In a landscape worthy of Cormac McCarthy, the river runs septic with blood. Edgar Wilson makes the sign of the cross on the forehead of a cow, then stuns it with a mallet. He does this over and over again, as the stun operator at Senhor Milo's slaughterhouse: reliable, responsible, quietly dispatching cows and following orders, wherever that may take him. It's important to calm the cows, especially now that they seem so unsettled: they have begun to run in panic into walls and over cliffs. Bronco Gil, the foreman, thinks it's a jaguar or a wild boar. Edgar Wilson has other suspicions. But what is certain is that there is something in this desolate corner of Brazil driving men, and animals, to murder and madness.

Saga of Brutes draws together three confronting and darkly stories: "Between Dog Fights and Pig Slaughter," "The Dirty Work of Others," and "carbo animalis," published in one volume for the first time. Ana Paula Maia's no-holds-barred narrative pulls few punches, describing the shocking reality of the lives of the invisible workingmen who, like Atlas, are forced to carry society's burdens. These heroes of vile circumstance-coal miners, firemen, garbage collectors, crematorium workers-are the soot-covered supermen who risk their lives performing difficult and dangerous work for others. But in the end, they, too, amount to nothing but carbo animalis-notwithstanding the impure relation of coal to diamonds. Despite their straightforwardness, Ana Paula Maia's stories are filled with great insight and compassion for the lives of the men who live on the edge of a society built with their own sweat.

By whatever measures scientists choose for social intelligence, behavioural resilience of wolves illustrates their adaptations to changing aspects of their environments in the wild and captivity. Intriguing questions about wolves have emerged from studies of life history traits in social carnivores, such as large body size, delayed reproduction, and variable dispersal patterns. In this social context, the rapidly accumulating evidence for behavioural flexibility of wolves is reviewed in terms of learning, communication, problem-solving, and awareness. In this book, the authors present research on the biology, behaviour and conservation of wolves.