Review: The Unexpected Truth About Animals by Lucy Cooke

3.5 out of 5 stars

Everything that you thought that knew about cute penguins, adorable pandas and the utterly chilled out sloths, was probably wrong. When you see photos or videos of animals doing human type things we tend to put human personalities and our morals on animals and it really doesn’t work. They have their own tales to tell us and in a lot of cases the truth is much much stranger than the fiction.

Cooke is the founder of the Sloth Appreciation Society and they make an appearance in here as she dispels the myths about them being lazy and explains the crucial part they play in the ecosystems in the forests that they live in. We will learn why vultures crap on their own legs, which animals partake in prostitution and necrophilia. How pandas are not as sex adverse as we think that they are and what happens when they stop being cute. Lots of animals were considered to appear from out of the mud at the bottom of ponds, including frogs and eels and swallows were though to stay at the bottom of ponds over winter and appear each spring. Migration was only properly discovered when a stork turned up with a spear from an African warrior in its neck. If you want to know why an African Hippo is making itself at home in Columbia and what they are actually closely related to and also to find out if moose are actually drunken reprobates then this is a good place to start.

I am not sure that science books are meant to make to laugh out loud and chuckle away to yourself, but this did. Cooke dispels lots of myths and uncovers secrets about her selected animals so of which have been suppressed for almost 100 years. It is an enjoyable popular science book that still has its foundations in serious research in seeking to understand just what makes animals do what they do.

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2 Comments

  1. Pandora

    This book sounds very interesting indeed! The idea that migration was only properly discovered because of the spear in a neck is amazing! Sounds like this book will have some great facts and anecdotes to amaze friends with! Thanks for the great book review 🙂

    • admin

      Thanks, Pandora. Well worth reading and entertaining too

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