Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead.

I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings.

Anything requested and approved will be read and a decent quality review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

A great read. Both educational and entertaining, the titles of the chapters were particularly funny and standout.

9/10 stars

My full review on my blog (link attached).

Ward’s The Social Lives of Animals delivers exactly what it promises - a highly interesting, sometimes humorous, sometimes dead serious account on the social aspects of animal lives. It’s a very good popular science book, full of fun facts and anecdotes made more engrossing by the fact that many of them were witnessed first-hand by the author. As Ward is a professor of biology, there is a certain hierarchy detectable in the storytelling, a slow journey through the animal kingdom following the growing social complexity of behaviour: from the invertebrate toward vertebrates, and among these, from fish to mammals. The natural science lens is visible in other aspects of the book, as well - Ward judiciously spices his account with more scientific terms, taking care to explain what each means and why it is important. It is a highly entertaining, educational book and while maybe a tad less jaw-dropping and more anecdotal than I expected, it’s still a great resource for those interested in animal ethology. Ward is a great storyteller and possesses a wealth of data he itches to share with everybody. His enthusiasm is palpable, as is his knowledge. There’s humour, horror, sadness and joy, and loads of fun facts about a host of animals as varied as krill, termites, humpback whales, cockroaches, gorillas and vampire bats. I, for once, will never look at tits (erm, the birds) the same way.

The one element that I found truly tiresome, and which also seems to stem from Ward’s biological science background, is the constant hedging around animal emotional states, consciousness and the terrible sin (gasp!) of ascribing human categories to animals. If it looks like grief, feels like grief, smells like grief, and most notably has all the contextual signs of grief, maybe it is grief? Why would the act of ascribing basic human emotions and states to highly evolved animals such as elephants, apes, and cetaceans be more erroneous than not doing this and hedging behind stupid descriptions - and denying animals their cognitive abilities or worse, sentience, in the process - is simply beyond me. I am tired of biological sciences clinging desperately to their inaccessible ideal of objectivity. Go ahead, get as close to it as you can, that’s a worthy goal. But stop pretending you can actually get there! I much prefer de Waal’s approach, who is the first to admit we might simply be too stupid to really understand animals - but that shouldn’t mean we have the right to demean them. Ward, on the other hand, goes to lengths to emphasise that his emotions and observations are unscientific and that there is no consensus in biology when it comes to animal sentience or emotions. He thankfully drops the act when talking about chimpanzees and bonobos, and by then it would be really hard not to, as the apes are increasingly recognized by the scientific community not only as our genetic cousins, but as our behavioural and social family, too.

The Social Lives of Animals served also as an intriguing counterpoint to Bitch, which focused almost solely, and sometimes even, it seems, vengefully, on females of the species. In many cases both books described the same species, be they orcas, bonobos, termites, etc., but did it in somewhat divergent terms. Ward focused on the complexity of social relations and the material substrates of why these social relations grew to be the way they are, paying more attention to the species as a whole, a sort of cooperative between the sexes. Cooke, on the other hand, looked for specific instances where females, for a variety of reasons, had the upper hand in what she perceives more as the war of the sexes than the cooperation. These two perspectives formed a surprising whole in the end, though, and I’m happy I was able to compare them and access the information in both. Ward also adds a lengthy bibliography at the end, which is a rare and welcome supplement for all those who want more detail ;).

All in all, a great popular science book, engaging, entertaining, educational and accessible, which I can wholeheartedly recommend to all interested in biology, behavioural sciences, and animals in general.

Ah, and word for the wise: if anybody offers to greet you the lobster way, decline.

I have received a copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks.

Given the content, this book has a more generic cover than I think appropriate. The author begins by putting forward his stance on the concept of humans as social animals by providing personal anecdotes that outline the theory. It is a good jumping-off point to the animals' social structures because, at each stage, we return to the book's central theme. Each creature is part of a very different society, and it was extremely fascinating once I got into the groove of reading it. In the very beginning, I felt the content was a little dense. As I kept reading, however, I got used to the author's style and started to focus more on the contents. I am a fan of factoids that I can regale people if I am ever in a social setting that might appreciate such facts. This book is not conducive to individual facts being taken out and examined. It is best understood (at least it was by me) as part of the whole.
There is not much more that I, as a layperson, could talk about a non-fiction title. The writing was interesting, and the combination of that and the content had me enjoying this entire book.
One main thing I took away was that I never really registered that termites were vegetarians while ants are not! Thinking back, this distinction makes sense, but it came as a big surprise for some reason.
I have read/listened to quite a few standard and anecdotal books on animals this year, and this definitely tops the list of the ones I would recommend for people to keep on the shelf to peruse at leisure. Each individual creature can be taken as a chapter distinct from the rest, making it easier to read a book like this.
I received an ARC thanks to Netgalley and the publishers, but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

I've learned many new things from reading this book. I enjoyed reading it and didn't feel bored at all learning all the things about the social lives of animals.

A very good book , it was informative without being dull. I loved learning more about the emotional life of animals and this boo was one I couldn't put down!

I received an arc of this title from NetGalley for an honest review. Animals can be very social creatures and they often do things for one another. Interesting book about different animal social lives.

The Social Lives of Animals by Ashley Ward

Informative, insightful, and delightful ~ What a marvelous way to spend the day!

What I Liked:
* All of it…from introduction through to the last page of the epilogue
* Learning something new in every chapter of the book
* Seeing in how many ways animals are social and how that social aspect overlaps with other animals/species
* Being reminded again that we are animals
* Wondering if humans will ever understand and be able to truly communicate with animals – completely
* The wide variety of animals covered: krill, locusts, cockroaches, bees, ants, termites, fish, birds, rats, cows, elephants, lions, hyenas, wolves, whales, dolphins, primates, and more
* Being reminded of stories I have heard about local wildlife
* Reading of ways animals cooperate to hunt and to ward off predators
* How social animals are similar and different from one another
* The writing style – more a conversation with tidbits of science, fact, and trivia presented in a captivating easy to understand way
* The personal anecdotes of the author
* The variety of experiences shared
* The way some societal behaviors or the animals overlap with those of humans and inferences that can be made
* Contemplating what *I* would have done if I had been in the shoes of the author and seen the dolphin in the whale pod or the eye of the whale open while I was checking on it to make sure it was okay…and so many others
* The admiration I felt for the author – his ability to find his true calling, pursue it, enjoy what he does, and share this with us in the book he has written

What I didn’t like:
* Not much…mostly the times I thought of man’s ill treatment of so many animals over the span of time, and the extinction and near extinction of so many species,
* Knowing that humans think they are superior and have more rights on earth than other animals

Did I enjoy this book? Yes
Would I read more by this author? Yes

Thank you to NetGalley, Hachette Books, and the author for the ARC – This is my honest review.

5 Stars

Have you ever wondered what goes on inside an ant colony? Or whether animals are willing to help others, even at great threat to themselves? This book explores all the social intricacies from krill up to apes in an engaging way. I have read a lot of animal-based research and still learned so much, especially about animals that aren't often described in depth.

The highlights were stories based on the author's own experiences, such as swimming alongside sperm whales or sitting in a vehicle a troop of baboons decided to make their own. I'll admit I was a little more captivated by the chapters on more traditionally popular animals, but it was all interesting. I appreciated the writing style, and how it didn't go into too many statistics, nor did it dumb things down for the reader. There are some descriptions of animal violence towards one another, but nothing more than you would expect from watching a nature documentary. I enjoyed this book and would read more from the author.

I received this book as an ARC through NetGalley for my opinion.

Wild Romp. This is a book that takes us on a wild adventure across the planet as we see the societies various animals have built, from the smallest Antarctic krill to the large Orcas and Humpback whales to the largest land animals out there - the African Elephant. Fascinating in breadth (though with a dearth of bibliography, as the Advance copy I read only contained about 9% bibliography compared to 3x that amount being more typical, even in early copies) and often hilarious in approach, this is a book that lovers of any animal great or small are going to want to check out. Though I *would* be careful with younger readers (and apparently there is a children's edition already being planned), as the primate chapter in particular gets a bit salacious. Apparently you can't talk about baboon social life without talking about just how promiscuous - and "pansexual", to put a human label on it - they are. Other than that particular section though, most anything here is about the same as anyone will hear on TV / at work / at school as far as "bad" language goes. Truly a fun tale that never gets too academic and yet manages to present quite a few (presumed, see note about bibliography above) facts that are likely new to most readers. Very much recommended.

A fascinating read that delves into the lives of creatures big and small. Learn how connected these animals are with each other and even us in these nine well-organized chapters. Insects, fishes, birds, mammals are connected back to history, biology, psychology, and sociology in this book that will give you a greater appreciation for the interrelations between all living things on our planet. Helpful references and further reading list serves as an excellent springboard for those whose curiosity was piqued on a particular topic.

This is a fascinating look into animals as groups. From the smallest creatures to our closest cousins and, even, us. The author is a professor and the director of the Animal Behavior Lab in Sydney, and he is hilarious. Written in an entertaining and approachable way, he includes tons of science, but explained in a way that even dummies like me will understand completely. He adds examples of the conducts he describes. Most are funny, others grisly but necessary. Since he references the work of ethologists I follow, such as Frans De Waal, some of the stories and theories were familiar. Others I’d never heard of, and surprised me. As I mentioned earlier, he discusses little guys such as ants and termites, even cockroaches (sorry, profesor, I still don’t like them), larger mammals such as rats, birds, fish, sea mammals, big cats, monkeys and apes, among many others. Now I’m just happy that I don’t have any lobsters of my acquaintance since their way to say hello must be very stinky. This is an excellent volume.
I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, NetGalley/#Perseus Books, Basic Books!

I learned something new and had a good time doing it. What more can one ask, really?

The author is a very gifted storyteller. He manages to take a very academic subject and make it interesting to a general audience. This goes down so easy, with lots of humor and clear explanations of somewhat esoteric concepts. It amazing how much we can learn about the smallest, most obscure animals, and now much of it parallels human behavior. One needn't have a particular interest in zoology, populations, or animal behavior for this to be a good read. Anyone curious about the natural world or just looking for something interesting to learn about will be quite satisfied!

Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review!

I love animal docs so I was hoping this one would be fun and educational but it was a bit boring. I think there’s a lot of facts in the book that are great, but I think it would have been better if it had not been formatted like a novel.

Fantastic book! I love watching and learning about the interaction of animals. I enjoy documentaries and will watch them first before anything else.
This book is really good! I truly enjoyed it and learned several things that I didn't know. If you have any interest in animals you will want to read this one.

Thank you so much, NetGalley, for allowing me to read and review this great book!

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher I got the opportunity to read this book in advance. I feared it might be another book mired with statistics and meaningless (to the un-initiated folk) numbers, but it wasn't.

Put simply, the main topic of the book was how various classes of animals form societies and tries to answer the enigma of why in that certain manner and why at all. The book gives us a delightfully humorous and fascinating insight into the social lives of animals of all strata and spaces, going from tiny creatures such as krill to insects over to fish to birds to mammals. Some tales were endearing while others quite shocking, meaning, not family-friendly. That shouldn't surprise us though; it is our own fault that quite often the only way our urban lives get in touch with the nature is through the TV screen, and even then the more gruesome aspects of it are shown in words only or not mentioned altogether.

I've never put much thought into how social characters of some species affect their learning and decision making processes, so much they balance between life and death there. A simple example from the book gives a lot to think about us too - a mere shoal of fish very often has to make a life-challenging decision: to dare and go at once over there to another coral reef based on a hunch of a single curious fish or to wait for a mutual agreement of the whole shoal. For more advanced species the level of sociality is more complex, requiring brain cells working in many directions, from communication methods to familiarity and conformity levels, not so far from our own human means of surviving. Sometimes nice gestures do wonders for their well-beings, and opposite.

What exactly governs social lives of animals (us included), scientists are still doing thorough dissertations about. With this book we the ordinary readers get the glimpse of what they discovered so far. If you are fascinated with the nature, I would highly recommend reading this book. It is a treasure trove of many tales about animals and their lives that TV teams rarely get chance to or simply cannot film. While carefully citing the scientific sources for each of them, the book does not take a dry and strictly scientific approach to them. In that sense, the book is worthwhile read even to novices.

A wonderful and vast collection of fresh, strange, eclectic, and diverse tales and facts about the social lives of a wide array of different animals. This isn’t a quick read. It’s more the kind of book where keep coming back to read it a bit at a time. You get your fix of fresh animal facts to keep your mind occupied for awhile. Then, you go back to read a bit more. This diverse collection is vast and detailed enough to last you a good long while. A fitting match for such varied and vast subject matter: social behavior of animals. You’ll find personal anecdotes, secondhand stories, and wisdom from both researchers and experts. This has a better variety of animals then I’ve seen in most animal books. This book covers not only social interactions among animals that are all of the same species, but also interactions between animals that belong to different species. Ward compiles this impressive collection in the hopes that we humans can better understand and improve our social lives by understanding social lives of the animals we share the earth with. It’s is informative, comprehensive, entertaining, and full of material that’s brand new to me. A very enjoyable read.

Loved the book. Gave me insight into how other animals interact socially. Humanity's social structure and organisation is well studied and something that has allowed the economy to flourish. It is by no happenstance and rather an evolutionary survival mechanism.

I am a huge fan of animal facts in general, and this book gave me what I wanted.
Loved it!

The Social Lives of Animals is about exactly what it says on the tin: the social lives of animals. The author, Ashley Ward, argues that animals have complex social lives, and that learning about the importance of animals' social lives teaches us about the importance of humans' social lives. So this book doesn't really have a provocative thesis or groundbreaking argument -- for the most part, it's 380 pages of animal facts. And I absolutely love it.

Why? First of all, I am always up for animal facts. Do I want to know about the intricacies of bee dances? Absolutely. Whale songs? One hundred percent. Elephant mourning? Sign me up. When I was little, I was the kid who watched Zoboomafoo religiously and spent hours digging through my children's encyclopedias. The Social Lives of Animals reminds me of the best parts of that curiosity and wonder.

Another reason I had a blast reading this book was Ashley Ward's voice as a writer. He intersperses his animal facts with personal stories, told in a voice that reminds me of my scientist grandfather. Here's a short example, which comes from a section where Ward has been searching for whales:

"We racked up hour after hour of zilch, but that's all part and parcel of looking for animals -- if you want guarantees, go to a zoo."

Ward's style is genuine and keeps his subject matter fresh and interesting. All told, I'd recommend The Social Lives of Animals for readers who are looking for a solid collection of fun animal facts, or who are seeking to reignite their curiosity about the animal world.

Thank you to NetGalley for an e-ARC of this title, in exchange for my honest review. I love animals and all the quirks that come with them. This book was informative, but one that I wanted to continue turning the page. I learned many new pieces of information, and it gave me a new respect for the social ladder that exists even in the animal kingdom. This was a very good read, and if you're looking for a bit of non fiction, don't hesitate to pick this one up.