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    Bats Sing, Mice Giggle: The Surprising Science of Animals' Inner Lives
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    Bats Sing, Mice Giggle: The Surprising Science of Animals' Inner Lives
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    Bats Sing, Mice Giggle: The Surprising Science of Animals' Inner Lives
    Ebook335 pages6 hours

    Bats Sing, Mice Giggle: The Surprising Science of Animals' Inner Lives

    By Jagmeet Kanwal and Karen Shanor

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    "Bats Sing, Mice Giggle" tracks many years of research by hundreds of scientists that reveals how wild animals, as well as pets, have inner, secret lives of which until recently - although many animal lovers will have instinctively believed it - we have had little proof. The authors show how animal 'friends' stay in touch, and how they warn and help each other in times of danger; how some animals problem-solve as or in some instances even more effectively than humans - and how they regulate, create, and entertain themselves and others. They show how animals express grief and reverence in ways we never thought possible. From the sleep patterns of some owls, birds and horses, as well as porpoises, who go to sleep in only one half of their brains at a time; to how schools of electric fish give off complex signals of one frequency to communicate with their mates and another frequency to locate their prey, and how Polar bears tune into quantum 'radio stations' to sense prey as far away as ten miles and under the snow, "Bats Sing, Mice Giggle" provides an unparalleled insight into animals' secret lives.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIcon Books
    Release dateMay 1, 2010
    ISBN9781848312265
    Unavailable
    Bats Sing, Mice Giggle: The Surprising Science of Animals' Inner Lives

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    Reviews for Bats Sing, Mice Giggle

    3/5

    33 ratings12 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I have been a zoo veterinarian and private practice now for over 43 years. I love animals and I also love this book. It talks about amazing attributes that animals possess discovered with research. Our ability to measure many subtle energies that exist in our world has helped us discover explanations for how animals do amazing things. I believe each individual within a species is different and each species has unique characteristics differing from other species. Recent science is reported in this book. It is filled with really neat observations and many hypotheses about how these animals interact with the environment. It is hard to put down as the stories are really interesting to me. I now understand why basic zoological research can help us develop many useful tools for humans. If we understand animals better we will benefit by learning how they do the things they do. Energy fields are being discovered by quantum physics and the animals seem to use these energy fields as a matter of routine while humans argue about their existence. There are many references to the studies but I will take the authors word for what they think right now and hope to learn more as science continues to reveal this world stranger than fiction. I believe there is much potential for medical science in learning from animals.
    • 3/5
      This book was received free from Library Thing in exchange for review.I love reading popular science books, and books on animal behavior are always fun. This had a lot going for it. But it also had a lot against it.FOR: Animals are interesting. Great subject matter. All kinds of quirky bits of info I'd never heard before, which was why I wanted to read it in the first place.AGAINST: Wow, where to start? First, the style was a little too breezy and tried too much to be funny. It was a little jarring sometimes. But that wasn't a major drawback. No, what really brought the rating down for me was two other things. First, the way the writers, especially Karen Shanor, had to insert themselves in the book at every given opportunity. I'd be reading along and suddenly, "Karen had firsthand experience of this while visiting her grandparents - while in college - when traveling Africa." What gives? I don't want her whole history; get back to the animals. If it was a story she was really anxious to include, she could simply leave herself out of it. It got so bad that I had to keep checking the cover to remind myself that yes, there was another author of this book. Didn't HE ever do anything? Yes, in fact, and there were a couple of stories about his childhood, but mostly it was about his research. Now that was worth including.Second major problem - the organization. At least, what there was of it. There wasn't much. Sure, it was divided into chapters, but the writers tried to include too much stuff. Even in one paragraph, we'd go from one animal to the next, until I'd forgotten what the chapter was supposed to be about in the first place. It would have been so much easier to read if the writers had stuck to one animal per chapter, or at most, one animal per section in a chapter. Then they could have really covered each one in depth. Anything else they were dying to include could have been included in some footnotes at the back of the book.I don't recommend this book. There are better books about animals and neuroscience out there. This one was a disappointment.
    • 2/5
      I was looking forward to this book, but ended up frustrated. The authors included a lot of sentence-long summaries of papers and abstracts but didn't reference them in the text. I wanted to know more about what they wrote about and see which papers they referenced, but couldn't. It was almost as if they were selling these great, human-animal bond-changing ideas to the public but were afraid to show that there was real research and work behind it. (Perhaps because they are researchers who work with animals to better human life instead of study and better animal lives? I'm not sure.) It seemed like they couldn't decide who their audience was - the general public or animal scientists looking for a read? The book ended up irritating both sides of me. I couldn't even finish the book because I just didn't trust the authors. What a shame, because the writing was decent and the presentation of facts was enthusiastic.
    • 3/5
      I finished this book awhile ago. I was expecting a book more animal lives and emotions, instead, the book was much more how an animal reacts, rather than why. It was interesting, and I learned a few things.This book I think could have been much better if the authors stuck to one or two topics. There was a lot of information crammed in it, tied together thinly. I enjoyed reading it, but was a bit disappointed that it was less on animal emotion and more on animal physiology.
    • 3/5
      I was disappointed in this book. With a title so playful as Bat's Sing, Mice Giggle, The Surprising Science of Animals' Inner Lives, I was expecting a more "heartwarming" approach to teaching the reader the science of these mysterious phenomenons. It was just too heavy handed on the science side and too dry on the emotional side for me. I enjoy science and discovering new things, but I am not a scientist, and I was expecting a more "readable" book for the average animal/nature lover.
    • 4/5
      Bats Sing, Mice Giggle discusses new developments in animal behavior and emotions, The authors provide both interesting stories of animal behaviors along with information on the biochemical evidence. While none of the information is technical, from a biochemist's point of view, in some areas it was more than what the average reader might be expecting.Overall, I enjoyed the book and learned some interesting facts about animal behavior. To me, the biggest problem this book has is the writing. The writing is at times stiff and too factual. Yes, the book was written by scientists, but an editor could have corrected some of stylistic problems to produce a book which was more interesting and easier to read.I would gladly recommend this book to people interested in animal behavior.
    • 1/5
      I didn't know "popular science" meant "sloppy science." The book was a good overview of animal communication and behavior. Since it was an overview, nothing got too detailed or deep. There were interesting facts about underground animals and plant-dwelling animals using drumming for communication as well as amusing anecdotal evidence for animal emotions. However, the book is fatally flawed. It's footnoting is very sloppy. When you go to the back, it's hard to tell what bit of information is covered by the footnote. Is it only the single paragraph, or the top three? There aren't actually any numbers referring to footnotes so reading the bibliography is a bit of a puzzle. I'm not so picky that poor footnotes in a science book would be a fatal flaw. In this case it is though, because the book included information from unreplicated experiments with no indication that the results were in question. Some of the information is obviously spurious. For example, they discuss plant communication with the Backster experiment. They don't call it the Backster experiment, and if you look in the bibliography, it looks as though the respected Max Planck Institute ran the experiment. Here's the experiment. A group of people go one at a time into a room with plants hooked up to electrodes. One of the people tears a leaf. To cut to the chase, eventually all the plants go electrically bonkers whenever this one plant vandal comes into the room but not when anyone else does. Bats Sing doesn't mention this, but this experiment was part of a series of "experiments" "proving" that plants are psychic. It has never been replicated. And by the way, why are we talking about plants? The book says right on the cover that it is about animals. If I read a science book that has a piece of disinformation in it as big as this, I can't trust any of the other information unless I've already heard it, or I sit down and verify the sources. So what good is this book then?
    • 2/5
      This book seemed to be caught in a quandary. The two authors are well-credentialed scientists and I had the feeling that they were torn. They wanted to write a book geared toward a wide audience -- people who are curious about animals, nature, and the increasingly confusing differentiation between the rest of the animal kingdom and man. But they couldn't resist adding lots of hard science snippets about physics and biochemistry that I found confusing and distracting from their themes (describing circadian rhythms for the layman does not require an explanation of the brain's superchiasmatic nucleus). In the end, this is a flat book. It should have been much more enthralling, but it really is just a collection of facts that are organized in a confusing fashion. It is almost as if they collected a large variety of interesting facts, wanted to write them down, forced them into an artificial organization and wrote the collection. It's a short book (262 pages) covering way too much material. I would have been far more interested in seeing them take only one of their themes ("sensing', "surviving", "socializing") and provided more indepth descriptions, analysis, and to find some fun in their subjects.
    • 3/5
      When I started reading Bats Sing, Mice Giggle, I think that I anticipated something along the lines of Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" about the science of Animal Behavior and Neurobiology. I was quite excited about the topic, as animal behavior is quite fascinating. However, while I enjoyed this book, I felt that it wasn't sure just what it wanted to be - a lighthearted romp, or a detailed overview for scientists. In some areas, I thought that the scientific detail was too technical for the topic being covered (this from a licensed veterinary technician with a BS in zoology and neuroscience), and in other areas, I found myself wishing that the authors had gone into more detail about certain topics. Other times, I found myself feeling that a portion of a chapter was lacking in cohesion and was just listing various interesting findings within a certain category of animal behavior without a well-defined organizational theme. I wouldn't totally discount this book due to the aforementioned flaws, however, as much of the book is quite interesting. I think that people well-versed in the subject may find the book a bit lacking, and newcomers may feel a bit overwhelmed, but if either type of reader sticks with it, I think they will not feel they have wasted their time in reading it.I received a review copy of this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers giveaway.
    • 3/5
      Bats Sing, Mice Giggle by Karen Shanor and Jagmeet Kanwal reports the newest research in animal behavior and emotion. This study of animal lives describes their sensing, survival, and social life. It tells both in scientific fact and interesting stories how animals live and feel. Although this book was a bit too technical for me, I did enjoy the articles about the animals. I would recommend it to anyone who has a connection to nature.
    • 2/5
      This book turned out to be hard to get into . It has alot of technical science jargon that the average reader like me won't understand . It would've been helpful to have photos or drawings of the animals being discussed and compared , but there aren't any in the book . Also the authors chose to use third-person narration which I found off-putting in a nonfic book that is not a biography . The authors should've decided who they really wanted as the audience for their book . As it stands , its too technical for average readers and scientists may find fault with it too .
    • 3/5
      Informative, fun and accessible for a wide range of readers. Authors Shanor and Kanwal offer a look at some interesting research being carried out regarding our animal neighbors. While some of what they offer was old news to me, other nuggets were fresh and interesting. Peppered throughout are anecdotal offerings by the authors as well that fit well with the rest of the book. While there were a few spots where the detail may have leaned a little too technical for the average reader, I felt the majority of the information was welcoming to almost anyone and will certainly provide food for thought to most. There are a few pieces of information I need to look into further (hence the 3 star rather than 4 star rating) just because they sound so far-fetched (plants and emotions for example), I hope I will be able to follow some of that research as well!