The Inner Life of Animals

Have you ever looked into an animal’s eyes and wondered what it was thinking? Or if it could feel in the same way you do? In The Inner Life of Animals: Love, Grief, and Compassion—Surprising Observations of a Hidden World, renowned forester and author Peter Wohlleben invites you to reconsider everything you think you know about animals’ emotional lives. Drawing from decades of observing wild and domestic creatures in the forests of Germany, he argues that emotions—love, fear, joy, grief, even shame—are not exclusive to humans. Instead, they are essential, shared traits woven through the entire tapestry of life.

Why Animal Emotions Matter

Our culture often paints animals as biological machines—instinct-driven beings without self-awareness or moral feeling. Wohlleben dismantles this outdated view with both scientific evidence and intimate anecdotes. His goal isn’t to anthropomorphize animals, but to encourage what he calls anthropodenial—the refusal to see connections where they exist. By blending research with personal experiences, he reveals a world of consciousness that mirrors ours more closely than we dare admit.

He shows that animals grieve their dead, plan for the future, make moral judgments, and even suffer psychologically. They display empathy, shifting moods, and complex social hierarchies—and they communicate these emotions through intricate sounds, gestures, and acts. In doing so, Wohlleben challenges the myth that only humans experience deep feeling or intelligence. If anything, our shared emotions are evolutionary tools for survival and connection.

From Science to Sympathy

Wohlleben’s insights rest on solid science as well as storytelling. He cites neurological studies proving that animals—from fish to birds to mammals—possess the neural architecture needed for emotional experience. For instance, fish possess pain receptors and stress responses strikingly similar to those of humans. Birds such as ravens and pigeons perform memory tests and show planning intelligence on par with great apes. Even tiny creatures like fruit flies and slime molds demonstrate forms of problem-solving that recall the roots of consciousness itself.

At the same time, Wohlleben’s anecdotes bring warmth and relatability. He recalls the grief of a mother deer who continues to search for her fawn after hunters take it away, or the satisfaction of wild boar who teach their young to migrate safely across rivers during hunting season. Through such scenes, he paints a picture of animals not as automatons, but as thinking, feeling individuals trying—like us—to make sense of their world.

Blurring the Human-Animal Divide

The book’s central question—“What makes us different?”—is answered with patient humility: not much. Humans, Wohlleben says, are not an exception in nature but a continuation of it. Our love, grief, and joy didn’t appear suddenly in evolution; they developed gradually alongside the same traits in other species. To deny animals these emotions is to misunderstand our own origins.

Throughout the book, you meet creatures that defy human expectations: horses expressing embarrassment, pigs understanding fairness, crows teasing dogs just for fun, and wolves forming friendships with ravens. Fish display compassion, and even bacteria exhibit cooperation that borders on altruism. By recognizing such behaviors as emotional, rather than purely instinctual, we begin to see animals as full participants in life’s drama.

(In spirit, this aligns with the work of biologists like Frans de Waal, whose books Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? and Mamas Last Hug also argue that emotions are a biological constant, not a human luxury.)

Why This Matters to You

Wohlleben doesn’t just aim to warm your heart—he wants to change your relationship with nature. Understanding animal emotion has ethical implications. If goats, pigs, and even martens can suffer psychologically or feel gratitude, how can we justify factory farming, trophy hunting, or environmental destruction? In the end, Wohlleben calls for a renewed respect for all living beings, grounded in empathy rather than dominance.

“Emotions steer instinctive programming and are vital for all species,” he writes. “Every species experiences them to a greater or lesser degree.”

As you journey through The Inner Life of Animals, you’ll move from affectionate anecdotes to scientific depth, from chickens and goats to ravens and wolves, and finally, to humans and our spiritual kinship with all life. The message is both simple and profound: by acknowledging animals’ inner worlds, we rediscover our own humanity. When we treat animals as sentient partners rather than resources, we enrich not only their lives—but ours as well.

Wohlleben begins his exploration of animal emotion with love—the simplest and yet most profound of feelings. Through the experiences of squirrels, goats, and birds, he shows how maternal devotion in animals rivals human tenderness. The red squirrel, for instance, risks her life to carry her babies one by one to safety, collapsing from exhaustion as she does. This isn’t a mechanical instinct, he argues, but what we would recognize as love: a self-sacrificial care for one’s offspring.

Instinct or Emotion?

Science often separates instinct from emotion—instinct as automatic, emotion as conscious. Wohlleben dismantles that divide. Even in humans, he reminds us, most decisions are made unconsciously before our rational minds catch up, as imaging studies from the Max Planck Institute demonstrate. In that sense, much of what we call “love” is instinctive too. So why should instinct in animals diminish their feelings?

Whether in mother goats licking newborn kids to bond through oxytocin or a crow feeding an orphaned kitten, the drive to care springs from both biology and feeling. In the Yukon, researchers have documented squirrel adoptions—mothers who take in relatives’ young after a tragedy. These acts, Wohlleben suggests, blur the line between evolution’s mechanisms and genuine compassion.

Human–Animal Love Stories

For Wohlleben, love isn’t limited to one’s species. When he raised a chick named Robin Hood, the little bird imprinted on him completely, following him around endlessly. Decades later, he still wonders whether this was maternal substitution or mutual affection. He also recounts stories of animals that choose human companionship freely—like Fungie, a wild dolphin in Ireland who befriends swimmers for decades without taking food rewards.

At its best, cross-species bonding reflects curiosity and trust. When reindeer in Lapland approached Wohlleben’s campsite, encircling his tent out of apparent interest, it revealed how easily connection arises when fear is absent. Love, he implies, is the natural consequence of peace.

The Shadow Side of Affection

But attachment has costs when humans dominate. Wohlleben highlights how selective breeding—like creating French bulldogs who crave affection yet can hardly breathe—turns love into a kind of exploitation. In making animals fit our desires, we deform their nature for our comfort. His point is uncomfortable but clear: to truly love animals, we must respect their freedom, not remake them to please us.

“Nature didn’t intend for goats and horses to spend their whole lives as prisoners behind a fence,” he notes. “To love them means letting them be what they are.”

Love, for Wohlleben, is both simple and vast—it exists wherever life commits itself to the good of another. The more we acknowledge it beyond our species, the more compassionate our world becomes.

Can a fish feel pain, or a bird experience fear in the same way we do? Wohlleben walks you through decades of neuroscience to argue that animals share not only emotional capacity but neurological hardware with humans. From the amygdala that governs fear to the neurochemical oxytocin that underlies bonding, the building blocks of mind are ancient and shared.

The Neurology of Emotion

Experiments with goldfish show that disabling certain brain regions erases learned fear responses—just as destroying the amygdala in humans eliminates fear altogether. This means even fish feel and remember fear. Similarly, lobsters, long boiled alive, display pain reactions not as mere reflex but conscious distress. (Biologist Robert Elwood famously quipped, “Denying crabs feel pain because they lack our brain structures is like denying they can see because they lack our eyes.”)

Birds further dismantle our biases. Without a neocortex, ravens still perform complex planning via an equivalent structure called the dorsal ventricular ridge. They can hide food strategically and recall faces, showing intention, memory, and cunning. Intelligence, Wohlleben reminds us, is not confined to one neurological blueprint.

From Slime Molds to Self-Awareness

Even creatures with no brains at all can surprise us. Slime molds—a single giant cell organism—can navigate mazes and map subway systems through chemical memory. Such feats suggest that cognition isn’t “all or nothing” but exists on a continuum. If mind begins this simply, emotion likely follows early in evolution too.

When Wohlleben invites us to imagine the subjective life of a bee, crow, or goat, he’s asking for humility. The real limitation may not be animals’ consciousness, he notes, but our imagination to comprehend how different kinds of minds feel the world.

Do animals grieve? Wohlleben answers unequivocally: yes. He describes female red deer returning again and again to the spot where a fawn was killed, calling out for days despite the danger of hunters. This mourning, he argues, serves the same purpose as ours—to slowly accept loss and let bonds dissolve without breaking completely.

Gratitude and Trust

Animals also show gratitude and friendship beyond survival. A humpback whale, freed from a fisherman’s net, spends an hour leaping joyfully near its rescuers as if to say thank you. Crows in Seattle bring shiny trinkets to a little girl who feeds them, even returning a lost camera lens. Such gifts reveal awareness of reciprocity—an emotional sophistication once reserved for primates.

Shared Mourning and Empathy

Empathy, too, crosses species. Laboratory mice show heightened pain when witnessing other mice suffer. Dutch researchers found pigs mirror the emotions of others exposed to classical music linked to fear or to joy. And a bear in the Budapest Zoo, captured on video rescuing a drowning crow instead of eating it, demonstrates compassion without payoff.

“Empathy isn’t human charity,” Wohlleben writes. “It’s the nervous system’s way of acknowledging another life as your own.”

By shifting attention from human moral superiority to biological continuity, the book redefines what it means to care. We are not unique in our feelings; we are participants in a shared emotional ecosystem.

Morality doesn’t belong solely to philosophers—it shows up in the chicken yard. Wohlleben’s rooster Fridolin deceives his hens with false calls of “found food” to lure them into mating. Meanwhile, magpies cheat on their partners, and great tits issue fake alarm calls to scare rivals away from a meal. Yet these same species also exhibit fairness and altruism, proving that deceit and virtue coexist in the animal world just as they do in ours.

Cheaters and Cooperators

In experiments, dogs refuse to give a paw when they see a companion rewarded while they get nothing. Ravens boycott partners who hoard food, and wild horses sulk when treated unfairly at feeding time. These reactions mirror our own concept of justice—proof that fairness supports cooperation even among non-human species.

From Shame to Evil

Animals also display emotions that look like shame and remorse. Wohlleben’s mare Bridgi turns her head and yawns when scolded in front of her companion, visibly embarrassed. Yet other animals—like a violent white rabbit who mutilates its peers—can act with what he calls genuine malice. This, he says, may be the animal equivalent of evil: not instinct but calculated harm.

By framing these behaviors within moral terms, Wohleben doesn’t humanize animals; he naturalizes morality. Fairness, deceit, and empathy are not inventions of civilization—they’re ancient behavioral codes that bind all social life together.

Not all emotions are heavy. Animals also experience joy, play, and fear much like we do. Underneath these expressions lie survival instincts and, occasionally, just plain happiness.

The Bright Side: Play and Pleasure

Wohlleben tells of crows that use bottle caps as snow sleds, flying up to a rooftop again and again simply for the thrill of sliding down. Dogs invent games of chase and deliberately slow down to keep their human playmates interested. Even goats distinguish between feeding visits and “fun visits,” recognizing when an interruption might bring joy. Pleasure, he argues, isn’t always utilitarian—it can be an end in itself, a luxury of safety and surplus energy (as biologists like Jaak Panksepp have argued).

The Dark Side: Fear and Trauma

Fear, too, plays a crucial role in animal lives. In Switzerland, when hunting was banned around Geneva, deer and boars grew calmer and began appearing in daylight. But just across the border in France, where hunting continues, terrified boars swim across rivers to escape gunfire—teaching their young that safety lies beyond the water. Trauma, Wohlleben notes, can even embed itself in DNA: chemical markers pass fear memories to future generations, as shown in studies by the Max Planck Institute.

Between joy and terror lies a full emotional range—one that mirrors our own struggles to balance adventure and safety. Animals, too, want to thrive, not just survive.

Wohlleben celebrates the everyday genius of animals—from slime molds that map mazes to bees that teach dance-based geometry. Intelligence, he suggests, is relational: it expresses how well a creature reads its world and community. Bees communicate through angle dances to share flight-path coordinates; ravens give each other personal names and greet old friends with specific tones. Pigs learn their own names, recognize mirrors, and understand spatial reflection. Even fish and insects process sensory input to focus attention—an evolutionary seed of consciousness itself.

The Language Barrier

While we struggle to decode these languages, Wohlleben gently suggests that perhaps it’s we who should learn theirs. Koko the gorilla mastered over 1,000 signs of American Sign Language, but real progress will come when humans use technology to mimic animal communication—two-frequency horse whinnies, ultrasonic dolphin patterns, or complex crow calls. Until then, he says, we mistake silence for simplicity. True intelligence often whispers rather than shouts.

“If we really are the most intelligent species,” he muses, “why haven’t we learned their languages instead of forcing them to learn ours?”

Every chirp, wag, and gaze becomes meaningful once we accept that communication transcends words. The forest, he reminds us, is full of conversation—it’s just speaking in frequencies we’ve forgotten how to hear.

The book concludes with a philosophical question: if animals think, feel, plan, and mourn—do they also have souls? Wohlleben carefully sidesteps religion to focus on essence. If the soul is “the principle of life, feeling, and thought,” then every sentient creature qualifies. Evolution never drew a dividing line where the human soul began. Therefore, animals share in it.

He extends this logic to moral responsibility. Hunting for sport, factory farming, and environmental exploitation rest on the fiction that animals are less alive inside. Acknowledging their inner lives means rethinking how we eat, work, and coexist. To him, empathy is not sentimentality—it’s justice.

Seeing Ourselves in Them

In the closing pages, he imagines a more harmonious world: humans living alongside foxes in cities, horses and loggers working as trusted teammates, bees and trees thriving because we finally listen. The measure of civilization, he suggests, is not how we dominate but how we care. “Squirrels, deer, or wild boar with souls,” Wohlleben writes, “that thought warms my heart when I watch them in the wild.”

Through this reckoning, he leaves you with a simple challenge: to look around and see the soulful life in every creature—and act accordingly. Compassion, in the end, is the most intelligent response evolution ever produced.