Toward a New Understanding of Animals

Description

An award-winning journalist s all-night vigil with a retired chimp performer named Roger blossoms into a whole new way to regard our fellow creatures as well as ourselves. While researching a recent New York Times Magazine cover story about chimpanzees, Charles Siebert visited a retirement home for former ape movie stars and circus entertainers in Wauchula, Florida known as the Center for Great Apes. There Siebert encountered Roger, a twenty-eight-year-old former Ringling Brothers star who seemed convinced he knew the author from some other time and place. Haunted by Roger s response, Siebert takes up residence at the Center for Great Apes and, in the course of one late-night visit to a sleepless Roger s quarters, gets to the bottom of this mysterious connection between himself and his simian counterpart.The result is The Wauchula Woods Accord, a strikingly written, wide-ranging physical and metaphysical foray into the increasingly fraught frontier between humans and other animals; a journey that encompasses many of the author s encounters with chimpanzees and other animals, as well as the latest scientific discoveries that underscore our intimate biological bonds not only with our nearest kin, but with far more remote-seeming life-forms. By journey s end, the reader arrives at a deeper understanding both of Roger and of our numerous other animal selves, a recognition an accord that carries a new sense of responsibility for how we view and treat all animals, including ourselves.

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