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).

What does Jenny Diski know about animals? She's really not sure. She remembers the animal books she read in her childhood; the cartoons she watched; the meals she ate; the strays she found; the animals who have lived and still live with her. She examines human beings, too, and the way in which we have looked at, studied, treated and written about the non-human creatures with whom we share the planet. Subtle, intelligent and brilliantly observed, What I Don't Know About Animals is an engaging look at what it means to be human — and what it means to be animal.