This book is an insight into communicating with animals. It follows the quest of its author who, after almost being crushed by a whale, awakens to the world of these cetaceans. What do we know about this language, often called song, which is rhythmic and repetitive and differs from one pod to another? Can we translate what they say? Tom Mustill takes us through the history of deciphering these sounds and explains how artificial intelligence and big data are accelerating the development of this knowledge. An astonishing, easy-to-read book that reveals a different view of our relationship with animals.
“Alive today are some 25 billion farmed chickens. Their biomass is more than double the weight of all the remaining wild birds on the planet added together, in fact, so many are killed each year that their bones accumulating in rubbish dumps are becoming a paleontological layer, a future marker of the Anthropocene. Of all the mammals left on the planet, by weight, 96 percent are human and domestic animals, such as cows, sheep, goats, dogs, and cats. As for the seas, we’re told that by 2050 there will be more plastic in them than fish. This mega-death is unusual in life’s history. As a wildlife filmmaker, like so many of my peers, I became a sort of nature war reporter. But I’d never really looked into whaling until my own run-in with the humpback in Monterey Bay. Before that experience, I’d naively imagined that most of the whale killing had happened in the nineteenth century, in Herman Melville’s time, when industrial society ran on cetacean products, and cities were illuminated with burning whale oil and corsets were ribbed with baleen from their mouths. But once I started reading about whales, including new research drawing on combinations of whale DNA and the records of whalers, I discovered that most of the cetaceans ever killed were in fact slaughtered in the twentieth century, and many in my own lifetime.”
Read and listened to as an audiobook