Bioethicist Jessica Pierce’s new book Who’s a Good Dog?; And How to Be a Better Human, publishing this month from University of Chicago Press, is “an invitation to nurture more thoughtful and balanced relationships with our canine companions,’ presenting her readers with both the biology as well as the psychology of dogs, and guiding them toward a better informed understanding of what dogs need in their relationships with us.
The phrase “here there be dragons,” so famously seen on old maps indicating places where there were great and mysterious dangers to be found, was not so very long ago not simply a metaphor. In fact, no less an authority on natural philosophy (what would later become known as natural history) than Linnaeus himself included […]
If you’re a regular reader of The Well-read Naturalist (and if so thank you very much for doing so) you’ve by now discovered that it’s as much about being well-read as it is about natural history. So when a new book is published that brings together the two of these, I most enthusiastically sit up and take notice. Such is the case with the recently published “Animals in the American Classics; How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction.”
From platypuses and possums, through wombats, echidnas, devils, and kangaroos, to quolls, dibblers, dunnarts, and kowaris, Jack Ashby knows them all; and in his recently published “Platypus Matters; The Extraordinary Story of Australian Mammals,” he guides his readers on a tour of their lives, their evolutionary stories, and the challenges they face in the modern world.