Part 2: Animals R Us, by Luanne Armstrong

These days, attitudes towards animals conflict and clash with every person; my brother walks up the mountain to be with animals, he watches and notices everything but he still rages, much as our father did, about bears in the fruit trees and deer eating the garden. He loves ‘his’ animals but he is still more aligned with our father’s values then with mine. But it doesn’t matter; we share enough similarities and the same ideas about care and respect.
Last week, I went to visit a new neighbour, a wealthy German industrialist who has spent a lot of time and money and energy landscaping his place, making a garden that looks quite natural and beautiful. He has also built a series of ponds on a hill, and each pond is surrounded by an electric fence to keep the otters from eating ‘his’ goldfish. I pointed out, rather mildly, that otters are endangered here and goldfish breed so fast they tend to become a nuisance. He shook his head impatiently at me. “The otters live in the swamp,” he said as if that somehow justified everything. I liked his garden but I didn’t like him.

It never fails to astonish me how much emotion people invest in their relationships and ideas about animals, both positive and negative. They either love them passionately; or, just as often, are terrified of, or hate them just as passionately. Stories about animals seem to be either long or short; in either case, they are usually not stories about animals at all, but about people’s ideas and involvement, however profound or superficial, with animals. Which is very odd, because animals don’t seem to have similar kind of passionate feelings towards us although of course we matter to them in all kinds of ways. But of course, we don’t know, because we haven’t yet learned to communicate with animals in such a way that their communication matters to us, as well as ours towards them, and most of us still tend to assume we know how they think and what they feel, often without a lot of evidence.
But there is a slow change going on…there are a lot of people working with animals in positive ways, interesting books, about a parrots, bonobo monkeys, about chimps, about bears and wolves; like most other information not amenable to mainstream thinking, none of this gets widely covered or talked about.
Most of these books are still focused on how much animals are or are not like us; whether they have language, whether they have culture, how they feel about us. But I was very happy to read about a man named Lynn Rogers, a biologist who has spent time with bears in the northern US woods. Rogers is no sentimentalist. Even after devoting 40 years of his life to the back bear of Minnesota he is under no delusion that his interest is reciprocated. The bears don’t really like him, he says.
"June, she has no feelings for me,” he is quoted as saying. “If she had feelings I think she would want to seek out company like a dog does its master," he said. "But she doesn't think of me in those terms. I'm just the guy that brings her a treat once in a while and that she can ignore and not pay any attention to and that is what makes her so valuable to science."

I also like this quote from a book called Landscapes of Fear, “We tend to suppress the knowledge that fear is a universal emotion in the animal kingdom from our consciousness, perhaps because we need to preserve ‘nature’ as an area of innocence to which we can withdraw when discontented with people.” Yi-Fu Tuan.
Craig Childs, a biologist who makes a living looking for water in the desert, says: “The life of an animal lies outside of conjecture. It is far beyond the scientific papers and the campfire stories. It is as true as breath. It is as important as the words of children.”
Or, as Barbara Noske writes, in Beyond Boundaries, “perhaps what I am looking for is an anthropology of animals, a place where the human-animal interface thins and disappears, where “Otherness” isn’t any longer an excuse for “objectification and degradation, either in practice or in theory.” (p.170

The reality of animals will never really be accessible to me or to people in general. But knowledge of animals is a different thing. But people who work with animals or encounter animals on a regular basis, (and these people are getting fewer all the time) farmers, hunters, animal trainers, etc., usually have a very specialized and often quite deep knowledge of particular kinds of animals and particular kinds of knowledge about animals; my sister, for example, is a horse trainer and knows an immense amount about horses but isn’t interested in dogs. My friend George, who is a hunter and a fisherman, knows his local landscape and the habits of the animals within that landscape amazingly well, but is suspicious and resentful of what he sees as the intrusive meddling of ecologists and wildlife biologists meddling with his choices and telling him what to believe.
Scientists, while they are often are extremely knowledgeable about particular kinds of animals, seem to often know little about animals in general. But they are also constrained by the requirements of science and what often appears as a rather almost comic fear of not anthropomorphizing animals, which often then excludes anecdotal evidence or local knowledge or indigenous knowledge – in addition, science seems very slow to take up on the idea that knowledge of animals gained in a library or through scientific methods is itself biased and oddly skewed to a particular point of view. Science needs to do more research that is both respectful of animals and their actual lives.
But at least people who work or live or hunt or depend on animals are in relationship with animals; and while this relationship takes an almost infinite variety of forms, depending on how such people characterize animals, it does exist and can be leared from. But then of course, this is also the great difficulty, that people are free to characterize animals according to whatever cultural and social framework they happen to be working with; from a woman getting her poodle dyed to match her apartment; to the Inuit hunter dependent on his dog’s sense of smell to get him home.

I still spend a lot of time these days with animals though much less than I did when I was a child,. When I was a child, I was sure my father knew everything about animals. He knew a lot, and everything he knew was constrained by his view as a pioneering small farmer, desperate to survive and make a living.
But now, I listen more. I listen and watch. The swallows sit on the porch in the early morning, gabbling and yelling, sounding exactly like a crowd of people at a party or in a restaurant. When the hawk comes by, or the golden eagle, the ravens come out to meet him or her. There is obviously lots of communication going on, wing tip to feather lift and I am blind and deaf to it.
I know something about domestic animals, less about wild animals, almost nothing about insects and lizards and spiders and wasps and flies. I share the farm in June and July with an almost infinite number of mosquitoes and I truly can’t come to any understanding about them because no matter how equitable I am determined to be about our shared life, they in fact, drive me quite mad. Screaming mad. Raging mad. They do it to anyone and everyone. Nothing about it is personal.
And while I am picking raspberries and the mosquitoes are ranging in and out of my ears and eyes, I try to remember we are here together, living our lives in some kind of strange and unknown partnership/relationship, each with our roles and our umwelt; mine is of heat and berries and itching and satisfaction and theirs is one being mosquitoes, blood, smell, pursuit, reproducing. In our own ways, we are doing exactly the same things.
But for most people, especially those that rarely encounter animals, the idea of animals remains an area of innocence, an area of sentimentality, an area of the unknown where humans can endlessly project needs, desires, their own humanness. And in this territory, we lurch from sentimentality to cruelty and back, a lurching horribly and eerily similar to historical positions previously help by whites about blacks, the church about Indians, Southerners about slaves.
It is no longer politically acceptable for men to say what women are feeling, or for white people to assume they know and understand the reality of people of colour. But it is still perfectly acceptable to assume we know what animals are thinking and feeling. But we don’t. And can’t.

This spring, a neighbour phoned my house. Her voice panted in panic. The night before, a cougar had broken into someone’s chicken shed, she said, the person had surprised it and the cougar had run away. Someone else might have seen the same cougar, she thought, of course they weren’t sure, but she was phoning everyone with children or grandchildren to warn people keep them inside.
What I didn’t tell her was that my brother had come down from his walk on the mountain, a few days earlier and told me he had just found a cougar den with a female cougar and two kittens. We were both glad about it; there are too many deer and not enough predators in our neighbourhood. I didn’t tell my neighbour this..
Neither of these stories is a judgment; one person is terrified of cougars and one is not. The difference is that my brother walks up the mountain every day and has all of his life; he walks up to deer, ravens sit on his shoulder. He’s not a Thoreau kind of guy; he’s redneck logger who loves the place where he lives and knows enough about it to walk through it with no fear and a sense of comradeship.
But my neighbour’s fear is a lot like being terrified of terrorists; if they never attack, the unfearful people can crow triumphantly, (after a long while) that nothing was ever wrong but it only takes one attack for the fearful people to consider their fear justified. It only takes one bear/cougar/wolf/coyote attack for all kinds of stories and fear to circulate. People are terrified of cougars, bears, wolves, because of the possibility, however remote, that they can hurt people.
Whether any of the stories of people being in danger or hurt are true or not, what caused the animals to act the way they did, never seems to be an issue.