Carol Giglioti's The Creative Lives of Animals (New York University Press: 2023) held my interest from the first to the last page. I am of two minds about the book though. On the one hand, I think she provided ample and conclusive evidence for her proposition that other animals are creative. They invent new ways of doing things and those new ways get handed down through multiple generations. Human observers commonly perceive those invented, taught, and practiced behaviors as gene-regulated characteristics rather than the culturally embedded activities and ways of living that they actually are.
If you have an interest in why animnals do some of the things they do and how they may have come to do some of those things, I think you too will enjoy and find much to think about in The Creative Lives of Animals.
But the book also left me more depressed about our treatment of them. It seems that no matter what we learn about animals, that knowledge is only rarely sufficient to cause us to stop hurting them, let alone genuinely help them, or even just leave them alone. Throughout history, and still today, what we know about them is often used to exploit them, to take advantage of them, and is sometimes the reason that we hurt them even more.
In that sense, The Creative Lives of Animals probably won't be any more successful than any of the many other books by authors who probably hoped that the stories they told, the facts they cited, would at least nudge us in a more humane direction. Some of them have, a little, but on balance those changes have been slight. I hope The Creative Lives of Animals will have more success. It's worth a read and a recommendation to those you know who still don't give a damn.
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