After I finished The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben, I was glad to learn that the author had written two other books. The first one I got my hands on was The Inner Life of Animals: Love, Grief, and Compassion; Surprising Observations of a Hidden World.

By chapter three, I knew I wanted to read it to my kids, so I started it over as a read-aloud for them for school. I figured it would count both for Literature and Science, and I love extra credit.

With a layout similar to the trees book, each chapter explores a different aspect of animals and their emotional lives. Wohlleben uses scientific studies to illustrate his points, but just as often, resorts to anecdotes about his own pets and the animals he interacts with in the forest where he works. When those stories couldn’t capture his point, he’d turn to stories from the internet, the type you’d find in a viral YouTube video or in an annoying slide show on BuzzFeed.

There were fascinating stories and thought-provoking ideas in this book. For example, pigeons can see the polarity of light and so everywhere they look, they literally have a visual compass. There is a single-celled organism with spacial memory that was able to recreate the public transit routes of a Japanese city when placed on a map with food at each of the subway stops. It completed an efficient map strikingly like the actual transit system in just hours, a project that took engineers years of planning to come up with. The miracles of our world are truly amazing.

Yet there was a long period in the middle where I was bored, with little relief. I seriously considered quitting reading, but the kids were still into it, so I pressed on. While the trees book felt like a scientifically supported treatise with some extrapolation, Wohlleben had much less research to back up his claims in this book, and while he may have had some good points, a lot of it was speculation.

When it comes down to it, I just don’t enjoy stories about other people’s pets, and this was an entire book where it seemed not a chapter went by without a tale about Wohlleben’s goats, dogs, horses, or birds. It almost seemed like Wohlleben cared so deeply about the content of this book that he wasn’t even able to allow the dry sense of humor that I loved so much from the trees book to shine through. He wanted to be taken seriously, and that took some of the fun out of The Inner Life of Animals.

This has happened before, where I read a book by an author, and then didn’t enjoy another book by the same writer (here and here are a couple of examples). But just as often, I binge read through an author and love almost every word (Brené Brown and Richard Rohr come to mind, as well as Madeleine L’Engle). When the first book I read is as good as The Hidden Life of Trees, it is particularly disappointing when the next one doesn’t live up to its predecessor. I doubt I’ll be reading Wohlleben’s most recent work, The Secret Wisdom of Nature: Trees, Animals, and the Extraordinary Balance of All Living Things – Stories from Science and Observation, which came out this year.

Side note: This book is accessible for all ages, but the content was intended for adults. Wohlleben describes the sexual behavior of animals in a very direct way, using mature terms we typically attribute to humans. Depending on how graphic he got, I did edit this content on the fly to keep it G-rated for my audience. If you want to know more about what we do for sex ed in our homeschool, check out this post, or this one.