Review: The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife

The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife by Lucy Cooke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a book filled with very interesting information about a select set of animals including sloths, bats, penguins, hippos, frogs, eels, pandas, chimpanzees, hyenas and others. Lot of the information is lesser known, and makes for engrossing reading.

For instance, hippos genetic makeup shows a closer match with whales rather than any land animal. How do vultures promptly appear when animals die? And so many other interesting bits of information.

Lucy Cooke closes the book with some excellent passages about how in our thinking we have distanced ourselves so much from animals. We think of them as things which exist for our use, and have license to perform cruel experiments on. The passages in the book on the cruel experiments performed on bats to satisfy our curiosity on how they navigate and using frogs for pregnancy tests is sad to read. Pandas for their cute appearance have become a political industry where they are artificially birthed in captivity and don’t lead very satisfying lives.

While the book for the large part makes for excellent and very engrossing reading, it would have benefited from some more material on what motivates the behavior of each of these animals.

I received a free ecopy from NetGalley to provide an honest review.


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