Book review: Are the wild animals in your garden a nuisance or your neighbors?

Book review: Are the wild animals in your garden a nuisance or your neighbors?

By Tove Danovich

NON-FICTION

Meet the Neighbors: Animal Spirits and Life in a More Than Human World
by Brandon Keim.
WW Norton, 2024 ($29.99)

Anyone who follows stories about animal intelligence has heard of extraordinary animals. Snowball the cockatoo dances rhythmically to pop songs. Alex the parrot knew more than 100 words. Koko the gorilla had perhaps the language ability of a small child. But do animals have to be geniuses to deserve our attention?

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The journalist Brandon Keim Meet the neighbors is about common animals – the bumblebees, coyotes, sparrows, raccoons and squirrels that live among us – and what it would take for humans to be more considerate of the wild creatures that share our cities and backyards. Keim asks, “How might an awareness of animal brains affect our understanding of them and, ultimately, our coexistence with them on this shared, precious planet?”

I was gripped from the first pages, which describe a woman’s relationship with a bumblebee she rescues and nurses back to health. Keim’s enthusiasm for animals and the people who care for them is infectious. For example, he interviews people who spend hours cataloging the movements of local coyotes to prove they aren’t dangerous or overrunning the city, and talks to scientists in Seattle who banded sparrows to observe how they socialized over the course of a year. In this thoughtful book, people’s experiences with animals and scientific studies of animal behavior become the starting point for larger questions about how to treat animals more fairly.

In later chapters, Keim examines various efforts to give animals legal status so that their needs are represented alongside our own. What if we thought about the seasonal cycles of nesting swifts before removing a chimney they have inhabited in the past? What if we considered animals as advocates who should be heard before harvesting wood from a forest, using pesticides in agriculture, or removing “nuisance” animals that cause no harm or suffering?

It is now well documented that the so-called anthroppause – the absence of human sounds and activities during the COVID lockdown – led people to become more interested in the natural world around them. Meet the neighbors asks how we can use our newfound love to better coexist with nature – in other words, to be better neighbors.