Animal Minds: What Are They Thinking?

We first learn about animals from studying their appearance, life cycles, habitat, food and behaviours. Animal Minds: What Are They Thinking? goes beyond that kind of detail and delves into how animals think, asking the reader to consider how similar to us they may be with respect to cognition. Can animals express a personality? Do they remember things? Can they count? Can they solve problems? Humans can do all of these; what about other animals? How can we find out? It’s always intriguing to learn how a scientist discovered their passion. In this case, a summer spent working with bumble bees was the trigger for a fascinating career in studying animal cognition for Dana L. Church.

With lively, personal accounts of many scientists’ experiments to figure out some of the ways animals think, the book’s four chapters each cover one mental process: personality, memory, counting and problem solving. Readers are shown charts (personality types, phases of learning to count, the scientific method) along with the focused explanations of experiments (observing personalities of bees and dogs, how sea turtles navigate oceans and return to their nesting beaches, how guide dogs create cognitive maps of their neighborhood). The storytelling style and variety of examples will prove motivating to readers keen on sciences. A Glossary and list of both print and online resources will aid in their ongoing research.

Each chapter ends with a “Scientist Spotlight”, a brief interview about a scientist’s work with a particular animal. These include sharing advice for kids who might be interested in this field of animal study. Plenty of sidebars add other information to extend interest and learning. The sidebars draw from history (Charles Henry Turner, a Black American who studied insect behaviour in the early 1900s; Jane Goodall’s 1960 discovery of tool use by chimpanzees) and studies in mathematics by Australian scientists in 2018 working with honeybees. With a nod to the future, mention is made of how the introduction of AI offers “huge potential to allow scientists to learn new things about the animals they study”.

Full-colour photos and illustrations are well-chosen and positioned to enhance understanding. There is a tendency to use a quite small type size for some of the inserts and sidebars, however, which makes them appear text-heavy and could discourage some readers from taking time to explore that content. Some colour choices of type make captions hard to see well against an image background.

Animal cognition is by no means a new field of study, but young readers who may not have encountered a lot written for them about it will find Animal Minds: What Are They Thinking? intriguing. It might help fill that knowledge gap and offer inspiration for further investigation. Deeper understanding about how humans are so closely connected to the rest of the animal world is never overdone.