What Sheep Think About the Weather: How to Listen to What Animals Are Trying to Say

by Amelia Thomas

As journalist Amelia Thomas settled into life on a Nova Scotia farm, she developed a "desperate urge to vault the species divide" and converse with her menagerie and the surrounding wildlife. Asking herself, "How can I better understand the animals in my life?," she set off on a yearlong quest to build up her knowledge and enhance her relationships. Rooted in her home space but ranging through research, travel, and interviews, she learned all she could from scientists, trainers, and animal communicators. With curiosity as her guide, she also undertook simple behavioral experiments. What Sheep Think About the Weather is the result: a comprehensive yet conversational book that effortlessly illuminates the possibilities of human-animal communication.

Thomas was always an animal lover, rescuing bedraggled pigeons and keeping everything from guinea pigs to a wallaby as pets. As a travel writer, she encountered exotic animals, too. But the other-than-human encounters ramped up on her new farm. One spur to her project was learning about Simona Kossak (1943-2007), a Polish scientist and animal trainer known for her listening skills. Kossak became a professor of forest sciences as well as national director of the Department of Forests, while living deep in the woods surrounded by myriad animals, like a lynx and a raven. Kossak seemed to combine the best of the hard and soft sciences, a love of pets and a rigorous scientific background.

"Science scares me," Thomas confesses, but in her keenness to learn she started reading all the scientific papers and reports she could get her hands on. As she researched, she realized that science arises from natural inquisitiveness and, rather than demanding flawless results, rewards sincere attempts. With this in mind, she lined up an impressive roster of researchers who shared their work on animals' personalities, vocalizations, and other forms of communication. This is the substance of Part I of What Sheep Think About the Weather, "The Thinkers."

Two things soon become evident. First, with the exception of some dogs and parrots that have been taught to mimic human speech, animals don't "talk" in ways we expect; other senses predominate. Smell and body language are crucial, and tone of voice might outweigh the actual words spoken. Thomas is earnest and unafraid to try things that might seem ridiculous, such as sniffing on her hands and knees alongside her dogs to see the world their way, or assembling a "pigtionary" of her Kunekune piglets' vocalizations.

Second, it is essential to treat animals as individuals. Isaac Planas-Sitjà, an assistant professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University, has proven personality in cockroaches: they have distinct characteristics ("bold versus shy, social versus nonsocial, risk taking versus risk averse") and make choices not based on instinct. (Thomas then seeks to replicate this experiment at home with her 11-year-old son and a group of racing earwigs.) Likewise, Rachel Mundy, a musicology professor at Rutgers University, teaches her students to recognize particular robins based on their song patterns. When Thomas visits a battery chicken farm, she is reminded that each of these creatures matters as much as her hens, yet humans choose to view them as a commodity.

Some of the individual animals discussed may be familiar. Trained by animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg, Alex the African gray parrot learned more than 100 words and was able to ask questions; Koko the western lowland gorilla knew 1,000 American Sign Language signs. But the history of experimentation with chimpanzees--medical or otherwise--is a sad one. Dr. Mary Lee Jensvold was involved in Project Washoe, a long-running ape language experiment, but concluded, "we must never do these experiments again" because she feels it is cruel to keep such intelligent animals imprisoned in cages.

"The more we listen, the more we know about animals' lives," Thomas writes. "The more we know... the more we tend to care." Empathy is a necessary foundation for animal training, the subject of Part II, "The Doers," as well as for "intuitive interspecies communication," one of the techniques discussed in Part III, "The Feelers." Thomas meets horse whisperers and dog trainers and goes out in the field with a tracker and an animal communicator. What she learns helps her to improve her dogs' behavior and better understand her ailing horse Major's pain--and know when it's time to let him go.

Alternating between research, discussions with experts, and her experiences on the farm, Thomas maintains an engaging pace. She synthesizes mountains of information and big scientific concepts such as theory of mind and operant conditioning into hugely readable prose. The book ranges through history, from the Greek philosophers to Darwin to today's researchers. Full of fascinating facts wittily conveyed, it elucidates science and nurtures empathy. Thomas's genial tone will make readers feel they know each of the pets and wild animals described.

Ideal for fans of classic animal writings (e.g., Gerald Durrell and James Herriot), What Sheep Think About the Weather also recalls popular science writers including Temple Grandin, Sy Montgomery, and Ed Yong. The message has never been more important: listening is what "makes humans humane" and "there's no 'us and them': rather, infinite varieties of 'us.' " --Rebecca Foster

Amelia Thomas

Amelia Thomas has contributed to more than a dozen Lonely Planet books. Her journalism has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, CNN Traveler, the Middle East Times, the Sunday Times, and the Washington Post. Her previous book, The Zoo on the Road to Nablus (2008), inspired the documentary Waiting for Giraffes. Thomas attended Cambridge University and holds a diploma in equine psychology. She lives on a farm in Nova Scotia and practices equine bodywork for charitable organizations. Her new book, What Sheep Think about the Weather (Sourcebooks, November 4, 2025), delves into human-animal communication.

Would you share a bit about Simona Kossak and how she inspired your project?

A few years ago, a friend sent me a black-and-white photo of a Pippi Longstocking-ish young woman in a cardigan, gazing adoringly at an enormous wild boar who is busy nibbling crumbs from her dining table. This was my first glimpse of Kossak, a Polish naturalist who shunned her family's high-society Krakow lifestyle to live deep in the Bialowieża forest with a menagerie of animals--some domestic, but many others wild--and her partner, Lech Wilczek, a wildlife photographer. Immediately intrigued, I sought out all I could about her. The more I learnt, the more I aspired to Simona's ease with the natural world surrounding her, and to her apparently effortless understanding of what all kinds of animals--her pet boar Żabka included--were telling her. Fast-forward to 2023. A new farm and host of unruly pets conspired to send me diving into the question Simona first teased loose: How can we best understand what animals are trying to say, not to each other--but to us? And my family has Simona to thank for Constance and Agnes, two ginger-haired pet Kunekune pigs, named after my red-headed grandma and great-aunt.

In the first chapter, you write about your fear of science. How did you go about defusing that and building a new understanding?

When I attended a drafty old girls' school in England, Mr. Heap, our ancient science teacher, seemingly had only two lesson plans: endless demonstrations of a similarly decrepit Van de Graaf generator, or timed tests on the 118 elements of the periodic table. I grew up thinking science was inscrutable, difficult, and boring, and that I, with my interest in arts and poetry, wasn't clever enough to understand. Researching this book cured me of this misbelief, because science and the arts, I found, have more commonalities than I'd ever imagined. The best scientists, I realized, are no more certain about things than the best poets: they are seekers with insatiable curiosity, on the hunt for new discoveries and understandings. This broke down a barrier for me. I concluded that good science is about the right question, not the right answer. Keats talked about "negative capability"--being able to sit with feelings of uncertainty or mystery without immediately being able to explain them away. Professor Irene Pepperberg told me something similar: if you're certain something doesn't exist, wait a decade or two and you'll probably be proved wrong.

You class experts under the headings "Thinkers," "Doers," and "Feelers." How have you tried to be all three?

The lessons I learnt during my year of deep listening have carried over into every aspect of my life, far beyond the realm of listening to animals. For example, I find frequently that when I'm stumped by a work question--or even a personal one--I default to a quick list of questions. What do I know, think I know, or need to know, about the problem (the thinking)? What methods can I learn or use to overcome it (the doing)? And what do I intuit (or feel) about what to do? I've noticed that running through this three-part mental checklist helps me go from a state of worry or panic to a plan of action every time.

You note that most of your favorite scientists are over 70. Is animal communication a dying art?

While it's true that many of my favourite scientists (like the delightful and prolific ethologist Marc Bekoff, or Con Slobodchikoff, who studied prairie dogs' fascinating "language") are well over 70, there's a host of wonderful younger researchers discovering amazing things: for instance, Australian Dr. Alex Schnell, who proved cuttlefish can pass the Stanford "Marshmallow Test," and Dr. Cat Hobaiter in the U.K., who is one of the founders of the Great Ape Dictionary. In the U.S., there's Dr. Denise Herzing, who has spent decades studying a group of wild dolphins in the Caribbean. In Brazil, turtle researcher Camila Ferrara has found that mother turtles, previously thought to be silent, actually vocalize to their hatchlings. I admire all these scientists, because each knows the importance of what Dutch biologist Niko Tinbergen, in his 1973 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, called "the old method of 'watching and wondering.'" Despite recent interest in using AI to "decode" animal communication, there are still plenty of younger people out there in the field who know that to better understand what animals are saying, there's still no substitute for putting in careful hours with one's old-fashioned eyes and ears.

Animals (generally, their deaths) are often used in literature as portents. Does this offer useful lessons, or cheapen them as individuals?

The fact that animals' deaths are so frequently used as symbols in literature shows, I think, just how powerful their individual influences on our human lives really are. Take Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner": shooting that single albatross doomed the entire crew to destruction. Or Old Yeller and Greyfriars Bobby. Both symbolize canines' devotion to their human companions, but that doesn't make their individual deaths any less moving. The same goes for the death of Aslan, for example, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or of Pimpernel in Watership Down. And then there's Orwell's Animal Farm, the book that devastated me as a child; we all know it's an allegory, but what adult doesn't weep, even now, at the fate of Boxer?

What are non-animal lovers missing out on?

Even people who wouldn't consider themselves nature or animal lovers might find comfort in seeing cattle grazing peacefully on a sunset marsh, or have their emotions stirred by a flock of wild geese flying overhead on a crisp fall night. But it's easy to become so wrapped up in our human world that we can forget we, too, are part of nature: that there's really no "us" and "them" at all. Luckily, though, nature is inescapable, even on city streets. There you'll find weeds or ants or common or garden city pigeons, all of whom--historically, botanically, phylogenetically, behaviorally, microscopically--are really interesting. And it's great that nature is always there. Because aside from the well-documented emotional and mental health benefits offered by interacting with the natural world--be it listening to birdsong, petting a dog, or walking in the woods--the non-human world offers us all a sense of unjudgmental and profound connection, far deeper than the kind we're endlessly seeking in our ever-more connected, social media-dominant human world. And all we have to do to access it is to stop and listen. --Rebecca Foster