The quotation I posted one post back is from the book, Where the Animals Go, with which I’m currently obsessed. In Where the Animals Go, the two authors take a look at the movements of groups of animals, letting the animals themselves map areas and giving us insight into how they see their world.
For instance, for the feature image I’ve used here, a group of scientists have tagged a number of elephant seals. The elephant seals naturally make deep dives, which then help the scientists collect temperature data of the water — and maybe even more importantly, it helps them see the ocean through the eyes of the seals themselves, without human artifacts such as boundary lines.
Nothing could be clearer to me than that animals see this world as their world. I’ll probably talk more about this over time, but if you spend any time with lions, they clearly think this is a lion world, and humans are just one feature in it. It’s the same with birds, who clearly think this is a bird world, and of course humans think this is a human world.
If we have any hope of coexisting in a crowded world, I think we’re going to have to accept these different perspectives as valid. Animals cross boundaries because that’s how they see their world; we make boundaries because that’s how we see ours. I can’t really imagine us giving up half the world — or anything like it — to a boundary-less, animal-only space. We’re going to have to find some way to exist together.
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