First published in 1978 by University of Georgia Press, this work foreshadows the author's 1996 work, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human . Its central thesis is that animals profoundly shape human intelligence, and by increasingly isolating ourselves from them, we jeopardize the processes of cognitive and psychological development that are essential to human flourishing. Shepard is widely regarded as an elder of the environmental movement, whose radical and visionary ideas shaped much of our current thinking about human nature. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.