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“It blew my brain to discover that teenage pets and teenage humans are so comparable. Both are naive risk-takers. I cherished this reserve!” —Temple Grandin, writer of Pets Make Us Human and Animals in Translation

A revelatory analysis of individual and animal adolescence and young adulthood from the New York Times bestselling writers about Wildhood: The Epic Journey from Adolescence to Adulthood in Humans and Other Animals of Zoobiquity.

With Wildhood, Harvard evolutionary biologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and award-winning science writer Kathryn Bowers have created a completely new thought process about the crucial, vulnerable, and exhilarating phase of life between childhood and adulthood over the animal kingdom.

Within their critically acclaimed bestseller, Zoobiquity, the writers revealed the fundamental connection between human and animal wellness. In Wildhood, they switch the same eye-opening, species-spanning zoom lens to adolescent youthful adult life. Journeying around the world and sketching from their most recent research, they discover that this same four common challenges are experienced by every adolescent human being and animal on earth: how to become safe, how exactly to navigate hierarchy; how exactly to court potential mates; and how exactly to feed oneself. Safety. Status. Sex. Self-reliance. How individual and animal children and young adults confront the difficulties of wildhood forms their adult destinies.

Natterson-Horowitz and Bowers illuminate these primary challenges through the lives of 4 animals in the open: Ursula, a young king penguin; Shrink, a charismatic hyena; Salt, a matriarchal humpback whale; and Slavc, a roaming European wolf. Through their riveting stories—and the ones of countless others, from exciting eagles and rambunctious high schooler to inexperienced orcas and naive young soldiers—readers get a vibrant and game-changing portrait of adolescent adults as a horizontal tribe, writing behaviors and difficulties, setbacks and triumphs.

Upending our understanding of from risk-taking and stress towards the origins of privilege and the type of intimate coercion and consent, Wildhood can be a profound and necessary guide towards the perilous, thrilling, and universal trip to adulthood on planet earth.