a capsule review about How Animals Grieve by barbara j. king

while i'm not a scientist nor a book reviewer i requested a book and so shall make some comments thereon.
while the title is how animals grieve the author is a scientist, as well as a human animal and a teller of stories. the scientist still wants proof while the teller of true stories knows truth is anecdotal, and provides many colorful illustrations about how animals do love, and grieve. then the scientist gets skeptical, then the writer frees her, and so on. particular in my mind was how she related a story about bear bile farms in china, and a particular episode of infanticide and suicide by a mother bear. the baby bear was being prepared for a life of immobilized sacrifice to a bile pump. the mother squeezed the life from her child and threw herself against the cement wall, dying. the scientist writes it first, then the writer says that that was the way she was taught to write in grad school, and then writes it again, with emotion. the salient thing here in my mind is that the first paragraph said what happened and a sentient reader gets it, and interestingly i got it stronger without her embellishment, and in the same breath she has managed to question what she had related by simply telling the story. the scientist wants more facts, there are holes in the story, it is anecdotal. i kept seeing her vacillation between her inner scientist and her adaptive, developing writer and sentient being. not that science is not sentient or precludes sentience, but it remains ever skeptical, especially since the ghost of descartes is still at large.
skepticism is a tool and used with compassion and insight, is helpful. it should not be used as protection nor escape. she at points asks if the animals are acting simply by instinct, or if they really feel grief and love. but isn't instinct imbued with grief and love. the scientist wants categorization, but experience is together, it's both and.
after relating the death of a tortoise they called Honey Girl, and the story of her funeral on the beach, wherein her mate comes out of the water and stays for an hour at the grave, looking at the picture of his love, she says, "I don't think that the Honey Girl anecdote proves the existence of tortoise grief, but it should take us into a realization: We don't have a hope of finding tortoise grief if we don't look for it."
i feel overall the writer emerges, i feel the writer emerging, growing more sentient through the stories and through direct experience, and i applaud her.

post script.
a respondent to the above was unclear about the story of the bears, whether it was a story, or an incident. i write in haste and i went back to see. it is both factual and a story, since it is passed along, and translated, and since the scientist can neither verify details nor ascribe meaning to the actions of the mother bear. as with all things we must both decide what is true in the anecdotal and ascribe our own emotion and meaning. we may do so as scientists or as lay readers and we may bring whatever empathic or apprehensive tools to our reading, but yes the bear bile farms are real, and the story or incident occurred. yet so much is implicit, animal love, animal grief, animal awareness of others and their suffering, animal awareness of death, and animal understanding of the sacrifice of life.