Cav's Place

This was another nice read, mixing the sort of “curiosities” that make up popular science with more advanced elements that nevertheless remain accessible and easy to read. And the effort made to show how other species perceive the world as differences, presenting each case as it is instead of focusing on comparisons to humans and which may be better or worse, is largely successful. But, past the chapters dedicated to specific senses, the twelfth one, where they’re all brought together, struck me as particularly interesting, and answered crucial questions that I hadn’t even realized I should have had. However, the thirteenth and last chapter is the most impactful, leaving behind the “dissection” of animal senses and presenting the harm we’re causing from this point of view as well, though light and sound pollution, but also in more indirect ways, which is an issue that tends to receive far less attention than other environmental concerns… Not that those receive anywhere near enough either, but that’s another matter.
The only issues, other than perhaps at times appearing a little more lighthearted than it should have been for my taste, have to do with the chapters about nociception and magnetoreception. Admittedly, in both cases the problem is mainly how little we really know about those topics, in case of other species in the former case and in general in the latter one. And while the rather meandering magnetoreception chapter does at least make it clear that the topic is being actively researched, the one about nociception and pain also shows that the matter isn’t even really being looked into, so the fact that it’s rather devoid of content isn’t the fault of the author, but it still stands out in a negative way.

Rating: 4/5