Madeline’s Reviews > Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide > Status Update

2/2 “Also because it makes a statement about our own supposed cognitive superiority over the animals: ‘they smell & hear more acutely than I do because I’ve moved on from such basic brain stem functions. I don’t need to smell, I think instead, and that’s much more useful!’ In fact, we don’t do so badly at all.” Young children hear sounds at a frequency similar to a dog, better than many small animals.

1/2 “We humans tend to denigrate our own sensory lives; to assume that all things ‘do the wild’ better than we do. I suspect this is because we want to justify to ourselves our own dismally unsensuous urban lives: ‘I have to live in a centrally heated house and get my food in cans because I couldn’t ever live in a tree and catch a squirrel.’ -