What I Don't Know About Animals

I propose to watch animals and write about them. I will visit places where animals are studied (university departments and field studies here and abroad) and spend time with the researchers and the animals. I will also watch in an unofficial way — birds outside my study window, ants on the patio, zoos, safari parks, my cats... I will use these travels and observations to encounter not only the watchers and the watched but also more general human behaviour and of course myself. The book will move in its last segment into a discussion of how we watch ourselves: psychology, sociology and surveillance. It will be a very personal take on all this. Not academic and taking the freedom to write about my own experience as both a watcher (a teacher in state schools and a 'free school' I set up in the 70's) and as watched (childhood, school, psychiatric hospital, writer).