When Elephants Weep – The Emotional Lives of Animals

By Jeffrey M. Masson and Susan McCarthy.

268 Pages | Published in 1996 | Softcover | Vintage, London | ISBN: 0099478919.

Fore more than 100 years, scientists have denied that animal experience emotions, yet this remarkable and ground-breaking book proves what animal-lovers have known to be true: wolves, giraffes, elephants, and many other creatures exhibit all kinds of feelings - hope, fear, shame, love, compassion. From Ola, the irritable whale, to Toto, the chimpanzee who nursed his owner back to health, this book collects together for the first time a vast range of case histories, which show the extraordinary complexity of the animal world, and the tumult of emotions that govern it.

From page 223:

" Freedom from exploitation and abuse by humankind should be the inalienable right of every living being. Animals are not there for us to drill holes into, clamp down, dissect, pull apart, render helpless and subject to agonising experiments. They are, like us, endangered species on an endangered planet, and we are the ones, who are endangering them, it and ourselves. They are innocent sufferers in a hell of our making. We owe it to them, at the very least, to refrain from harming them further. If no more, we could leave them be.

When animals are no longer colonised and appropriated by us, we can reach out to our evolutionary cousins. Perhaps then the ancient hope for a deeper emotional connection across the species barrier, for closeness and participation in a realm of feelings now beyond our imagination, will be realised. "