How to Be Animal

Humans are the most inquisitive, emotional, imaginative, aggressive and baffling animals on the planet. But how well do we really know ourselves?How to Be Animal tells a remarkable story of what it means to be human and argues that at the heart of our psychology is a profound struggle with being animal. As well as piecing together the mystery of how this psychology evolved, the book examines the wide-reaching ways in which it affects our lives, from our politics to the ways we distance ourselves from other species. We travel from the origins of homo sapiens through the agrarian and industrial revolutions, the age of the internet and on to futures of AI and human-machine interface. We examine how technology influences our sense of our own animal nature and our relationship with the other species with whom we share this fragile planet.Drawing on new evidence from a wide range of disciplines, Challenger proposes that being an animal is a process – beautiful and unpredictable – and that we have a chance to tell ourselves a new story, to realise that if we matter, so does everything else.

'What an interesting book! The recognition that we are animals should come less as a slap in the face than as a welcome reminder of the great resources that can come from paying attention to the ways we and our various cousins handle our journeys on this difficult but beautiful planet.' -- Bill McKibben, author Of Falter: Has The Human Game Begun To Play Itself Out?

elanie Challenger studied English literature and language at Oxford University. Initially, she worked in the creative arts, in classical music and literature. She published a sequence of poems, Galatea, which won a 2005 Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. In 2003, she adapted the Anne Frank diaries for a choral work by James Whitbourn, which was premiered under Leonard Slatkin in 2005 and continues to be performed extensively.During this time, she began to focus her research interests on environmental history, and on interdisciplinary work on the relationship of humans to the living world. Her first non-fiction book On Extinction: How we became estranged from nature was published in 2011. It was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the best non-fiction books of 2012 and received the Santa Barbara Library’s Green Award for environmental writing. “Surely the most poetic book on the environment published this year,” (Roger Cox, Scotsman’s Books of the Year). She was the recipient of a Darwin Now Award for her research among Canadian Inuit and the Arts Council International Fellowship with British Antarctic Survey for her work on the history of whaling.From 2007-2010, she was a Fellow at the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at University College London. Prior to this, she also edited Stolen Voices, an anthology of young people’s wartime diaries with Bosnian writer Zlata Filipovic. More recently, she has focused on environmental philosophy and bioethics. She has been a visiting scholar at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, a visiting fellow in the philosophy department of Durham University, and a visiting scholar at the Hastings Bioethics Center. In philosophy, her interests are across environmental ethics and philosophy of biology. She is a current member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics.Melanie continues to work in the creative arts. As the librettist for British composer Mark Simpson, she provided the text for his Manchester International Festival oratorio, The Immortal, which won the 2016 Sky Arts/South Bank Award for classical music and received its London premiere at the 2017 BBC Proms under Juanjo Mena. Their first opera together, Pleasure, was co-commissioned by Royal Opera House, Opera North and Aldeburgh Music. Starring Lesley Garret, it toured in 2016. Together, they were 2013 Jerwood Opera Fellows. Melanie lives on a farm in the middle of a forest with her husband and two young sons. Melanie Challenger works as a researcher on the history of humanity and the natural world as well as environmental philosophy. She is the author of On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature. She received a Darwin Now Award for her research among Canadian Inuit and the Arts Council International Fellowship with the British Antarctic Survey for her work on the history of whaling.

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