The Others: How Animals Made Us Human

In this provocative, illuminating volume, Shepard examines the role of animals in human history from the Pleistocene to the present. He argues that anthropomorphism binds our connection to the rest of the natural world. Noting that narratives in which animals are protagonists occur in all kinds of societies and in different forms at all stages of life, Shepard (Thinking Animals) analyzes fairy tales (child), folktales (juvenile) and myths (adult), concluding that the last is the most revealing source of information about how people relate to the nonhuman world. He reviews the sources of biblical natural history and parable, and he discusses the ``nightmare of domestication.'' Shepard argues that the benefits to other species of being domestic are fictitious; they are merely slaves. Additional topics include animals in language, the cult of the cow and the rise of pastoralism, augury and the biblical zoo. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Dec.)