Paul Shepard was an ecologist with a Yale Ph.D. who spent more than 40 years studying human evolution. With The Others: How Animals Made Us Human Shepard, who died in 1996, wrote a masterful book about the relationship we've always had with animals. The idea behind the book, that humans have always depended on animals, and that the dependence has greatly affected what we are, seems simple at first. But Shepard combined prodigious scholarship with eloquent writing to produce a very entertaining and informative look at that special relationship. Among the topics covered in The Others are the role animals have played in myth and folklore, the uses to which humans have put animals, and even the role of animals in the cartoons of Gary Larson.

Paul Shepard has been one of the most brilliant and original thinkers in the field of human evolution and ecology for more than forty years. His thought-provoking ideas on the role of animals in human thought, dreams, personal identity, and other psychological and religious contexts have been presented in a series of seminal writings, including "Thinking Animals," "The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game," and now "The Others," his most eloquent book to date."The Others" is a fascinating and wide-ranging examination of how diverse cultures have thought about, reacted to, and interacted with animals. Shepard argues that humans evolved watching other animal species, participating in their world, suffering them as parasites, wearing their feathers and skins, and making tools of their bones and antlers. For millennia, we have communicated their significance by dancing, sculpting, performing, imaging, narrating, and thinking them. The human species cannot be fully itself without these others.Shepard considers animals as others in a world where otherness of all kinds is in danger, and in which otherness is essential to the discovery of the true self. We must understand what to make of our encounters with animals, because as we prosper they vanish, and ultimately our prosperity may amount to nothing without them.

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In this provocative, illuminating volume, Shepard examines the role of animals in human history from the Pleistocene to the present. He argues that anthropomorphism binds our connection to the rest of the natural world. Noting that narratives in which animals are protagonists occur in all kinds of societies and in different forms at all stages of life, Shepard (Thinking Animals) analyzes fairy tales (child), folktales (juvenile) and myths (adult), concluding that the last is the most revealing source of information about how people relate to the nonhuman world. He reviews the sources of biblical natural history and parable, and he discusses the "nightmare of domestication." Shepard argues that the benefits to other species of being domestic are fictitious; they are merely slaves. Additional topics include animals in language, the cult of the cow and the rise of pastoralism, augury and the biblical zoo. Illustrations not seen by PW.