Anne Benvenuti

I’m a lifelong animal lover, as reflected in my books, KINDRED SPIRITS: One Animal Family (2021), and SPIRIT UNLEASHED: Reimagining Human-Animal Relations (2014).

I am an organic and regenerative farmer in Italy, after decades working as a professor of psychology and philosophy, teaching critical thinking and writing interdisciplinary scholarly works. I am a licensed psychologist, specializing in mind-body medicine. I most love to be outside, doing farm work or long distance walking, or swimming. I think my joy in movement is a very common animal pleasure across species.

In KINDRED SPIRITS, I take the academic case I’d made in SPIRIT UNLEASHED and make it accessible through stories of people working to save other kinds of animals and through encounters with the animals themselves. I love the power of stories to transform us, and in this case to affirm what many of us feel that we already know in our bones, that we humans are part of one big animal family.

In the field research for this book, I was constantly surprised by the animals themselves, though I was not surprised by the depth of care for them that I encountered. I was surprised by how accessible they are, by how like us they are, and by how different they are, especially in having different sensory systems and different capacities (think of elephants communicating over distances of 20 miles, using their feet to send and receive messages). I was tenderly surprised by the love and consideration given to animals in unusual settings: for example, the way that England’s Monkey World takes us humans into the umwelt of primates, allowing us a glimpse of the world as it is experienced by other animals. Or the way that love between other animals and humans is the central point of the Earthfire Institute, an interspecies community. I saw over and over that love for other animals is common to us humans, stimulating immense passion and creativity. Many of the nonhuman animals understand they are being cared for. It is a stunningly beautiful thing when they reach back to us.