How Animals Think and Feel: An Introduction to Non-Human Psychology. By Ken Cheng. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2016. 294 p. Acid free $46.40 (ISBN 978-1-4408-3714-2). E-book available (978-1-4408-3715-9), call for pricing.

This affordable single-volume work is the first book by Dr. Ken Cheng of McQuarie University, who has published many journal articles on animal behavior on a variety of species in the past thirty years. Cheng’s experience as an accomplished researcher and professor is evident in his readable, well-researched, and entertaining writing. How Animals Think and Feel features nine chapters that focus on topics related to animal cognition and emotions. In addition, there are nine case studies of animals that reflect a diverse representation of animals, from jumping spiders to apes, with a concluding chapter putting human cognition and emotion into the context of animal behavior. A key feature of this book are the debates featured in some chapters featuring multiple researchers from universities across the world discussing topics as diverse as “How Important Is the Actual Information Conveyed through Animal Communication” to “What Is Special about Humans?”. One of the strengths of How Animals Think and Feel is Cheng’s ability to remain on topic while also acknowledging larger concerns, which is most evident in the chapter on honeybees, which provides the problematic context of the decreasing number of bees due to environmental issues, while spending most of the chapter on the social structure of bees and hives. Although it is clear in Cheng’s writing that the topics are well researched, a weak point is the lack of extensive references, with only four pages of references included at the end of the book, and no references in-text.

How Animals Think and Feel is a positive addition to reference works related to animal behavior. Animal Behavior: How and Why Animals Do the Things They Do (ABC-CLIO, 2014), edited by Ken Yasukawa, is an excellent work covering all of animal behavior, and does not have the same focus on emotions and thinking. The Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior (Elsevier, 2010), edited by Michael Breed and Janice Moore, is an essential reference work on this topic, but is already in need of an update in this quickly evolving field. There are many recent positively reviewed monographs on animal emotion and thought. Virginia Morell’s Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures (Crown, 2014) is an excellent book on this topic, but Morell’s approach as a science writer differs from Dr. Cheng’s approach, which is academic but accessible enough that a beginning undergraduate or high school student can easily understand his writing. Carl Safina’s 2015 Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (Henry Holt) is an excellent title that expertly covers the same content and focuses on elephants, whales, and wolves. Acclaimed biologist Frans de Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (Norton, 2016) is another excellent work worth adding to any animal behavior collection. There are many recent excellent books about the cognition and emotions of specific species of animals from birds to elephants to fish. All of the aforementioned books are excellent, and represent a growing academic field producing many recent high quality major works. Although How Animals Think and Feel does not add significant new information on these topics, this title could serve not only as a reference work but also as a well-developed introductory textbook, which makes this a good accessible addition for libraries owning other recent titles in this area. Recommended for high school and undergraduate libraries—Shannon Pritting, Library Director, SUNY Polytechnic Institute, Utica, New York