Dr. Safina is a terrific writer, majestic and puckish in equal measure, with a contagious enthusiasm for the complex social lives of the animals he’s observing — in this book, chiefly elephants, wolves and killer whales. If he pulls a bit of bait and switch, for long stretches abandoning his supposed theme of animal consciousness to focus instead on simple appreciation and advocacy, it’s hard to object because he brings his subjects so vividly to life.

Image Credit... Patricia Wall/The New York Times

Here he is, for instance, describing killer whales as they forage for salmon off Vancouver Island in British Columbia: “Several whales bow their backs and dive steeply. Below, the fish have their attention. A couple of other whales slice rapidly through the surface, quickly switching directions.”

“The closest whale, right behind us, is L-92. This big one over here with the high, wavy dorsal fin is K-25. He begins a series of high-arcing lunges, with lots of splashing and commotion. He’s after one large, isolated fish. He dives away. When he suddenly bursts through the surface, his mass and momentum startle me wide-eyed.”

The effect — and surely the intention — of such lively, physical description is to make Dr. Safina’s readers feel as strong a connection to these animals as he does. Again and again he follows the same formula, familiar from nature documentaries: Draw close to the animals, explain their habits and family structures and personalities until we perceive them as individual characters, then detail the ways human culture is destroying their way of life.

For elephants, that means ivory poaching; for wolves, the threat of hunters and trappers; for killer whales, everything from overfishing to underwater military explosions to the continued practice, in some places, of capturing young whales for use in aquarium shows.

The strategy of making us see animals as individuals is undeniably effective, as anybody who has followed the story of Cecil the lion can attest. And Dr. Safina draws out haunting resonances between animal lives and our own. “What I had not imagined,” he writes of a Yellowstone wolf pack that fractured after hunters killed its alpha member, “was the politics involved, the personalities, the vendettas and coalitions, the family turmoil following tragedy, the loyalties and disloyalties.” Dr. Safina describes the drama as “all too human.”

In the same section, he describes a legendary wolf from Yellowstone, the “superwolf” known by his tracking number 21, who never lost a fight and never killed an opponent.