REVIEW: Our Animal Familiars by Dan Werb

Reviewed by Brian Lee Knopp

They are coming for us.

They are coming because of us.

Raccoons hijacking fast-food restaurants. Coyotes hunting in metro transit hubs and deserted inner city streets. Foxes pouncing about urban parks and gardens at twilight. Bats and rats flitting inside buildings with impunity. Giant octopus lurking just off the most populated and polluted coastal cities. Leopards prowling courthouses and government buildings. Marauding bands of baboons herding and riding feral dogs who protect them while the primates terrorize tourists and city dwellers, alike. Invasive plants climbing inches per day, self-replicating from deeply buried seed pods, proving almost impossible to stop as they strangle vast swaths of urban and rural areas.

Are these scenes from a terrifying new sci-fi thriller?

Nope. These scenes are our new reality. And this new reality just might—with paradox piled atop paradox, here—save humankind from itself. That is, if we are smart enough and empathic enough to not only adapt to, but also accommodate “synanthropes”—the wild creatures and plants that have figured out how to survive and thrive in human-modified environments.

Canadian author Dan Werb is the perfect role model of smarts and empathy to instruct and to lead us in this brave new world wherein our “ancient frenemies” and even exotic predators are now becoming our urban neighbors. His latest book, Our Wild Familiars: How Animals Are Adapting to Cities and Reshaping The Natural World (Crown; July 2026), is a stellar and utterly necessary read. Werb is a social epidemiologist, a kind of disease and injury detective sworn to protect and preserve human health. But to that end, he is also driven to explore our era of human-driven mass extinctions and displacement of other species, and to uncover the key co-evolutionary role shared between humans and animals.

Please don’t let Werb’s science cred chase you away from this book! He is a former dance-punk band musician, and quite simply the coolest, most reassuring geek guide you could ever hope for while facing down apocalyptic scenarios of our own making. Our Wild Familiars effortlessly and enthusiastically combines biology, philosophy, sociology, and literary references to present an astonishing and ultimately uplifting study of animal resilience and adaptation. And best of all, Werb writes like a dream—lucid, witty, impassioned, yet concretely illustrative paragraph by paragraph.

Just two brief examples will convince. Here, Werb explores the depths of heavily-polluted Puget Sound:

“Textured sunlight drips down from the surface, shifting the colors diffracting through the water surrounding me–green, yellow, orange, red–and imbuing it with a satisfying viscosity, as if I were swimming through the dissolved insides of a giant gummy bear… [W]hen I dove down sixty feet and met a giant Pacific octopus clutching hundreds of thousands of eggs in a house made of concrete and rusted iron debris… I felt all the big emotions that you would expect. Running my eyes over her fleshy pink tentacles, white suckers, heaving gill, and gigantic eyeball, other thoughts came to mind that I’m only ready to admit to now. This thing is a monster, I thought, but somewhere in the world is another one like it that feels, with every fiber of its being, that this is the sexiest creature to ever exist. That thought made me laugh, which is hard to do underwater. And it’s as true of an octopus, I realized, as it is of a corpulent raccoon, a hideous-to-me leaf-nosed bat, and a hamadryas baboon flashing a swollen, garish, and throbbing red bum.”

Here, he relates the onslaught of hamadryas baboons in Saudi Arabia:

“I have seen few things more otherworldly than the image of a horde of baboons, thousands strong, moving in frantic unison over these desert hills. When it happens, triggered by onlookers, buzzing drones, or some other perceived threat, the dogs here move with the horde… their herding instincts put to the service of baboon protection… [We] might be seeing the second time in history of their species that Canis familiaris is being domesticated by a primate.”

Our Wild Familiars is structured in three parts, with the three main sections bookended by the most gripping prologue I have ever read in a natural science book, and an epilogue that will haunt you long after you close the book. Part One introduces the reader to the synanthropes that live among the world’s most destructive and toxic predators ever having evolved to date: Us. Part Two explains the consequences when synanthropes become too successful or too concentrated in a particular area. Part Three reveals the ways human communities might evolve in sync with the synanthropes, achieving a harmonious equilibrium with animal species that will not only survive but become celebrated almost-family members who impart meaning and purpose to our lives. All nine chapters begin with a brief block summary of the respective chapter’s key points, like in an abstract you would typically find in a scientific journal.

But beyond that formal presentation, the book’s organization becomes charmingly and even purposely digressive, yet always narratively riveting. Amazing animal achievements and fantastic factoids briefly intermingle and separate, flashing here and there across the pages like fireflies. Dramatic cameos of beasts, and of the renegade biologists who champion them, pop up like prairie dogs, only to disappear for a few pages and then reappear to deliver a trenchant analysis or bold prediction, or to deliver an epic encore featuring the beasts by themselves, whose very persistent presence conveys a mute yet triumphant eloquence that is neither self-contradictory nor the product of anthropomorphic projection. Indeed, the subject animals deliver something far more remarkable: they deliver nothing less than the much sought-after concept and liminal state we Creatures of the Word call hope.

Our Wild Familiars is the perfect antidote to the “depressive realism” inherent to most current studies of the 21^st century clash between human and animal trajectories. Werb certainly sees the bad and calls it out. But the more he makes us look around the globe, the more we can see “patterns of resilience and improvement” we likely never believed existed or were even possible.

Werb’s alternative tone of “manic realism” flags in a few spots—and understandably so. Like in his chapter “Embracing the Widow Makers,” wherein he struggles with the karmic battle between the extinction of the Bengal tiger through unchecked human “progress” and the fate of the “tiger widows” whose dead husbands and sons can no longer provide food and shelter for them, and whose vulnerable daughters are pulled away from their communities and down into the perilous vortex of sex work just to survive. He has the courage to confess being shaken by the stark truth that there is, at present, “no clear or psychically satisfying outcome to this battle.”

Face it. Werb does. We should, too. Despair is self-fulfilling and disempowering. Rage might be a great motivator, but it sucks as a solution to complex interrelated problems. For myself, the most important takeaway from this book is to try and adopt the synanthrope’s perspective about the seemingly catastrophic degradation of our environment: Adapt or die. Paradise lost is not a reason for paralysis or apathy.

“Life is chaos,” Werb solemnly admits, “but there is no going back. Building a denial of these basic facts into urban design will make us less able to contemplate and come to peace with our own inevitable end and the constant transformation of the planet around us.” Throughout much of the book, Werb spotlights numerous simple solutions that achieve results: animal corridors provide safe passageways through city grids and reduce roadkill; working toward a “managed retreat” rather than the futile and inevitably toxic “zero tolerance” efforts against urban rodents, and recognizing that our “rat problem” is actually a human problem of how we organize and maintain our urban spaces. Regarding the nightmare-inducing scenario of warlike baboons and their feral dog bodyguards, locking waste receptacles and prohibiting tourists from feeding baboons have proved more successful in deterring them than the unchecked poisoning and shooting campaigns.

Will informed hope be enough? Is it even feasible? Werb believes and proves the affirmative:

“Nature isn’t retreating; it’s accelerating toward us. A motley band of synanthropes, huge in number and diversity, are burrowing their way into our communities. In doing so, they are changing the places we call home. And they are changing themselves in the process… [They] show us the world as it is and a path forward to connecting with nature beyond simply mourning what we’ve lost. And if we look closely enough, they can show us that wonder is alive all around us, in the incredible adaptation of these creatures, our wild familiars, who have found solace in our streets, our garbage cans, our sewers, and our homes.”

You know that old icebreaker question used by book clubs and for author events: “If you had to choose one book to read while marooned on a deserted island, what would it be?” Well, I have a new choice for myself (before now I always chose The Riverside Shakespeare). And maybe a new choice for you, too: Dan Werb’s Our Wild Familiars.