge: the dogs Maxi (a Münsterländer), Crusty (a French bulldog), and Barry (a cocker spaniel); the rabbits Hazel, Emma, Blacky, and Oskar; the goat Schwänli; horses Bridgi and Zipy; and various (sometimes warring) colonies of bees.

While Wohlleben is careful to note the limitations of anecdotage – such as when discussing the scientifically flawed claims of the Gorilla Foundation – his largely observational approach and lightly worn research nevertheless yield fresh insights. Wohlleben doesn’t simply rehearse, for example, the recent claims made for the high intelligence of octopi in books by Peter Godfrey-Smith (Other Minds, 2016) and Sy Montgomery (The Soul of an Octopus, 2015). I was surprised to learn, for instance, that, while ‘crowd intelligence’ in bees has long been recognised, individuals also exhibit the ability to remember people, navigate using the sun, and communicate via subtle, dance-like movements. ‘The bee,’ notes Wohlleben, quoting German zoologist and neurobiologist Randolf Menzel, ‘knows who it is.’

Crow (Photograph by Mali Markus Maeder, Pexels)

Comprising forty-one short chapters, the book can do little more than scratch the surface of its various topics – for example, empathy and altruism in animals, their dream lives and capacity to experience pain and fear, as well as pleasure for its own sake (yes, animals masturbate, though Wohlleben says nothing about non-reproductive sex, including homosexuality, which has been observed in many non-human species).

Even so, Wohlleben’s warm, chatty prose is never less than engaging, and his insights add up to a rich, panoramic view of the historically underestimated ability of animals to know themselves and the world. At its best, the book reminds us how much we stand to gain, both intellectually and spiritually, from the careful observation of animals, and how our relationships with them can be mutually enriching.

If I have one quibble, it is that Wohlleben doesn’t always follow through on the complexities or implic ations his book raises. He writes of pigs that, ‘If people knew what kind of an animal they had on their plate, many would completely lose their interest.’ And yet we know that in many cultures there exists a long-standing prohibition on eating pork, most likely because of the resemblance of pigs to humans in both their shrieks of pain, and the taste (and the smell, according to many firefighters) of their roasted flesh.

Peter Wohlleben (photograph by Tobias Wohlleben)More significantly, if we were to fully accept the claims Wohlleben makes on behalf of animals – even ‘organisms with only a single cell’, Wohlleben writes, ‘have spatial memory and can perform complex tasks’ – then it would be morally incumbent on us to radically alter our relationship with non-human species, which we continue to exploit on a vast scale. Wohlleben ponders this dilemma all too fleetingly, and does not consider – despite his considerable menagerie – recent research into the emotional lives of animals by Dr Jessica Pierce, Dr Hal Herzog and others that has called into question the ethics of keeping pets.

Still, Wohlleben’s book is another welcome sign of how far we have come since seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes argued that the inner lives of animals were no richer than those of mindless automata – an idea entirely unworthy of a supposedly intelligent species.