"In the cloud forests of Monteverde, Costa Rica, pairs of male long-tailed manakins-clad in their stunning, red, blue, and black plumage-use perches as a stage for a coordinated song-and-dance to attract mates. Because the potential benefits are so great, males compete intensely for access to the stage. Who wins that competition? If you want a good perch to attract a mate, you need to have connections-and be deeply embedded in the manakin social network from the days of your youth. This is just one example in biologist and science writer Lee Alan Dugatkin's book The Well-Connected Animal. Drawing on work in animal behavior, evolution, computer science, psychology, anthropology, and genetics, Dugatkin enlightens readers about the role of social networks for animals in the wild. Readers will learn that social networks play a key role in the lives of giraffes, elephants, kangaroos, many a primate and bird species, Tasmanian devils, honeybees, whales, bats, badgers, field crickets, manta rays, and more. Interviews and insights from researchers offer a front row seat to understanding animal behavior and uncovering animal networks"--

A user friendly manual for performing acupressure treatments with your dog, "The Well Connected Dog" is filled with photographs and charts illustrating a step-by-step treatment guide, meridian pathways, and acupoints. Authors Snow and Zidonis also include twenty-five special conditions treatments and lots of additional information about your dog's optimal health.

“A book that offers hope.” —The New York Times Book Review “A wondrous tapestry.” —Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel Audubon Medal winner Richard Louv’s landmark book Last Child in the Woods inspired an international movement to connect children and nature. Now he redefines the future of human-animal coexistence. In Our Wild Calling, Louv interviews researchers, theologians, wildlife experts, indigenous healers, psychologists, and others to show how people are connecting with animals in ancient and new ways, and how this serves as an antidote to the growing epidemic of human loneliness; how dogs can teach children ethical behavior; how animal-assisted therapy may yet transform the mental health field; and what role the human-animal relationship plays in our spiritual health. He reports on wildlife relocation and on how the growing populations of wild species in urban areas are blurring the lines between domestic and wild animals. Our Wild Calling makes the case for protecting, promoting, and creating a sustainable and shared habitat for all creatures—not out of fear, but out of love. Includes a new interview with the author, discussion questions, and a resource guide.

Animals ranging from mosquitoes to elephants use their own words to guide humanity to a deeper spiritual awakening. • Contains interviews with 25 professional animal communicators and over 100 different animals and animal spirits. • Provides a thrilling glimpse of the possibilities of direct animal-human dialogue. According to Echo, an Arabian mare, "Humans are beings of love who have forgotten what love is and who they are." Along with a host of other animal communicators, Dawn Baumann Brunke gives animals like Echo a voice--a direct line of communication to the human mind. Through Animal Voices, the animal kingdom delivers a message about deepening our spirituality and reconnecting with the web of life. Our earliest ancestors had an ongoing shamanic dialogue with the animal kingdom, but this ability has been lost to most in the modern world. Brunke provides the techniques to reopen these connections, reminding us that when we are open to communication with animals, we are open to deeper layers of ourselves. The main contributors to this book are actual animals, who reveal themselves to be sentient beings with their own thoughts, emotions, and spiritual reasons for being on the planet. How Brunke overcame her initial skepticism and learned to hear their voices is a fascinating story. Throughout Animal Voices the author integrates her own reflections with those of the animals she interviews. The result is something that will delight animal lovers and force skeptics to reconsider their ideas about the nature of animal consciousness and the possibility of telepathic human-animal communication.

Social network analysis is used widely in the social sciences to study interactions among people, groups, and organizations, yet until now there has been no book that shows behavioral biologists how to apply it to their work on animal populations. Exploring Animal Social Networks provides a practical guide for researchers, undergraduates, and graduate students in ecology, evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and zoology. Existing methods for studying animal social structure focus either on one animal and its interactions or on the average properties of a whole population. This book enables researchers to probe animal social structure at all levels, from the individual to the population. No prior knowledge of network theory is assumed. The authors give a step-by-step introduction to the different procedures and offer ideas for designing studies, collecting data, and interpreting results. They examine some of today's most sophisticated statistical tools for social network analysis and show how they can be used to study social interactions in animals, including cetaceans, ungulates, primates, insects, and fish. Drawing from an array of techniques, the authors explore how network structures influence individual behavior and how this in turn influences, and is influenced by, behavior at the population level. Throughout, the authors use two software packages--UCINET and NETDRAW--to illustrate how these powerful analytical tools can be applied to different animal social organizations.

The scientific study of networks - computer, social, and biological - has received an enormous amount of interest in recent years. However, the network approach has been applied to the field of animal behaviour relatively late compared to many other biological disciplines. Understanding social network structure is of great importance for biologists since the structural characteristics of any network will affect its constituent members and influence a range of diverse behaviours. These include finding and choosing a sexual partner, developing and maintaining cooperative relationships, and engaging in foraging and anti-predator behavior. This novel text provides an overview of the insights that network analysis has provided into major biological processes, and how it has enhanced our understanding of the social organisation of several important taxonomic groups. It brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines with the aim of providing both an overview of the power of the network approach for understanding patterns and process in animal populations, as well as outlining how current methodological constraints and challenges can be overcome. Animal Social Networks is principally aimed at graduate level students and researchers in the fields of ecology, zoology, animal behaviour, and evolutionary biology but will also be of interest to social scientists.

Explores the frontiers of research on animal cognition and emotion, offering a surprising examination into the hearts and minds of wild and domesticated animals.