A review by andrewspink
On the Trail of Animal by Baptiste Morizot

informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.0

A very thought-provoking book full of interesting ideas. I was interested by the idea of 'enforesting', for instance, "a twofold movement... we go out into the forest and it moves into us". Also this, "wild animals are not our friends... neither are they beasts to be conquered". And "territoriality was invented by evolution as a way of pacifying the relations between living things". All fascinating ideas which bear some thinking about, perhaps even meditation on.
Inevitably there are some thoughts which I was less impressed with. I thought that the idea that "tracking is an intellectual problem that probably helped to create the human being" did not bear much scrutiny.  Firstly, the species that humans evolved from also tracked. Secondly, there is increasing evidence that hunter-gatherer societies were much more gathering than hunting (the ideas about the importance of hunting coming from more from the hobbies of 19th century gentleman scientists). So the skills of categorising, observing and reading a landscape were important, but less so some of the specific hunting skills outlined by Morizot.
Near to the end, he writes, "Attention to the animal landscape and to plant sociology... reveal another way of inhabiting nature, which becomes an unexplored diplomatic community". That was a statement that I could relate to. In the days when I worked as an ecologist, I learnt to read the landscape and understand its dynamics. I remember watching the film An American Werewolf in London and being distracted from the plot when they were on a Calluna heathland, where the vegetation dynamics were particularly apparent (I was working on Calluna at the time). 
Either way, close observation of natural (or indeed artificial) ecosystems can indeed lead to a deepened understanding of and empathy with what is going on around you and this book makes a great contribution towards promoting that.