Renowned biologist and animal behavior expert Janine Benyus has compiled the ultimate reference guide for zoo lovers with her new book, The Secret Language of Animals. This lovingly researched guide is divided geographically into five sections, from Africa to the poles, and focuses on each area's most watchable animals.

We asked Benyus a few questions about misunderstood animal behaviors and the role of zoos today.

What motivated you to write this book?
All of my books are about people getting outside and interacting with the natural world. I remember reading a statistic that a greater number of people go to zoos than to all sporting events combined. Zoos are how most people connect to the natural world. People only begin to care about something when they get to know it, so conservation begins with affection. If you want to reach a large number of people, you have to go to the zoo going population. An afternoon spent watching an elephant or an otter is a teachable moment. People are curious about what they are witnessing, but they don't always have a zookeeper right there. My question was, could I write a Berlitz guide to zoos and offer the translation skills of a biologist or zookeeper? Something that would give zoogoers the information they needed to really absorb the life of the animal in front of them?

People only begin to care about something when they get to know it, so conservation begins with affection.

When did you become interested in animal behavior?
I grew up in New Jersey, so I just had a backyard, but a backyard was enough of a wilderness for me. Kids just need a little green nearby. I was a budding scientist and spent a lot of time absorbing details, like where woodpeckers made their nests, or where the rabbits would hide out. I got to know the animal families. Here’s where a caterpillar has formed a cocoon and if I come back tomorrow I might be able to see it transform into a butterfly. I’d started following the squirrels in the trees and then the hawks following the squirrels. I would just spend hours of my childhood watching their Wind in the Willows kind of drama.

I actually believe that people are fascinated by science, but they want to read about it in a way that’s enjoyable and immediately relevant.

I also read some formative books as a child, and my favorites were The Wind in the Willows, Shaggy Coat and Hunting with the Microscope. Shaggy Coat was about a family of beavers and it really taught me the joy of observation. My view went from large to small when my Dad went to Edmund Scientific in New Jersey and bought me a microscope. These two books basically translated for me in layman’s terms what these organisms were doing, and it was written in a way that a kid, even 10 or 11-year-olds could grasp and understand it. I thought to myself that I would like to do this for other people—explain how wondrous life is, and let people in on the latest scientific findings. I actually believe that people are fascinated by science, but they want to read about it in a way that’s enjoyable and immediately relevant. They want to know about an ecosystem when they are picnicking in it, and that’s really how field guides should be organized, by habitat. Instead of carrying around a dozen guides—one to birds, one to butterflies and one to mushrooms—you should be able to carry one book and when you went into a marsh, you turn to the chapter on marsh and learn about the plants and animals that you are most likely to see there. So that’s what I did with my Wildlife Watcher’s Guilds to Habitats of the Eastern and Western US. This book has a similar premise about teaching in context. While you are watching the animal—at the zoo, in its habitat-based exhibit—is the best time to see why it has the adaptations it does in order to fit into its place. At the zoo, you can really start to get an insight into the survival values of that physical trait or behavior. Being generous with scientific knowledge to me means translating and giving it to people at the moment they need it and making it really relevant to them.

Have you ever observed an animal behavior that made you laugh out loud?
I was in Yellowstone one winter—a great time to see wolves and wolf packs. They are visible from the road, and you can follow them all day long as they travel the rolling floodplains of the Lamar Valley. On this day, there was a wolf pack feasting on an elk, having a good time and sort of relaxing and just being. At one point, this small, teenage male wolf left the pack unnoticed and went across the road and down to the river. The wolf was all by itself and it decided to play with a buffalo—a huge old bison just trying to sleep. The wolf was trying its best to get the buffalo to play. This is a great example of the kind of highly visible animal behavior that is described in the book. Wolves do what is called a “play bow,” with their front legs outstretched, their head down and their butt up in the air, tail waving. There the pup was, bowing to the bison with this happy smile on his face.  

I was watching him through the spotting scope and the buffalo was ignoring the pup, pretending to sleep. The wolf kept getting closer and closer and began yapping and play bowing. All of a sudden this buffalo had had enough, and it just stood up—and they’re amazingly fast, buffalo, even though they have so much bulk—and he just towered over this little wolf. The wolf leapt into high gear, running like one of those funny cat videos on YouTube, around and around in circles before racing away to safety. Several hundred feet downriver, he finally sat down to catch his breath. Slowly, I watched his demeanor change again as he realized, oh my god, I’m not with my pack. He looked incredibly forlorn, and there, taking up the whole of my viewfinder, he lifted his head and started to howl for his pack. I didn’t hear any response at first, maybe because his parents wanted to make him suffer a little bit. Finally, they called back to him from across the valley and he figured out where they were and went scuttling up back to them. It was quite the reunion.

I think every now and then, it’s good to turn the tables, to have humans stay in the cage and let the animals have the space. To me, that’s the proper relation.

How have zoos evolved over the years? Are there any additional changes you would hope to see implemented?
In modern zoos, zookeepers try to create natural conditions in the exhibits through “habitat enrichment.” Zookeepers will hide food in branches, for instance, or give the animals nest materials that they can build with. But there’s a limit because of the limited space. I really love the safari parks in which people stay in their cars while the animals get to roam. I love this idea more than little enclosures for a couple of reasons. A safari park allows animals to get to know their habitat and perform more natural behaviors—you can see them do things like exploring, mating and marking their territory. When they’re able to get their own food every now and then, to catch a prey animal for instance, that’s when we as visitors really start to see their true grace and prowess. I think every now and then, it’s good to turn the tables, to have humans stay in the cage and let the animals have the space. To me, that’s the proper relation.

Are there some zoos that you’re specifically thinking of?
Well, there’s the San Diego Wildlife Park, which is absolutely tremendous. The zoo has not only the largest animal collection, but also the largest plant collection. What many don’t realize is that what you see at the most zoos—the front of the house—is just the tip of the iceberg. What zoos are doing behind the scenes is serving as an ark, preserving the genetic material of these creatures and trying to keep the species viable. Zoos are trying to pull species through these evolutionary knotholes that occur when species become very rare in the wild. In reality, the endangered species benefit from having their genetic material mapped, and for them, the “frozen sperm zoo” becomes as important as the living zoo. Zoos track the genetics of their collection and are vigilant about mixing that genetic material and keeping those organisms fresh genetically. The ultimate goal, if possible, is to release individuals into healthy habitats and naturalize them again. These sperm zoos are the last resort, pulling certain species from the brink of extinction. They’re like a modern day Noah’s Ark.

I am hoping for the day when humans are sharing more of our spaces with these organisms, so we’re able to reduce the habitat fragmentation, put the habitats back together, and bring the animals back to these habitats because animals are an essential part of preserving any habitat. For instance, in the rainforest, so many of the species of plants are dependent on animals eating the fruits and then dropping and planting the seeds. Sometimes the animals and the plants are in such a close mutual relationship that without the organism you’re not going to have the plant anymore. There’s a small rat called an Agouti that lives in Brazil and other parts of the Amazon. Agoutis are the only species able to open the hard outer casing of the Brazil nut, the skull-like packaging that holds multiple nuts. Agoutis have a specialized tooth and claw setup that breaks open the case. They eat some nuts and leave some nuts, and without the nuts they “plant” we wouldn’t have Brazil nut trees anymore. No agouti, no Brazil nuts; it’s that important to put organisms back in their habitats.

Many abnormal behaviors surface when animals are kept in captivity. What is a commonly misunderstood, captivity-induced behavior? Is there a way it could be corrected?
When you see a polar bear swimming at the zoo, you may notice something strange and repetitive. You may see them swim back and forth and back and forth, and this is called a stylized, pacing behavior, which is not really a natural behavior; it’s more neurotic than natural. Instead of the polar bear doing what it would normally do—swim long, long distances—it has to curtail its swimming. Animal behaviorists in zoos are really trying to prevent animals from engaging in those types of behaviors and it takes a lot of habitat enrichment to do that, so that’s one example of a sad consequence.

What's next?
I’m working on a new book about ubiquitous phenomenon in the natural world, patterns that researchers are just starting to piece together. These patterns repeat everywhere, in all five kingdoms and all around the world. When you ask, “what do all organisms have in common?” you get interesting answers—clues about earth-friendly chemistries, energy saving structures [and] cooperative networks—things that have lasted and that work well. Together these “best practices” are like a manual for how to live on this planet over the long haul.

Author photo credit: Biomimicry 3.8

Essayist and journalist Bronwen Dickey investigates how one of America’s most popular dog breeds became one of its most maligned in her illuminating and thoroughly researched new book, Pit Bull: The Battle over An American Icon.

What was your goal in writing this book? 
I hope the book will be a case study in critical thinking, especially when it comes to stereotypes. During the seven years I spent doing research on pit bulls, I met thousands of people who had strong beliefs about the dogs, but when I asked them what their views were based on, many didn't really know. They were just repeating things they heard from friends or had read on the Internet. After tracing the most common claims about pit bulls back to their original sources, I found that the vast majority of these "facts" were based on nothing but air. 

How would you describe the qualities that made pit bulls “American icons” and popular family pets in earlier eras?
By far, the qualities most associated with pit bulls in the 19th and early 20th centuries were courage, tenacity and loyalty. Because they originated as fighting dogs, they were seen as the type of dogs who can fall down nine times and get up 10. In reality, though, some were like that and many were not, but the symbolism overtook the flesh-and-bone animals. Pit bulls also fit nicely into the bootstrapping vision of the American dream that writers like Horatio Alger made famous because they traditionally belonged to working-class people. Contrary to popular belief, however, the dogs were not universally adored, even back then. There were always a number of folks who looked down their noses at pit bulls and considered them "savage." That had more to do with disliking their owners than anything else. 

I always believed that pit bulls had stronger jaws than other dogs because of the frequently cited "pounds of pressure" statistic. Not only is the statistic bogus, each new person to cite it adds a few hundred psi just for fun! How did this idea take root?
That's one of the most common truth-claims circulated about pit bulls, and it is absolutely not true. According to the available science, the biggest determinant of a dog's bite strength is body size, not breed. There's folklore about the strength of "bulldog jaws" that goes back over a hundred years, but the PSI figures didn't become popular until 1969, when a couple of researchers claimed that German shepherd military working dogs could be trained to exert a jaw strength of between  400 and 450 pounds-per-square-inch (PSI). The researchers never cited a source for this claim (and they probably did not even have equipment to measure it), but it became a common motif in stories about guard dogs, which lots of people were buying in the 1960s and 1970s in response to rising crime rates. The numbers simply spiraled out of control from there, like a game of telephone.

You have a dog that's at least fractionally a pit bull. How is she? Did you look at her differently while researching this book?
She's doing great; thank you! 

I learned so much about the power of perception while researching and writing this book. One of the women I interviewed said that the idea of "pit bull" now looms so large that it has become "unmoored" from the actual animals, and I think that's absolutely right. When we first brought Nola home, I interpreted everything she did as a possible "pit bull trait." She and I were playing a game of keep-away in the yard once, for example, and she accidentally nipped my arm while jumping up for the ball. Even though I was not hurt in the slightest (she only left a tiny bruise you had to squint to see), the fact that her teeth made contact with my skin caused me to panic because, oh my God, she was a "pit bull"! What if she was turning on me?! 

It went the other way, too. When I steeped myself in gung-ho pit bull history, I imagined that she was much more courageous than she actually is. For awhile, I worshipped at the altar of "breed traits." The more I learned about the extraordinarily complex science of behavior, however, the more I realized how unfair all that baggage was to her. It was also scientifically inaccurate. I wasn't appreciating her as an individual who has preferences and quirks just like I do. Nola is not an abstraction or a poorly-defined category; she's just Nola. 

I perhaps foolishly didn't expect a story about pit bulls to be so tied to class and race. Had you made the connection before you started writing or did it surprise you?
I began to see some disturbing patterns in the way people talked about pit bulls fairly early on, specifically after I began volunteering with a non-profit that provides free veterinary resources to people living in poverty so that their pets can stay in the homes they already have. Most of the families I met were incredibly warm and welcoming to me, and most owned dogs they described as pit bulls, whom they loved very much. Yet people who had never been to these communities insisted that pit bulls were only owned by "thugs" who kept the dogs to be "macho," and that urban dogfighting was "everywhere." Once again, that simply was not true in my home state of North Carolina, nor was it true in New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Oakland, or any of the other places I visited, but comments about "those people" and their "vicious animals" abound.

The landscape has changed so much over the years, but the story we tell ourselves about these dogs and their people hasn't, and that's a big problem. I wish the tendency to use dogs as proxies for human groups was a new trend, but that, too, goes back a very long time.

What does our treatment of pit bulls say more broadly about our relationship with dogs?
More than anything, I think it reveals how invested we are in the idea of breed, which is pretty historically recent. For many thousands of years, dogs were grouped according to their working function, not their appearance. In the mid-19th century, the Victorians wedded a dog's breed to its moral character, and by extension, the moral character of the person who owned it. Yet all dogs share 99.8 percent of their DNA, and "pit bulls" are not even one breed! That label is a messy, subjective category inside which at least four breeds are contained. While certain traits may be seen in greater or lesser degrees in specific working lines of some dog breeds, most pit bulls, like most American dogs, simply live as pets, and each one is different. That's what is so wonderful, surprising, and instructive about dogs in general.  

Many aspects of this story were hard to read. How did you keep at a job that must have been overwhelming at times?
It was incredibly difficult emotionally, psychologically, and at times, even physically. I lost a lot of sleep. The history of dogfighting was profoundly upsetting. Also, pit bull enthusiasts are extremely passionate, and several of my sources strongly disagreed with each other. They each wanted me to see things his or her way. But this story is so big and so complex that I wanted to introduce readers to many different perspectives. I have great respect for everyone I met, but I didn't accept anyone's views wholesale. Sometimes they didn't like that, but I hope when they see the finished product they will understand why I approached it the way I did. 

Terrible reporting about pit bulls has been nearly impossible to debunk. Do you see any signs that the tide is turning, in the media or in public opinion?
Without a doubt. I traveled through 15 states doing interviews for the book, and one of the biggest surprises was not how many people harbored negative feelings about pit bulls, but how few. Overwhelmingly, the people I encountered (even perfect strangers I chatted up at restaurants and whatnot) were looking for any reason at all not to be afraid. They were sick of the sensational fearmongering. Even the ones who were wary of pit bulls because of everything they had read in the media were open to changing their minds. The idea that "people hate pit bulls" is simply not true. We'll never know definitively, but if I had to guess, I'd say the dogs are more popular now than they ever have been. 

Even fans can’t agree about what’s best for pit bulls—if one simply wants to erase the stigma attached to the breed, another worries that pit mixes are watering down the breed’s integrity. Where do you see the hope for their future?
If history teaches us anything, it teaches us that what goes up very quickly comes down. Pit bulls were built up to an impossible height only to crash to an unforeseen low in the space of a hundred years. It's such a fascinating story of myth-making and re-invention. What's more American than that? But, as I like to remind people, the dogs themselves were never consulted about the story we wrote them into! They simply got swept up in our human drama. 

Today, anything you can say about a large, diverse group of people—say, "Americans"—you can say about pit bulls. Some are outstanding and some are unsound, but most fall in the vast, utterly normal space in between.

I'd love to see us loosen our grip on the symbolism of breed. We'll never let it go, of course, but I hope we can come to appreciate all dogs for the unique individuals they are. They would really benefit from that. So would we.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Pit Bull.

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Wandering through Aspen, Colorado, at 3:30 a.m., Mary Roach turned into a dark alley and encountered a burly intruder: a full-grown black bear happily gorging himself on restaurant waste. Roach knew full well that the bear could be dangerous. She also knew that the bear shouldn’t grow accustomed to being close to humans because it could lead to bolder, more aggressive behavior in the future. Nonetheless, she pleaded with her companion from the National Wildlife Research Center, “Can we go just a little bit closer? Just a foot closer?”

As she chats by phone from her home in the Bay Area, Roach vividly recalls that impulse to forget everything she knew about responsible wildlife encounters. “None of that was in my head,” she says. “It was just, ‘I want to get closer.’ . . . People almost seem to have an inborn affinity for animals—particularly big, furry, kind of cute ones. People are drawn to them. They want to feed them. And there begins the problem.”

That Aspen garbage gangster is just one of a variety of furry fugitives Roach writes about in Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, her fascinating and often hilarious investigation into what happens when creatures commit crimes ranging from murder and manslaughter to robbery, jaywalking, home invasion and trespassing. Ever since her 2003 debut, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Roach has been taking readers on a series of surprising explorations—from space travel to the afterlife. Like Susan Orlean, Roach has a knack for taking a deep, deep dive into unexpected and sometimes even mundane subjects (the alimentary canal, for instance, in Gulp) and unearthing a narrative feast of freaky fun facts and captivating characters.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Fuzz.

Roach started honing her keen observation skills early, as an elementary school student in Norwich, Vermont, where she and a friend sometimes ventured out at night to peek into people’s windows. (Decades later, her mother was absolutely horrified when Roach fessed up to these outings.) “We weren’t Peeping Toms, obviously,” she says. “We weren’t looking for naked women or men. We just liked to look in.”

And that, Roach says, is the curiosity factor that sparks her writing. “My motivating sentiment is ‘What’s going on in there? This is a world I don’t know. Maybe it’s interesting.’”

She also mentions another childhood adventure that may have signaled an early predilection for wildlife research. She and her friend called it “The Potted Meat Project,” in which the two pals would hang or bury potted meat sandwiches in the woods in Etna, New Hampshire, “playing naturalists. Then we’d go and take notes and look for tracks,” Roach says. When they returned, the food was gone and there were some tracks, but “we didn’t follow up. We were in fifth or sixth grade, and we had the attention span of a gnat.”

“My motivating sentiment is ‘What’s going on in there? This is a world I don’t know. Maybe it’s interesting.’”

Writing Fuzz involved much more follow-through as Roach trekked with man-eating leopards in the Indian Himalayas, investigated gull vandals at the Vatican the night before Easter Mass and tracked mountain lions in California. Thankfully, she finished these travels before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. “It would have been a disaster,” she says, imagining what might have been. “Yes, you can talk to scientists on Zoom, but that doesn’t work for me. I need something I can tag along for and see as it unfolds. That’s so much more interesting for my readers, and for me, honestly. I really love that part of what I do: the research, and the being there.”

Because of this commitment, Roach encountered intense, unforgettable new worlds as she researched Fuzz. In northern India, she came within 100 yards of a leopard wearing a radio collar—but, much to her disappointment, she never saw the animal, who was on the other side of a river. “I would’ve loved to be in the classic National Geographic scenario, surrounded by these creatures, but sometimes it doesn’t work out that way,” she says. In another part of India, she armed herself with bananas because she wanted to know “what it was like to be mugged by monkeys,” which is a widespread problem in many areas. “I was nervous,” she admits. “They’re not large animals, but they can get aggressive. I was standing with a bag of like six bananas, so I was asking for it.” The monkeys were speedy snatchers, as it turned out, so they left Roach unscathed.

Reading one of Roach’s books is always a breezy, informative treat, but a lot of behind-the-scenes effort goes into their creation, given Roach’s trademark immersive approach. The creation of this book, especially, involved hurdles from the start. In fact, Roach initially contemplated covering a completely different topic: natural disasters and the science of rescue, first aid, prevention and preparation. Eventually, however, she realized that she wouldn’t be allowed to tag along with first responders during those crucial early moments of a disaster. 

“Yes, you can talk to scientists on Zoom, but that doesn’t work for me. I need something I can tag along for and see as it unfolds.”

After that, Roach turned her attention to tiger penises. (Yep, you read that right.) She’s fascinated by forensics, whether humans or animals are involved, and an expert taught her how to tell counterfeit tiger penises from real ones, which are valued in some cultures for their supposed powers of virility. “I can fill you in if you want to know,” she says with a laugh. “I’ve got all of these bizarre photographs of dried mammal genitalia on my phone.” However, once again, she couldn’t further develop this subject because she couldn’t legally visit crime scenes, which often involved poachers.

Roach then had a eureka moment: “What if we turned it around, and the animals were the perpetrators rather than the victims?” Before long she was in Reno, Nevada, attending a five-day training session for wildlife officers tasked with investigating animal attacks. (She refers to these professionals in chapter one of Fuzz as “maul cops.”) Roach was gloriously in her element, hearing tales of bears discovered in the back seat of a car eating popcorn and a cougar wrongfully accused of murder. (The murderer was actually a human, armed with an ice pick, who years later bragged about the crime.) During one training session, Roach and the other participants headed out to examine simulated crime scenes in the woods so they could guess what had happened. As with any crime scene, DNA is often key, but with animal attacks, clues are often contaminated by scavenger animals who arrive after a death. Roach relished such forensic details, jotting down remarks like, “Bears are more bite bite bite bite. . . . It’s a big mess.”

“You spend three or four days with those people, and you get the sense that, my God, animals are attacking everyone all the time,” Roach says. “But . . . it’s actually super rare. Animal attacks just tend to get so much media attention when they happen. It eclipses anything else happening in the news, even human murders.”

“Whenever these animals are coming in contact with humans more frequently, it doesn’t go well for the animals.”

In addition to killer animals, Roach’s book includes one chapter on poisonous beans, as well as one on “danger trees”—falling trees or limbs that sometimes kill bystanders. When one such tree was being blown up for safety reasons in British Columbia, Canada, Roach got to be a “guest detonator.” “That was awesome,” she says. “I enjoy large explosions.”

With all of this deadly data, has writing Fuzz changed how Roach feels about outdoor adventures?

Roach explains that when she hikes in California, she sometimes sees signs warning of mountain lions and coyotes in the area. “My first reaction is that I’d love to encounter one,” she says. “I don’t have a fear of any of them. But at the same time, it saddens me, because whenever these animals are coming in contact with humans more frequently, it doesn’t go well for the animals.”