About a year ago, I was swimming off a beach in Puerto Rico when I was suddenly aware of a companion. A small fish was circling me, always ending up close to my face and fixing me with its large black eyes which had a softness one more often associates with cuddly mammals. I was completely charmed, and we stayed together until finally and regretfully I had to get out of the water and say goodbye.

This encounter, and the questions it raised, came back vividly as I read the story of a Scottish woman and a bumble-bee, with which Brandon Keim opens his book on animal behavior and the deeper impulses that drive it. All one “golden summer” – Keim is not afraid to indulge in poetics – the bumble bee would “come and snuggle on (her) hand.”

“Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds in a More than Human World,” by Brandon Keim. Norton, 2024; 355 pages, $29.99

What was going on in these encounters? “Meet the Neighbors” is a fascinating exploration of the possibilities. “Hardly a week passes,” the author notes, without some “delightful new insight” into animal minds. And as we learn more about this hidden world, he urges, the way we treat animals must evolve accordingly. How far we succeed in letting scientific understanding of animal behavior bring our traditional assumptions up to date, says Keim, is the “central question of our time.”

Keim, a prolific science writer who lives in Bangor, begins by leading the reader on a stroll through a neighborhood in Washington, DC where he once lived, taking the opportunity to share some of his own experiences and encounters with wildlife along the way. After that, he seeks out a bevy of people whose activities are spear-heading this burgeoning field of research. He accompanies hands-on ecologists where they are working with animals in the wild. He interrogates wildlife managers who decide things like optimum population levels for a given species (often at the cost of the individual animal). Then he discusses the ramifications and limits of wildlife ethics with some of the philosophers who are at the cutting edge of thinking about these issues.

It is a huge canvas. First there is the accumulating evidence of the social structures that suggest that animals not only have greater capacities for joy and grief than once imagined, but that these are experienced far further down the food chain than we may be comfortable considering. Take the despised but highly intelligent rat. Scientists have shown “how deeply rats feel for one another,” and are “especially generous when sharing food with rats who are anxious.”

Next, Keim gives a concise history of how human attitudes to animals — is it good or bad? Cute or ugly? Useful or a pest? — have been hard-baked into our collective psyches. Aristotle devised — and the Church adopted — the hierarchy that put humans at the top not only taxonomically, but morally as well. The result can be seen in a picture painted 2,000 years later: the vivisection of a dog, which Keim describes in horrible detail, including the impassive faces of the doctors.

Gradually, we began to realize that making animals suffer was wrong. The author quotes Darwin’s description of animals as “our fellow brethren in pain, diseases, death, suffering and famine”; they were also, he said, “our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements.” In our time, despite major environmental and conservation progress, wildlife managers treat animals as “interchangeable species units.” Legislation such as the “profoundly important” Endangered Species Act, Keim writes, “found it easier to personify Mother Nature than a mother mallard duck.”

“Meet the Neighbors” is full of delightful examples of a more individual approach. A wildlife control professional in Ontario calls raccoons “miniature home inspectors”; they’ll find any whole or crack in a building to exploit. To evict a raccoon family from an attic, he places the kits in a temporary box on the roof, where Mama can come and collect them. To guard against hypothermia while they wait, the box has an electric heating pad.

An interesting final section looks at the philosophical trends that animate the drive for greater animal “personhood,” some of them quite far-fetched. Much of the debate revolves around notions of pain, which quickly runs into the toughest nut to crack, coming to terms with predators. Keim approvingly quotes one ethicist’s position. “It is not pain and suffering per se that is wrong, but unnatural pain and suffering.”

The host of wildlife stories in “Meet the Neighbors” show Keim to be as good a nature writer as he is a perceptive wildlife whisperer. His book makes a cogent case for us to change our behavior in favor of greater accommodation for animal needs.

Thomas Urquhart is the author of “For the Beautyof the Earth,” and “Up for Grabs! Timber Pirates, Lumber Barons and the Battles Over Maine’s Public Lands.”