Abstract

The American philosopher Thomas Nagel famously argued that no matter how many objective facts we may know about bats, we cannot know what it is like to be a bat. There is an irreducible subjectivity to the experience of being a bat. I can only imagine what it would be like for a subject like me to be a bat but never what it is like for the actual bat to be a bat.In her book, Benvenuti demonstrates extraordinary sensitivity to the subjectivity of the nonhuman animals she discusses. In addition to being an organic farmer in southern Italy, Benvenuti is also a licensed psychologist. Her training and interest in neurobiology is evident throughout the work. She walks the middle path between human exceptionalism (the “old meme” as she puts it of humans being “distinct from” and “superior to” all other animals, p. 15) on the one side and collapsing the differences on the other. While she might agree with the thrust of Nagel's claim (she never mentions him in the book) that we cannot truly know what it is like to be a bat, we are not so different to bats that we cannot empathetically understand something of a bat's experiences. We are, after all, kin. Kinship, she argues, rather than “distinct and superior” is the more correct scientific understanding (p. 18).Her work is clearly influenced by that of her mentor, Jaak Panksepp, on affective neurobiology. Like the biologist and ethologist Marc Bekoff, Benvenuti argues that it is possible to be “biocentrically anthropomorphic and do rigorous science” (p. 66). Of course, kinship does not entail sameness. “The central core of my life's work,” Benvenuti writes, “is to articulate the grounds for real relationships between humans and other animals. This implies the capacity to empathize accurately and to be able to communicate across species differences, but also the capacity to recognize that the other is not ‘just like me’” (p. 82). Importantly for her, it is not just our learning about other animals but our learning from them and they from us. It is the complex—and it is very complex—relationship that matters.Kindred Spirits is a beautifully written book, part travelogue, part personal anecdotes, with a nice mixture of scientific and philosophical musings. It begins in her own backyard (in the United States at the time) with a friendship struck up with a crow named Jason and then transports us to destinations around the world and species including bees, dogs, elephants, cheetahs, whales, and rescued farmed animals. Benvenuti spends much of her time with people trying to research, rescue, and rehabilitate endangered species. Above all, she intends it as a hopeful book. She finds great inspiration and hope in the fact that so many people around the world care about animals. She finds hope in the decline of circuses that merely use and abuse animals for human entertainment. She points to the growing understanding of animal studies and general interest in animals’ internal lives and feelings.The book makes a useful contribution to the growing literature of cognitive ethology. It is along similar lines as the works of Marc Bekoff and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. For those of us already convinced of our kinship and similarity with nonhuman animals, there are inspiring stories of others engaged in trying to save the world, or at least the part of it they can. One of the real strengths of the book is the constant questioning of the animal's experience. While we all appreciate those “animal ambassadors” who come to represent their kind and educate us, Benvenuti raises the important ethical question as to whether those animals want to be ambassadors at all. Sometimes a quick bite, as she once received from an African gray parrot, is enough to remind us to mind our manners around other species. It was a lesson in respecting differences and boundaries. The book does in the end inspire hope that if enough European and American scientists continue to advance the study of animal intelligence and emotion, we might one day come to the understanding that our indigenous brothers and sisters around the world have had since the beginning—that we, human and nonhuman, are all kin.