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The Animal Contract
Originally published in Great Britain (1990) by Virgin Books. Renowned ethologist Morris examines the spiritual roots of the human-animal relationship and how humans have betrayed their fellow species in the quest for progress. Impassioned and highly readable. (c) by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.
- GenresNonfictionAnimalsScience
169 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
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91 people want to read
About the author
Desmond Morris
237 books571 followersDesmond John Morris (born 24 January 1928) is an English zoologist, ethologist and surrealist painter, as well as a popular author in human sociobiology. He is known for his 1967 book The Naked Ape, and for his television programmes such as Zoo Time.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 29, 2025
I remember when I first came across Desmond Morris. I was in the Sixth form at School, and my English teacher had set us an essay topic, to compare “Romantic and Realistic Love”. No doubt he had intended us to choose two authors whose works we were studying as examples, but I was a little … perverse. I chose the poet John Clare, whom I’d just discovered in the school library, and Desmond Morris, whose book “The Naked Ape” had been published a couple of years earlier (and which I’d just borrowed from my boyfriend, who went on to study psychology, albeit briefly, before switching to philosophy. Why he couldn’t have done something useful like plumbing or bricklaying I don’t know. But this digression is getting bizarre).
The point is that I got a good mark (no, that’s not the point, sorry) which was generous of my English teacher, but he wrote a cautionary note, to the effect that “not everyone accepts Desmond Morris’s theories of behaviourism”. I was a little crestfallen.
Do you ever wish that you could meet one of your teachers from long ago, and take them up on something? This is one of those cases. Granted “The Naked Ape” was an early work by Desmond Morris, but it was the one which established him as an authority on zoology, ethology and human sociobiology. He has since written another 35 books, at a rough count, all of which have been critically well received; some winning awards. Six years after publishing “The Naked Ape”, he returned to Oxford to work for the ethologist Niko Tinbergen. From 1973 to 1981, Desmond Morris was a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. He has also made many television documentaries and series. I really don’t think Desmond Morris is a flash in the pan. He is a well respected academic.
With this in mind, The Animal Contract: Sharing the Planet is a daring book for him to have written. By now Desmond Morris has shown his credentials, and he is almost “establishment”; certainly not to be dismissed as a “loony extremist”. However, as he says in his Foreword here:
“For some years I have felt the need to make a personal statement about the way our species has been behaving towards other animals: the way human beings have repeatedly abused and exploited the animal kingdom.”
Yet he has never attached himself to any campaigning group:
“All too often animal crusaders, despite their good intentions, allow themselves to become overemotional when what is needed is a cool head. They become obsessed with narrow issues when what is required is an attack on major principles of human conduct. All too often it is the horrific effects of animal abuses that are being tackled instead of the primary causes.”
Desmond Morris is convinced that we need a new “Bill of Rights” for animals, and this book accompanies a series of programmes he made for television, travelling to five continents to see at first hand many of the problems which beset animals today. He decided to keep the book short, thinking that “sometimes a brief message is heard when a long one is ignored.” It was a good theory, but this book from 1990 is now quite difficult to find, and not often listed with his major works. Despite winning the “Genesis Award for the Fund for Animals”, the conclusions he comes to, and the “Bill of Rights” he drafts after reasoned argument, is not a suggested way of life most humans want to hear.
Nevertheless, if you can stay with the depressing catalogue of how humans continually break their contracts with other animals, I think it is an important read.
“Environmentalists are increasingly preoccupied with the way we are polluting the waters, laying waste the land and corrupting the atmosphere, but there is another crime that humanity is committing against itself: the breaking of the Animal Contract. This is the contract that exists between ourselves and the other animals, making us partners in sharing the planet.
The basis of this contract is that each species must limit its population growth sufficiently to permit other life forms to coexist with it … Any species that competes so savagely that it wipes out everything else has a hollow victory: what it now dominates is nothing but a wasteland, and wastelands do not sustain life forms, even dominant ones.”
All forms of life are interdependent. Despite being strong and fast, lions do not kill every zebra and antelope they encounter. If they did, then their prey would become extinct, and soon after so would they. Our ecosystem is finely tuned, so that predators need prey, and prey animals need vegetation. Desmond Morris points out the various built-in ways for animals to limit their spread. Often females will cease to breed when they are overcrowded. Sometimes the embryos do not develop and are re-absorbed, and sometimes the mothers do not rear their young after they have been born. Then when the population has reached a sustainable level again, they will begin to breed as normal.
We cannot be sure what mechanism was in operation for early humans. Perhaps it was that populations were sparse; maybe 80 to 200 individuals in each tribe, and there was plenty of room to expand. Whether hunter-gatherers (as our teeth clearly show we were) or even when meat-eating increased, the resources were plenty.
“If we had increased our numbers very gradually, we would undoubtedly have evolved the kind of population control that we see in other species, but we did not. Because of our ingenuity and our sudden technological advances, our numbers exploded. In 10,000 years - a mere drop in the evolutionary ocean of time - we advanced from the Stone Age to the Nuclear Age, carrying with us our tribal genetic legacy. It was a legacy that said, if you have food, breed as much as you like. Our technology made our population control mechanism ineffectual and we had no time to acquire a new biological brake that could be applied as our numbers soared.
The result was that we started to rape the planet, a process that we confused with progress.”
We are just too clever, and with our “rush to world domination” and love of “diverting delights”, we behave like gods, and have forgotten the basic fact that we are animals.
Desmond Morris argues his case in three sections:
I. The Company of Animals
II. Fair Game?
III. Man’s Best Friends
The first section is an overview of how we have thought of animals from prehistory to the present day. Our earliest clues to this lie in the Cave Paintings in France and Spain, dating from more than 20,000 years ago. They are astonishing works of Art, but what drove the artists? Desmond Morris talks of sympathetic magic, totems, animal worship, and which species were accorded which roles. They were viewed with awe; an attitude which continued through Ancient Egypt. We know of lion-headed goddess Sekmet, who then became the cat goddess Bastet, the ram-headed sphinxes, and many more examples representing the Egyptians’ sense of wonder at the animal kingdom. What is not quite so well known is their observations of “dung-beetles to hippos, scorpions to leopards, frogs to mongooses” and their attempts to tame and domesticate these animals.
Many of our present-day categories of which animals we like and which we dislike seem to date from this time. The snake is a case in point. It was much revered by the Ancient Egyptians as a symbol of immortality, because when it sheds its skin, it re-enters the world glistening and new, as if it has been born again. This led to the tradition of circumcision; the act of shedding a male’s foreskin was supposedly in the hope of bestowing immortality. This was borrowed and has continued in both Jewish and Muslim religions. The Egyptian obsession with snakes also continues in the USA today, with various fundamentalist Christian snake-handling cults. Since they believe that snakes are living embodiments of the Devil, their rituals demonstrate a proof and strength of their faith.
It is clear in retrospect to see how the degrading of our attitude to other animals has progressed. Across the board, in early times there was respect for some animals, as totems, symbols, emblems or sacred beings. But if you elevate one, then you are likely to also acquire the opposite attitude. Animals who were respected were treated well, but others were persecuted. This systematically led to the idea that humans were somehow set above all other species. Only humans were deemed to have a soul, as animals were considered “brute beasts of no understanding”. If they had no souls, then they could be treated in any way, without guilt. The Christian idea of holding dominion over animals led to countless abuses, some of which continue. Perhaps they were put on display to be laughed at, as caricatures of ourselves. Or overpowered in displays of so-called “courage”. Perhaps enslaved as beasts of burden, or even tormented for “entertainment”.
Desmond Morris goes into many examples from history, and one has to remember that the formation of these attitudes dates from long ago. With the 13th century writings of Thomas Aquinas, and the advent of the Inquisition, there followed centuries of sanctified torture, torment and murder. Some extreme animals abuses remain to this day. We have separated ourselves from other animals, because animals have no rights. Even as recently as 1897, the Catholic Dictionary stated that it is “Lawful to put them to death, or to inflict pain upon them, for any good or reasonable end … even for the purpose of recreation.” Another example is that of early whalers, who were mostly devout Christian fundamentalists, thinking of a whale as a hideous incarnation of evil: “the great gliding demon of the seas of life”. Its jaws were depicted as a gateway to Hell. Perhaps it was viewed as an extension of a serpent.
The division widens. Circuses and early zoos were not happy places for animals. They were cruelly treated for our whims. Early zoos were like freak shows, with human “freaks” also in cages. But zoos have changed now, you may say. They are to do with conservation of the species. Yet when it was founded, the Zoological Society of London’s principal aim was “the introducing and domesticating of new Breeds or Varieties of Animals … likely to be Useful in Common Life”. This may come as a surprise to you. It certainly did to me.
Perhaps we have learned our lesson by releasing the grey squirrel into the English countryside and virtually eliminating our own indigenous red squirrel in the process. Perhaps too, we are no longer looking for new beasts of burden. Yet it is still always about what is useful to us, as humans. Yes, good modern zoos are now wildlife parks, and about conservation. But who is this for? Is this for each individual animal? Of course not. It is for us, so we can admire and wonder at them.
We may wish to support the conservation of a rare species (often an attractive one, such as the snow leopard) and yet we happily guzzle bacon and eggs, with the animals concerned reared in the most horrific condition imaginable: farrowing cages and battery farms. We “fulfil” our part of the contract by giving them the smallest space they can subsist in, the cheapest food, and an environment devoid of stimulation. The self-mutilation these birds resort to, in desperation, is heartbreaking.
Ironically it is the animals who are the most stoic, and unresistant who we treat the worst. A donkey is gentle and will work until they drop. So that is how we treat them. Dolphins in a Marina: are they happy? We all know how playful dolphins are, and when some were bored, they invented a game of throwing the pebbles in their tank at visitors, singling out nuns, for some reason. (Perhaps their black habits reminded the dolphins of an enemy such as a sea-lion.) Horrified, the marineland owners removed the pebbles, resulting in a completely sterile tank. There are countless examples of stereotypical pacing of animals kept in captivity. We address this by introducing things for them to do, such as foraging for their food, but are we approaching this the right way?
And what about pet-keeping? Who does this benefit? Again, it is humans. The contract we have with our pet seems to be a fair one, but it can descend into a travesty, when breeders are more concerned about fashion. It also seems illogical to treat our pets with this distinction, whilst turning a blind eye to other animal abuses. Dogs and cats are the preferred pets, and have been for centuries, but any individual farm animal can be a pet in the same way given a chance. But that is not their destiny.
These are just a few of the areas Desmond Morris explores. The section “Fair Game” is self-explanatory, but the examples are if anything even more graphic and disturbing. Why do we hunt for pleasure? Can we ever lose our appetite for killing?
In the third section “Man’s Best Friends”, Desmond Morris details how we have co-opted animals for our own purposes through history. Sometimes we have treated them well, although it is questionable whether it is often the animal’s choice to remain, or merely enforced. But animals’ partnerships with humans can be a joy. How can we ensure that this is possible without exploitation or suffering, and enabling as much of the animal’s natural behaviour patterns to continue? This is where Desmond Morris gives us his 10 point “Bill of Rights”.
However, if we continue to break the Animal Contract, his warning is clear.
“The time has come when we must accept that it is wrong to apply the harsher rules of commerce to the lives of animals. We must accept that quality of life is as important for them as it is for us.”
The consequences for humanity are potentially devastating.
“Every politician talks about the need for ‘more hospitals, more schools, more industry, more housing’ as if more is inevitably, unquestioningly, an improvement for society … The human species is not a high-quantity species, biologically speaking; it is a high-quality one. There is nothing to be gained but misery from over-population … The conservation movement must come out of the closet and declare itself totally behind population control.”
“If we forget our humble origins we will soon start to imagine that we can do what we like with our little planet.”
If humans are incapable of keeping to the Animal Contract, we too will follow the dinosaur, to become a fossil in some future age. But this is not a message humans want to hear.
The point is that I got a good mark (no, that’s not the point, sorry) which was generous of my English teacher, but he wrote a cautionary note, to the effect that “not everyone accepts Desmond Morris’s theories of behaviourism”. I was a little crestfallen.
Do you ever wish that you could meet one of your teachers from long ago, and take them up on something? This is one of those cases. Granted “The Naked Ape” was an early work by Desmond Morris, but it was the one which established him as an authority on zoology, ethology and human sociobiology. He has since written another 35 books, at a rough count, all of which have been critically well received; some winning awards. Six years after publishing “The Naked Ape”, he returned to Oxford to work for the ethologist Niko Tinbergen. From 1973 to 1981, Desmond Morris was a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. He has also made many television documentaries and series. I really don’t think Desmond Morris is a flash in the pan. He is a well respected academic.
With this in mind, The Animal Contract: Sharing the Planet is a daring book for him to have written. By now Desmond Morris has shown his credentials, and he is almost “establishment”; certainly not to be dismissed as a “loony extremist”. However, as he says in his Foreword here:
“For some years I have felt the need to make a personal statement about the way our species has been behaving towards other animals: the way human beings have repeatedly abused and exploited the animal kingdom.”
Yet he has never attached himself to any campaigning group:
“All too often animal crusaders, despite their good intentions, allow themselves to become overemotional when what is needed is a cool head. They become obsessed with narrow issues when what is required is an attack on major principles of human conduct. All too often it is the horrific effects of animal abuses that are being tackled instead of the primary causes.”
Desmond Morris is convinced that we need a new “Bill of Rights” for animals, and this book accompanies a series of programmes he made for television, travelling to five continents to see at first hand many of the problems which beset animals today. He decided to keep the book short, thinking that “sometimes a brief message is heard when a long one is ignored.” It was a good theory, but this book from 1990 is now quite difficult to find, and not often listed with his major works. Despite winning the “Genesis Award for the Fund for Animals”, the conclusions he comes to, and the “Bill of Rights” he drafts after reasoned argument, is not a suggested way of life most humans want to hear.
Nevertheless, if you can stay with the depressing catalogue of how humans continually break their contracts with other animals, I think it is an important read.
“Environmentalists are increasingly preoccupied with the way we are polluting the waters, laying waste the land and corrupting the atmosphere, but there is another crime that humanity is committing against itself: the breaking of the Animal Contract. This is the contract that exists between ourselves and the other animals, making us partners in sharing the planet.
The basis of this contract is that each species must limit its population growth sufficiently to permit other life forms to coexist with it … Any species that competes so savagely that it wipes out everything else has a hollow victory: what it now dominates is nothing but a wasteland, and wastelands do not sustain life forms, even dominant ones.”
All forms of life are interdependent. Despite being strong and fast, lions do not kill every zebra and antelope they encounter. If they did, then their prey would become extinct, and soon after so would they. Our ecosystem is finely tuned, so that predators need prey, and prey animals need vegetation. Desmond Morris points out the various built-in ways for animals to limit their spread. Often females will cease to breed when they are overcrowded. Sometimes the embryos do not develop and are re-absorbed, and sometimes the mothers do not rear their young after they have been born. Then when the population has reached a sustainable level again, they will begin to breed as normal.
We cannot be sure what mechanism was in operation for early humans. Perhaps it was that populations were sparse; maybe 80 to 200 individuals in each tribe, and there was plenty of room to expand. Whether hunter-gatherers (as our teeth clearly show we were) or even when meat-eating increased, the resources were plenty.
“If we had increased our numbers very gradually, we would undoubtedly have evolved the kind of population control that we see in other species, but we did not. Because of our ingenuity and our sudden technological advances, our numbers exploded. In 10,000 years - a mere drop in the evolutionary ocean of time - we advanced from the Stone Age to the Nuclear Age, carrying with us our tribal genetic legacy. It was a legacy that said, if you have food, breed as much as you like. Our technology made our population control mechanism ineffectual and we had no time to acquire a new biological brake that could be applied as our numbers soared.
The result was that we started to rape the planet, a process that we confused with progress.”
We are just too clever, and with our “rush to world domination” and love of “diverting delights”, we behave like gods, and have forgotten the basic fact that we are animals.
Desmond Morris argues his case in three sections:
I. The Company of Animals
II. Fair Game?
III. Man’s Best Friends
The first section is an overview of how we have thought of animals from prehistory to the present day. Our earliest clues to this lie in the Cave Paintings in France and Spain, dating from more than 20,000 years ago. They are astonishing works of Art, but what drove the artists? Desmond Morris talks of sympathetic magic, totems, animal worship, and which species were accorded which roles. They were viewed with awe; an attitude which continued through Ancient Egypt. We know of lion-headed goddess Sekmet, who then became the cat goddess Bastet, the ram-headed sphinxes, and many more examples representing the Egyptians’ sense of wonder at the animal kingdom. What is not quite so well known is their observations of “dung-beetles to hippos, scorpions to leopards, frogs to mongooses” and their attempts to tame and domesticate these animals.
Many of our present-day categories of which animals we like and which we dislike seem to date from this time. The snake is a case in point. It was much revered by the Ancient Egyptians as a symbol of immortality, because when it sheds its skin, it re-enters the world glistening and new, as if it has been born again. This led to the tradition of circumcision; the act of shedding a male’s foreskin was supposedly in the hope of bestowing immortality. This was borrowed and has continued in both Jewish and Muslim religions. The Egyptian obsession with snakes also continues in the USA today, with various fundamentalist Christian snake-handling cults. Since they believe that snakes are living embodiments of the Devil, their rituals demonstrate a proof and strength of their faith.
It is clear in retrospect to see how the degrading of our attitude to other animals has progressed. Across the board, in early times there was respect for some animals, as totems, symbols, emblems or sacred beings. But if you elevate one, then you are likely to also acquire the opposite attitude. Animals who were respected were treated well, but others were persecuted. This systematically led to the idea that humans were somehow set above all other species. Only humans were deemed to have a soul, as animals were considered “brute beasts of no understanding”. If they had no souls, then they could be treated in any way, without guilt. The Christian idea of holding dominion over animals led to countless abuses, some of which continue. Perhaps they were put on display to be laughed at, as caricatures of ourselves. Or overpowered in displays of so-called “courage”. Perhaps enslaved as beasts of burden, or even tormented for “entertainment”.
Desmond Morris goes into many examples from history, and one has to remember that the formation of these attitudes dates from long ago. With the 13th century writings of Thomas Aquinas, and the advent of the Inquisition, there followed centuries of sanctified torture, torment and murder. Some extreme animals abuses remain to this day. We have separated ourselves from other animals, because animals have no rights. Even as recently as 1897, the Catholic Dictionary stated that it is “Lawful to put them to death, or to inflict pain upon them, for any good or reasonable end … even for the purpose of recreation.” Another example is that of early whalers, who were mostly devout Christian fundamentalists, thinking of a whale as a hideous incarnation of evil: “the great gliding demon of the seas of life”. Its jaws were depicted as a gateway to Hell. Perhaps it was viewed as an extension of a serpent.
The division widens. Circuses and early zoos were not happy places for animals. They were cruelly treated for our whims. Early zoos were like freak shows, with human “freaks” also in cages. But zoos have changed now, you may say. They are to do with conservation of the species. Yet when it was founded, the Zoological Society of London’s principal aim was “the introducing and domesticating of new Breeds or Varieties of Animals … likely to be Useful in Common Life”. This may come as a surprise to you. It certainly did to me.
Perhaps we have learned our lesson by releasing the grey squirrel into the English countryside and virtually eliminating our own indigenous red squirrel in the process. Perhaps too, we are no longer looking for new beasts of burden. Yet it is still always about what is useful to us, as humans. Yes, good modern zoos are now wildlife parks, and about conservation. But who is this for? Is this for each individual animal? Of course not. It is for us, so we can admire and wonder at them.
We may wish to support the conservation of a rare species (often an attractive one, such as the snow leopard) and yet we happily guzzle bacon and eggs, with the animals concerned reared in the most horrific condition imaginable: farrowing cages and battery farms. We “fulfil” our part of the contract by giving them the smallest space they can subsist in, the cheapest food, and an environment devoid of stimulation. The self-mutilation these birds resort to, in desperation, is heartbreaking.
Ironically it is the animals who are the most stoic, and unresistant who we treat the worst. A donkey is gentle and will work until they drop. So that is how we treat them. Dolphins in a Marina: are they happy? We all know how playful dolphins are, and when some were bored, they invented a game of throwing the pebbles in their tank at visitors, singling out nuns, for some reason. (Perhaps their black habits reminded the dolphins of an enemy such as a sea-lion.) Horrified, the marineland owners removed the pebbles, resulting in a completely sterile tank. There are countless examples of stereotypical pacing of animals kept in captivity. We address this by introducing things for them to do, such as foraging for their food, but are we approaching this the right way?
And what about pet-keeping? Who does this benefit? Again, it is humans. The contract we have with our pet seems to be a fair one, but it can descend into a travesty, when breeders are more concerned about fashion. It also seems illogical to treat our pets with this distinction, whilst turning a blind eye to other animal abuses. Dogs and cats are the preferred pets, and have been for centuries, but any individual farm animal can be a pet in the same way given a chance. But that is not their destiny.
These are just a few of the areas Desmond Morris explores. The section “Fair Game” is self-explanatory, but the examples are if anything even more graphic and disturbing. Why do we hunt for pleasure? Can we ever lose our appetite for killing?
In the third section “Man’s Best Friends”, Desmond Morris details how we have co-opted animals for our own purposes through history. Sometimes we have treated them well, although it is questionable whether it is often the animal’s choice to remain, or merely enforced. But animals’ partnerships with humans can be a joy. How can we ensure that this is possible without exploitation or suffering, and enabling as much of the animal’s natural behaviour patterns to continue? This is where Desmond Morris gives us his 10 point “Bill of Rights”.
However, if we continue to break the Animal Contract, his warning is clear.
“The time has come when we must accept that it is wrong to apply the harsher rules of commerce to the lives of animals. We must accept that quality of life is as important for them as it is for us.”
The consequences for humanity are potentially devastating.
“Every politician talks about the need for ‘more hospitals, more schools, more industry, more housing’ as if more is inevitably, unquestioningly, an improvement for society … The human species is not a high-quantity species, biologically speaking; it is a high-quality one. There is nothing to be gained but misery from over-population … The conservation movement must come out of the closet and declare itself totally behind population control.”
“If we forget our humble origins we will soon start to imagine that we can do what we like with our little planet.”
If humans are incapable of keeping to the Animal Contract, we too will follow the dinosaur, to become a fossil in some future age. But this is not a message humans want to hear.
November 30, 2018
Morris expands the script of a 1990 television series about the deteriorating relationship between human beings and animals. While many of his points are valid -- the further our culture moves into technology, the less we understand other animals -- he has a tendency to mention vague "studies" or say "it is estimated" without ever providing information on his sources.
He quite correctly keeps circling back to one huge causative factor, but it is one without resolution. Humans have been tremendously successful in an evolutionary sense, and that very success will ultimately destroy us. (Whether that happens in time to save the other animals on the planet is problematical.) The issue is population, which is burgeoning far beyond the planet's capability to support it. More people require more land for housing and for food production, which of course reduces that available for wild animals, and puts pressure on farmers/ranchers to become more "efficient" in their use of resources. Unfortunately, "efficiency" often comes at the expense of the comfort and freedom of domestic animals.
The book becomes a dreary parade of atrocities without suggestions for a workable compromise. There is a proposed "new" contract, of "10 Commandments" for the general welfare of both domestic and wild animals, but practical plans to impose it are lacking.
He quite correctly keeps circling back to one huge causative factor, but it is one without resolution. Humans have been tremendously successful in an evolutionary sense, and that very success will ultimately destroy us. (Whether that happens in time to save the other animals on the planet is problematical.) The issue is population, which is burgeoning far beyond the planet's capability to support it. More people require more land for housing and for food production, which of course reduces that available for wild animals, and puts pressure on farmers/ranchers to become more "efficient" in their use of resources. Unfortunately, "efficiency" often comes at the expense of the comfort and freedom of domestic animals.
The book becomes a dreary parade of atrocities without suggestions for a workable compromise. There is a proposed "new" contract, of "10 Commandments" for the general welfare of both domestic and wild animals, but practical plans to impose it are lacking.
April 27, 2023
This book was written over 30 years ago, more notice should have been taken immediately about the concerns it describes. Some of the issues have been dealt with at least in part, but globally there are still many problems and time is running out for preventing widespread extinction of many more species.
November 3, 2021
la muerte podrá ser inevitable pero la crueldad no lo es
July 3, 2020
Avendo appena terminato il precedente lavoro dell'autore, La scimmia nuda. Studio zoologico sull'animale uomo, ho trovato questo libro abbastanza deludente.
In pratica, ha riprosto le stesse identiche riflessioni prodotte trent'anni prima nell'opera citata, aggiungendo giusto un paio di punti e purgando questo nuovo lavoro di tutte le conclusioni del primo libro che, alla prova del tempo, si sono poi rivelate inesatte.
Alcune riflessioni restano comunque provocanti e interessanti, e la scrittura divulgativa è piuttosto piacevole. Se però al suo primo saggio ho dato tre stelle, a questo rimaneggiamento (che soffre delle stesse pecche del suo gemello precedente, senza però la forza della novità) non posso che darne due, proprio per la mancanza di reale innovazione a distanza di tre decadi.
In pratica, ha riprosto le stesse identiche riflessioni prodotte trent'anni prima nell'opera citata, aggiungendo giusto un paio di punti e purgando questo nuovo lavoro di tutte le conclusioni del primo libro che, alla prova del tempo, si sono poi rivelate inesatte.
Alcune riflessioni restano comunque provocanti e interessanti, e la scrittura divulgativa è piuttosto piacevole. Se però al suo primo saggio ho dato tre stelle, a questo rimaneggiamento (che soffre delle stesse pecche del suo gemello precedente, senza però la forza della novità) non posso che darne due, proprio per la mancanza di reale innovazione a distanza di tre decadi.
May 21, 2011
A classic book about the relationship between humans and other animals. We have an unwritten contract, and we are breaking it in sometimes horrifying ways.
April 12, 2012
Desmond Morris is a nice combination of a zoologist with a philosopher. It flows very lightly and still it enriches you with data and relevant theories. A must.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews