The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition

Some really neat topics but the articles are somewhat dated by now, and not always as complete as one would think of scholarly essays.

Love this author!

This book is a large collection of short papers, somewhat comparable in style to what you would get in a peer-reviewed journal. I found many of them dull, but a few were good enough to make the book worth buying.Slobodchikoff's paper on prairie dog speech is what attracted me to the book; it's interesting but doesn't say enough to provide a convincing answer to my questions about how sophisticated their grammar is.Several of the papers provide nice anecdotes of sophisticated behavior where I didn't expect it (e.g. apparently detailed planning by a spider), but I sometimes wonder to what extent there's a selection bias that causes complex behavior to be overemphasized in reports of this nature, since they're more interesting to read than reports of animals failing to exhibit smart behavior.

Used this book for school. Not the most engaging read for sure, but got some cool stuff in there. Some of the case studies are very interesting.

For any animal behaviourist or any animal behaviourist wannabe out there, this will be essential. Really happy with my purchase.