Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves
Frans de Waal opens with the farewell between an elderly chimpanzee matriarch named Mama and the Dutch biologist who had known her for forty years, then uses that scene as a starting point to survey decades of research on animal emotions. Drawing on his own work with chimpanzees, bonobos, and capuchin monkeys, along with studies of elephants, dogs, rats, and fish, he describes how empathy, fairness, shame, grief, and even a sense of justice show up across species. De Waal distinguishes emotions from feelings, explains how researchers measure inner states through behavior and physiology, and pushes back against the long taboo against attributing rich mental lives to animals. He connects these findings to debates about consciousness, ethics, and how humans treat the animals in their care. The book is at once a primer on affective neuroscience and a quiet argument for taking other minds seriously.
What you might want to know about Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A primatologist argues that the emotional lives of animals, from chimpanzees to rats, are far closer to our own than science has been willing to admit.
Yes. Harari blurbed the book for W. W. Norton, writing that de Waal's work has profoundly changed our understanding of animal and human emotions and that this book is a beautifully written and important examination of who we are.
No; de Waal writes for a general audience and uses field stories about individual animals to introduce the underlying research on emotion and cognition.
Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves was written by Frans de Waal, published in 2019 by W. W. Norton & Company.
Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves is 336 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
