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About Beasts: What Animals Can Teach Us About the Origins of Good Evil (Unabridged)

Best-selling author Jeffrey Masson shows us what the animals at the top of the food chain - orca whales, big cats, etc. - can teach us about the origins of good and evil in ourselves. There are two supreme predators on the planet with the most complex brains in nature: humans and orcas. In the 20th century alone, one of these animals killed 200 million members of its own species, the other killed none. Jeffrey Masson’s fascinating new book begins here: There is something different about us. In his previous best sellers, Masson has shown what animals can teach us about our own emotions - about love (dogs), contentment (cats), grief (elephants), among others. But animals have much to teach us about the negative emotions such as anger and aggression as well, and in unexpected ways. In Beasts he demonstrates that the violence we perceive in the "wild" is mostly a matter of projection. We link the basest human behavior to animals, to "beasts" ("he behaved no better than a beast"), and claim the high ground for our species. We are least human, we think, when we succumb to our primitive, animal ancestry. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Animals, at least predators, kill to survive, indeed, but there is nothing in the annals of animal aggression remotely equivalent to the violence of humankind. Our burden is that humans, and in particular humans in our modern industrialized world, are the most violent animals to our own kind in existence, or possibly ever in existence on Earth. We lack what all other animals have: a check on the aggression that would destroy the species rather than serve it. It is here, Masson says, that animals have something to teach us about our own history. In Beasts , he brings to life the richness of the animal world and strips away our misconceptions of the creatures we fear, offering a powerful and compelling look at our uniquely human propensity toward aggression.