Field Notes from the Edge - Paul Evans

A unique, very provocative book in the naturalist vein.  Among other themes, Evans explores how the natural world survives and asserts itself in marginal, damaged and abandoned locations.  He is critical, or at least doubtful, of the conservationist approach to the natural world, and stands back from our human concepts of what natural environments should be.  In some of the essays, he looks at how the genie is already out of the bottle and we cannot turn natural systems back to what they were before - and notes that this preoccupation is a human one, a human concept, not one found in the natural world.  There is a quote in there somewhere to the effect that Nature is always good, even if it is not good for us.
Evans also has a good collection of startling facts, and new biological hypotheses and theories.

The Moral Lives of Animals - Dale Peterson

A fascinating book with personal anecdotes and scientific research centred around the presence of such "moral" values as empathy, selflessness, helpfulness, generosity, kindness, fairness etc.  He offers many instances of animals demonstrating this moral attributes that are often seen as originating in religion.  The book presents the case that these traits go way back from an evolutionary point of view as useful behaviours, especially in the context of social animals and animals living in groups.  

Worth rereading as it is impossible to truly appreciate the wealth of information and reflections around this topic in just one read.

The Lives of Animals - J. M. Coetzee

A radical exploration of animal rights and the eating of animals in the form of a story and two lectures or debates.  A look at several sides of the question of the nature of being of animals, of equivalency between animals and humans.  Extreme positions from animals are essentially objects to such a rejection of animals as food that would lead to the extinction of cows, pigs, etc. as we know them.
There are also three or four short essay responses to Coetzee's work.  One dryly academic, one in the form of another story and the last one which is the personal reflections of someone who has spent a great deal of time studying animals, in particular baboons(Barbara Smuts).  Her reflections are very interesting.  She explores the relationships that animals have formed with her in her long study of a particular troop of baboons.  She talks about personhood as a willingness to form a singular relationship with another being, animal or human, based on mutual respect and an effort to understand. She convincingly argues that baboons (and dogs) possess personhood as that kind of relationship exist between humans and nonhumans.  Interestingly, she argues that when animals are seen solely as something "other", it is not the animal that loses personhood but the human exhibiting this attitude. It is an interesting concept, one that challenges the "species centrism" of us humans  It defines human as a willingness to engage and form relationships with the world around us (which would clearly place current social trends especially in the West as non- person and inhuman or unhuman...)