Book Review: The Creative Lives of Animals

 

Image: The Cover of the book is a photo of 7 red- throated bee eaters - birds with green and orange bodies,  fanned out tails, long thin black beaks, a black mask line, and red throats- together on a clay wall with several nesting cavities. Weaving in and out of the birds is the title in large white letters. Across the bottom in yellow letters is the authors name: Carol Gigliotti.

I enjoyed reading Carol Gigliotti's The Creative Live of Animals for VINE book club this month. I wanted to wait until after hearing from the author, who kindly joined us, to write this review. Hearing more from her changed some of the ways I thought about this book. 

I love when people reach across fields to write about topics. It can be a mess when done poorly, but when done well, it offers a set of fresh eyes and a different voice- in this case, on animals' ways of experiencing and interacting with the greater world. Gigliotti comes to us as an artist who explores the inner and outer worlds of other animals through the lens of creativity. I believe that this is mostly done well and can create a bridge for people to experience these topics who may not seek out a more academic book. It is not that this is not an academic work. I am struggling to find the words to differentiate this work from the jargony type of text written primarily for others in one's field.

I admit that while reading this book, I found a lot of information from animal intelligence, emotion, language, sexuality, culture, etc that I had already read (though many species-specific things that I had not.) I was struggling to find what made this book stand out specifically as being about creativity itself. Each chapter is full of interesting research, well conveyed, but the descriptions of how creativity fit into the equation were too short for my taste. However, one of the things I liked about this author was the approach of acknowledging how anthropocentric definitions of various terms- including creativity and all others in this paragraph- limit us in understanding what creativity really means for other species. Looking at it that way, I could see her point that things like "intelligence" and other attributes have great overlap with creativity. The various things she chose to combine in this book also make it stand out from others in similar fields.

In terms of studies discussed, I really loved the section on prairie dog language and culture. I know I had read something about this elsewhere, but barely remembered it and it was a joy to read all of the research about these complex communication systems. I also enjoyed learning about the Moscow stray dogs who learned to use the subway systems. As a birder, my most favorite sections were on the languages and creativity of brown thrashers and gray catbirds. I've had the pleasure of listening to and watching the serenades of brown thrashers and catbirds, but had no idea how complex these songs were until this book. We often learn of these birds as "mimics" because they incorporate songs of other birds (and animals, car alarms, etc.) Would we call a composer a mimic for using notes and instruments created by others before them? These were the places I could see very clearly how "creativity" as I understand it came into play. That is not to say bird song is the same as human music- it is far more other-worldly than that in ways we will never be able to truly understand, which is part of why it is so lovely to witness. Field guides will say a species sings to "defend territory" or "attract a mate" which is in part true, but only a small part of the equation. After all, the colonizers running around shooting birds to draw them before returning home to their enslaved house mates (*cough* Audubon *cough*) used to think only male birds sang, which we now know is completely false, as is the notion that there are singular reasons why birds sing and communicate. A book written by an ornithologist might gloss over the creativity aspect which is one of many ways this book shines.

One of the best things about how research was discussed in this book was how the author never shied away from ethics. I complain frequently of how even the most animal liberation minded authors will sometimes include information from gnarly animal studies without comment, I suppose to be more accessible to the fragile colleagues who can't bear to think of a world without animals suffering in laboratory cages. Gigliotti manages to share results while adding something I have not seen said quite the way she did. She not only comments about the ethical issues with the research, but that the research itself hides results from us. Mainly, what would this creativity (or intelligence, etc) that we are studying look like if it were not forced by human hands and defined solely by us?

While listening to the author in book club, I appreciated the discussion of the creativity metric being used as a bridge to bring this information to a wider audience. People put off by words like "agency" might be more willing to read about "creativity." That made me more comfortable with some of my early confusion about what was creativity and what was not. She also shared an anecdote about another author saying something about how the greater than human world is inextricably linked with human creativity. I tried imagining the history of all creativity mediums if other animals were never present and I realized just how intricately they are woven throughout human creative mediums (in some good and not so good ways.) 

All in all, I think this book adds something useful to the shelf of animal studies. I would have liked a tighter grasp and focus on creativity as it branches further away from things like intelligence, but I still learned a lot and, more importantly, learned new ways to think about the lives of myself and other animals. I would love to read a full book by the author on creativity of birds specifically in the future.

This was also posted to my goodreads.