Author: mzepf1

While I really enjoyed this book, I think I’m part of a certain demographic that would inherently be inclined to like this book. I like science, I love evolution, I’m not particularly religious, I’ve received great education, and I like reading science-based or non-fiction books the best. I’m fully aware that not everyone shares those opinions though, which is where I get into the green bean metaphor.

The way I see it is this: people like me are the people who like vegetables. We’ll eat carrots, broccoli, asparagus, and definitely green beans, and green beans in particular are a very popular, well-liked veggie that doesn’t challenge you too much. But there are people who don’t like vegetables at all. For whatever reason, it’s not their scene. Maybe they taste bad, they prefer fruit, etc. However, on occasion, you can probably get someone to have some green beans that have been cooked up real nice, or introduce someone to veggies with a plate of green beans. They may not always turn to them, but green beans a good option if they’re in the mood for some greens.

Zoobiquity is green beans. For people who like science, it’s a light and interesting read that exposes you to some new information but doesn’t make you work too hard to get it. For people who maybe prefer works of fiction or don’t like science all that much, I think Zoobiquity is the kind of book that they could end up liking should they decide to pick up a *nerdier* book or want to dip their toe in the water.

However, I don’t think this book would ever go over well with someone extremely religious as it challenges a lot of the concepts held by some people in those groups. At least in any religion that’s a fan of the New Testament, members may struggle to accept a book that claims they’re not entirely separated from the rest of God’s creation, much as people oppose to the concept of evolution.

In all honesty, one of my favorite takeaways from this book was the validation it provides a ton of people with. Every day people are faced with harassment, cruelty, and judgement for things that are out of their control, such as their body weight, their mental health, their sexual preferences, their addictions, their anxieties, their overall strength, etc. And for a lot of these, you hear people say “It’s all in your control,” or “That doesn’t exist in nature,” or any number of ignorant things. This book puts a lot of those things to bed.

As someone who has struggled with a good number of the conditions described in this book, it gives me a great sense of comfort knowing that there are solutions and connections being made. It’s nice to know that my mental health issues aren’t just some strange complication of being an *intelligent being* to aid in a forever growing existential crisis. I’ve literally had malignant melanoma more than once and I hate talking about cancer because it’s so real to me, and yet this book gave me unique angles on my exact experiences that were previously never mentioned to me- and honestly I don’t know why they weren’t.

I understand that this doesn’t apply to everything; I’m not going to excuse bullying just because some primates do it somewhere. But this knowledge provides an opportunity for improvement. Even if knowing that these conditions exist in a higher quantity complicates the dataset, it’s still more data, and when has that ever been a bad thing for science?

My entire life I’ve struggled to justify my supposed superiority as a human being in this world. I was a church-goer (for a time), and aside from trying to understand how Jonah was supposed to survive being in a whale, I didn’t get why people were so separated from the rest of God’s creatures. I know that’s a very controversial opinion to have at a school like Notre Dame, but whenever classes would try to thoroughly distinguish human rights versus animal rights, or human love versus animal love (etc.), I’m at a loss. I can’t think of any unbiased reason as to why my version of life is better or different. At the beginning of my bio-anthropology class this year, this same question was posted and I had the same answer: I don’t know.

Zoobiquity as a book kind of confirmed my hesitations and ideas which was genuinely exciting- and not even a “I’m right your wrong” kind of exciting which is when you know it’s real. There were finally concrete connections between animals and things people perceive to be *uniquely human*. It makes a ton of sense if you look at any evolutionary tree because yes, even though there’s more than one solution to any problem, there are only so many ways to get to the answer, and we all started at the same place.