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The Factory Files are a curated library of everything the industry would prefer you never engaged with. Documentaries, investigations, books, films, and organisations on the front lines.
Mama's Last Hug
By Frans de Waal • 2019 A companion to Are We Smart Enough , but focused on emotions rather than cognition. De Waal argues that animal emotions are not lesser versions of human emotions, they're actually the originals . We inherited our emotional architecture from our evolutionary ancestors; we didn't invent it. The book explores empathy, grief, shame, gratitude, and disgust across species, grounded in decades of primatological observation. Why it matters The question of ani
Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat
By Hal Herzog • 2010 An anthrozoologist examines the messy, contradictory ways humans relate to animals. Why do we lavish affection on dogs while eating pigs of equal intelligence? Why do some cultures revere cows while others farm them industrially? Herzog observes, surveys, interviews, and reports. The book is less interested in telling you what's right than in showing you how inconsistent everyone is. Why it matters This is the book for someone who isn't ready to be argued
When Elephants Weep
By Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson • 1995 A book that asked a question science wasn't ready to take seriously: do animals have emotional lives? Masson, a former psychoanalyst, surveys evidence of grief, joy, anger, love, and shame across species. Elephants mourning their dead, dogs experiencing jealousy, parrots forming lifelong bonds. The book is part literature review, part philosophical argument, part provocation aimed at a scientific establishment that had long dismissed animal
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
By Frans de Waal • 2016 Primatologist Frans de Waal dismantles decades of scientific bias that framed animal cognition research around the question "can they do what we do?" He argues the question itself is flawed - that we've systematically underestimated animal intelligence by testing them on human terms rather than their own. The book surveys remarkable findings across species: tool use in crows, planning in apes, empathy in elephants, memory in octopuses. But more importa
Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows
By Melanie Joy • 2009 Psychologist Melanie Joy named something that had been hiding in plain sight: carnism , the invisible belief system that conditions people to eat certain animals while loving others. This isn't a book about why veganism is right, it's a book about why most people don't see the contradiction in the first place (did you catch it? If not, this book is definitely for you). Joy dissects the psychological defence mechanisms (denial, justification, perceptual
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