Two years ago, I began writing an essay with the working title “Does It Matter If All the Wild Animals Die?” I’d recently read the World Wildlife Fund’s report, The Living Planet, which found that between 1970 and 2012, the population of non-human vertebrate animals on Earth dropped by 58 percent. I’d also learned that there are a billion fewer birds in North America than there were 40 years ago; that in Germany, three-quarters of the insects have gone since 1990; that there are half as many orangutans in Borneo as there were 15 years ago, and that every 15 minutes an elephant is killed by a poacher. Of all the vertebrate biomass on land, 32 percent is humans, 65 percent is domesticated animals and 3 percent is wild animals. Wild animals are dying and as far as I could tell, soon they would all be dead.
I spoke to experts about whether it mattered, and the answers were more mixed than you might think. I asked what they thought we might do about it: the answers were almost universally despairing: we’d likely do nothing.
The deaths of wild animals are so inextricably woven into everything that makes up human civilization that we are disinclined to combat them. As one researcher studying wildlife populations in the area around the Chernobyl nuclear accident wrote, “we’re not saying radiation is good for animals, but we’re saying human habitation is worse.”
However, one researcher I spoke to, who works on ways to combine agriculture and wildlife preservation, thought there might be some hope—not much, but some—if we could begin to see animals as individuals.
The deaths of wild animals are so inextricably woven into everything that makes up human civilization that we are disinclined to combat them.
Witness, for example, the online grief and chest-beating when the last male white northern rhino died. Contrast it with the complete silence when the hundreds of thousands of white northern rhinos who came before him met untimely ends.
Or as Shaun Tan brilliantly summed up in his very short story “Rhinoceros,” from the collection Tales from the Inner City:
The rhino was on the freeway again.
We blew our horns in outrage!
Men came, shot it dead, pushed it to one side.
We blew our horns in gratitude!
But that was yesterday.
Today we all feel terrible.
Nobody knew it was the last rhino.
How could we have known it was the last one?
When we think of animals as a species rather than as individuals, not every rhino death is equal. The last one has to carry the full weight of our self-involved concern.
But for the northern white rhinos themselves, the death of the last male was no more traumatic than the deaths that came before. Potentially, it was less traumatic, in fact. Sudan, as we knew him, died at 45—the upper end of rhino life expectancy—from old age. You might call it a good innings. He died surrounded by those who loved him—his keepers—though sadly without much comfort from other rhinos. Most northern white rhinos over the past few centuries, on the other hand, died in horrible circumstances, forced from their homes and killed for their horns. They passed unmourned on Facebook.
What if we’d seen each of those rhinos as individuals? What if we’d cared about their suffering? Would we have made more of an effort before it got to this?
Look, probably not. But we might have made a bit. Humans are sentimental creatures, prone to strong feelings about things that don’t affect our own lives or wellbeing one little bit. And one of the things that triggers that sentiment—sentiment we even sometimes act on—is having the general become specific.
You might have heard of (but probably haven’t) the MPR Raccoon.
On June 12, 2018, a reporter at Minnesota Public Radio in the US noticed a raccoon climbing up the surface of the sky scraper opposite. Animal control had tried to capture it earlier in the day, but it had escaped and was now making its way up the 25-storey office building. The reporter tracked it to a ledge, where it took a rest for a while, and posted some messages about the raccoon on twitter. Meanwhile, lawyers working in the building noticed the raccoon outside their window and posted their own photos.
Maybe trying to force other people to care isn’t the best reason to write a novel anyway.
Social media started to pay attention, and all of a sudden thousands of people were fretting about the fate of this one raccoon. Would she fall off the building? Would she make it to the roof? Could someone smash a window and save her? Could a drone help? People were staying awake all night to follow this small wild creature’s progress on the internet. Over two days, not much mattered more than the fate of the raccoon.
The more we see, the more we are likely to care. A picture of a drowned toddler on a beach rouses our feelings much more than facts and figures about refugee children imprisoned by the Australian government. Photographs of people flinging themselves from a burning New York skyscraper—recordings of their voices as they make last calls to their loved ones—affect us far more than finding out more than 5,000 civilians have been killed so far in the Yemeni civil war or that one and a quarter million South Sudanese are on the brink of starvation. We care about individuals, but we struggle to care about groups.
Eventually the raccoon made it to the roof and was trapped, then released in the wild. She might be dead by now but nobody would know or care—once she was out of our sight we forgot her. Thousands of other wild animals died unpleasant deaths in the time we were watching her clamber up and down a building, but nobody cared. People cared about her because they could see her, and they could empathize with her fear and suffering.
What if we cared that much about each individual animal? What if we cared that much, at least, about the ones whose suffering we affect?
As poet and author Nick Flynn said, on another topic entirely, in a 2010 Paris Review interview
With the Abu Ghraib photographs I was never interested in the question of how our soldiers came to torture other human beings. That soldiers do terrible things during wartime should not surprise us. So at some point the question became about the darker impulses we all carry within us, which led me to examine my own darker impulses. The only way to break out of these darker impulses, for me, was to make a human, face-to-face connection with some of the ex-detainees from the photographs. This is always the only way out.
The only way to break out of our darker impulses, our lack of caring, is to make a face-to-face connection.
Our relationship with animals was once significantly more intimate than it is today. There was a good deal more face-to-face connection. In Palaeolithic times—and in some cultures still today—all kinds of mammals were kept as companions, often raised from infancy by women who breastfed them—this included monkeys, dogs, pigs and bears. These animals might be pets for a while then food, or pets for a while then sacrificed to the gods, or pets for a while then chased back out to the wild when they got too demanding or annoying, but their lives and those of humans were intimately entwined.
Back then, the animals that people ate were caught and killed by our own hands. Just as often they escaped being caught: it’s hard to consider an animal inferior when it outwits you. And of course, this was a time when humans were still frequently prey for other animals, a discouragement for us to think ourselves particularly special or separate.
Then things started to change. As monotheistic religions rose in power, we began distancing ourselves from animals.
Religious books told us to see ourselves as separate—that god had given us dominion over the other creatures. “Fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” The Christian church frowned on affection towards animals. Cats were agents of Satan. Islam said that dogs were unclean. We began severing our emotional relationship with animals, setting ourselves up for modern society, where animals are resources rather than individuals.
Today, consumer capitalism relies on us being completely cut off from the suffering of both other people and other species. Factory farming, sweatshop labour, the mass deaths of wild animals to make way for agriculture and housing—for the system to continue functioning these need to happen well out of our sight. Humans have always killed animals to meet their basic needs, but this isn’t about meeting our basic needs. Would you be willing to kill, with your own hands, a selection of small birds and mammals to get that pair of sneakers or new couch you really want? Those kinds of deaths need to happen at a distance from us if economic growth is going to keep rolling on. Modern capitalism cannot afford for us to feel empathy with these creatures.
In an interview with The Guardian about his latest novel, The Overstory, Richard Powers says “Every form of mental despair and terror and incapacity in modern life seems to be related in some way to this complete alienation from everything else alive. We’re deeply, existentially lonely.”
We are kept at a great distance from them, and yet at some deep level we crave a connection with non-human animals. We cannot get enough of them. We long to have that closeness with them. We wear clothes covered in pictures of birds. We give our children toys shaped like polar bears and tigers. We breed domestic cats that look like wildcats and pet dogs that look like wolves so we can have facsimile wildlife in our homes. Cute wild animals keep the internet alive.
Our relationship with animals was once significantly more intimate than it is today. There was a good deal more face-to-face connection.
Maybe you’ve seen the video that went up on YouTube in 2009 of a woman tickling her pet slow loris. Not only was the video watched 5 million times, it spawned a yearning for lorises so powerful that the illegal international trade in the small primates made them endangered. We want our animals and we don’t care what we have to do to get them. We don’t even care if getting our animals kills the rest of the animals.
But could novels—writing and reading them—help us reset this terrible situation we find ourselves in? Could it help our colleagues on this planet, all the non-human animals?
In 2009 I started writing a historical novel, From the Wreck. It was going to be the story of my great, great grandfather, George Hills, who survived the wreck of the steamship Admella in 1859. George was trapped on the semi-submerged ship, just one mile off shore, for eight days and nights in the freezing Southern Ocean. Of the 113 people on board when it left Port Adelaide, only 24 made it back home.
What would it be like, I wondered, to survive such an awful, traumatic event and then to live on for decades more? To marry, have children and grandchildren, to build a career. How would you keep your mind together after you had been through something like that? What help would there be for you at a time when Freud was still more than 25 years away from coming up with psychoanalysis?
I wrote two drafts of this novel. There was cannibalism, infidelity, child death, spiritualism, a very nice cow, seances, insanity. But no matter how much melodrama I flung at the story, I couldn’t bring the book to life. It was flat. Dead. The first draft went in the bin. Then the second draft, which also included a ghost, went in the bin as well.
What does all this have to do with animals?
For me, this story—ostensibly about mental illness in colonial-era South Australia, and the things we do to survive—only began to mean something when I started to write my obsession. I have been haunted, to a greater or lesser degree for my whole life, by the things we do to other animals.
I started writing my novel again. This time, the main character was not my great great grandfather, but an alien, a creature from another dimension who resembled, very closely, a giant Pacific octopus. Her home planet had been destroyed by human-like creatures. They’d left their own world, which they’d wrecked, and arrived on hers, terraforming it so it was suitable for human habitation. It was no longer suitable for anyone else.
Maybe trying to force other people to care isn’t the best reason to write a novel anyway.
I wanted to write a story from the perspective of all the animals who no longer have a place to live on this planet, Earth, because we’ve terraformed it to be human-only habitat. It seemed a foolish hope, but I wondered if I could write something that would cause readers to have an attack of empathy for the wild animals around us.
There has been a lot of guff spouted in the media in recent years about how literature builds empathy. Most articles on this topic riff off a couple of US studies from the past ten years. These studies set out to discover whether being a bookworm could predict success in the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test. In this test, people look at photographs of actors’ eyes and say what the actor is thinking—they get four states of mind to choose from.
The first of these studies showed that people given a literary short story to read fared better than those who read a “genre” short story. The second study asked people to choose, from a list, the names of any authors they recognized—those who recognized more literary authors were better at picking an actor’s state of mind than those who recognized the names of genre authors.
From this, we got multiple news stories saying that people who read literature are better people—kinder, more empathetic—than those who read thrillers, romance or sci-fi, or those who read no fiction at all. Which, I think you’d agree, is a bit of a stretch. Recognizing Salman Rushdie’s name on a list of names might make you a reader of his literature, or it might make you someone who loves gossip about philandering authors, or someone with an interest in fatwas against writers. It’s hard to say.
And one of the major problems with trying to scientifically assess whether literature increases our empathy is that we have no scientific test of empathy. “Reading the mind in the eyes” only tests how well you can guess another’s state of mind, not how much you care about it. The test can tell you if you’re good at spotting someone else in emotional pain, but not whether you’ll bother to do anything about it.
Science doesn’t have all the answers—mostly because it’s never got around to asking the questions. But maybe trying to force other people to care isn’t the best reason to write a novel anyway.
Richard Powers, again, says, “We authors are incredibly good at psychological and political dramas, but there’s another kind of drama—between the humans and the non-humans—that disappeared in the late 19th century once we thought we had dominion over the Earth. But now we know we don’t, actually. And until you resolve that question, how do we live coherently at home on this planet, any other kinds of stories are luxuries.”
But how would you even go about writing a novel from an animal’s perspective? There has been a lot of discussion lately about whether authors have the right to write from the perspective of people different to themselves, and those who argue yes generally emphasize how important it is to do your research, to understand the community, the history, the thoughts and feelings of your protagonists. But do we even have any idea what animals know, think and feel?
It’s a question most of us have asked ourselves, particularly in relation to the animals we raise for food. How much do cows suffer when we slaughter them? Do fish feel fear when they’re pulled from the water? Does it matter?
Unfortunately, again, there’s not a lot that science can tell us. For a very long time, humans assumed that we had thoughts and feelings but all other animals did not, and that anyone who suggested otherwise was sentimental and un-scientific. Anthropomorphism—the transplanting of human traits onto non-human animals, the mistaking of their behaviors and motivations for our own—was something animal behaviorists dreaded.
In an essay in Granta, Esther Woolfson writes about her relationship with a magpie:
His life was one of calculation and endeavour, of learning and watching, remembering and trying. He could be aggressive. He measured thoughtfully, practised speech with precise and prolonged dedication. Once when I wept, he flew to me, huddled against me, muttering softly.
It still seems vaguely seditious or presumptuous to write these things of another species. Why? Because we have so little belief in the consciousness or capabilities of others?
A lot of experiments on animal intelligence have gone out of their way to show we are different to them, and that our difference is better. We tested animals’ skills at counting and at language, even though those things have been completely unimportant in their evolution and survival. We set the rules for what made us special—only humans use tools, only humans plan for the future—and every time the rules got broken by an animal (it turns out damselfish, alligators, some species of ants and pretty much every other animal uses tools; while ravens and chimps plan for the future), we moved the goal posts.
Humans seem torn between two great longings—to prove that we are alone on this earth, and to discover we are not alone in the universe. We are endlessly reluctant to look around and see the myriad creatures who are, in so many ways, extremely similar to us. Instead we look out to space, where we are much less likely to find anyone who even remotely resembles us. We already know we share most of our DNA with so many other creatures on earth—why would our brains be completely and utterly different, as if dropped into our heads by God during creation rather than evolved from the same ancestors as the brains of apes?
In recent years, however, some scientists have applied themselves to figuring out what’s going on in the heads of other animals. Here are some of the things they’ve discovered:
–A Clark’s nutcracker, a kind of bird, can store and retrieve 20,000 pine nuts hidden in hundreds of locations over many square miles. Are you sure you remember where you parked your car?
–If you show chimpanzees photos of a bunch of other chimpanzees, they can figure out which babies are related to which adults. Capuchin monkeys can tell you from photos which monkeys they know in real life and which they don’t. Sheep recognize one another’s faces in real life and in photos.
–Even though crows don’t use facial recognition to remember one another, they can recognise the faces of humans they haven’t seen for years. So can chimps. In fact, chimps’ photographic memory is many, many times more powerful than humans.”
–Alex, a grey parrot, could count, add, describe, answer complex questions by combining information on colors and shapes—and he did it all using human language.
–Elephants communicate with one another over vast distances using bellows pitched at an infrasound level. When they’re even further away, they talk to one another by stamping their feet and sending vibrations through the earth.
–Chimps watch other chimps’ body language and use it to figure out what they’re thinking, which is pretty much what humans do too. They form elaborate alliances, they plot against one another, they backstab and they curry favor—in his book, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, Frans de Waal describes politicking among chimps that reaches a Game of Thrones-level of complexity.
–All kinds of animals cooperate to achieve a goal; if they have a pre-existing relationship they’ll often help another creature even if they don’t have a personal interest in the result. Cooperation has been observed in chimpanzees, hyenas, rooks, parrots, monkeys, elephants, humpback whales and orcas.
“Every single species,” de Waal tells us, “has profound insights to offer, given that its cognition is the product of the same forces that shaped ours.”
Even the octopus, the narrator of my most recent novel? Octopuses have a brain in each of their arms, and all of those brains operate independently but can also work in concert. Between them, these brains have just about as many neurons as a dog’s. Like so many animals, an octopus can differentiate one human from another. They like some, and others they hate. They are supremely good at adapting—to captivity, to warming oceans, to the tools they find around them; they shift shape and color and can make themselves disappear completely. In his brilliant book, Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith writes of octopuses,
If we can connect with them as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. They are probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.
And how do all these animals feel about being ejected from their homes, about being starved, about not being able to find a mate? How do they feel about the climate changing around them?
In her essay, “Loggerheads,” again from Granta, Rebecca Giggs writes:
What idiom or instrument captures how the weather is felt by the animals, in their bodies, their nests and niches? The planet’s atmosphere was never more quantified or monitored, but the uneven sensitivities of other species to the weather seem too alien, too interior and multiple to measure or articulate. Hard to picture, let alone describe, the way the summer is experienced by organisms arrayed with senses dissimilar to our own.
A scaly creature basks in the same weather as us, but in different atmospherics of perception. Schoolbooks still teach that reptiles belong to the category “cold-blooded.” A misnomer. Ecotherms internalize the temperature—their metabolism is sped on by the sun. Our human vocabulary seems inadequate to evoke the anguish of a reptile when it’s seared in its surroundings.
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Elena Passarello writes in her book, Animals Strike Curious Poses, about animals’ thoughts and feelings as the environment changes around them:
A worker ant forever isolated from its colony will walk ceaselessly, refusing to digest food, and a starling will suffer cell death when it has no fellow creature to keep it company. A dying cross spider builds a nest for her offspring even though she’ll never meet them, and a pea aphid will explode itself in the face of a predator, saving its kin. An English-speaking gray parrot once considered his life enough to ask what color he was, and a gorilla used his hands to tell humans the story of how he became an orphan. Not to mention the countless jelly fish that, while floating in the warm seas, have looked to the heavens for guidance. Though problematic, it’s still easy to call these things representative of what unifies our kingdom: we are all hardwired to live for the future. But is there space in a creature’s DNA to consider the prospect of no next? That one day, nothing that’s us—beyond ourselves—will exist, despite the world that spins all around us?
You’re never going to be able to write exactly as an animal thinks, because we don’t speak animal language. But we can attempt to translate their view of the world into our language. To try to see the world as they see it, and then write it with our clumsy human words.
A lot of experiments on animal intelligence have gone out of their way to show we are different to them, and that our difference is better.
Authors of children’s books have been doing it for decades. Animals are the central characters in about one-third of books for children. As children we are raised to have empathy and care for animals, to imagine what animals are thinking and feeling and at some point—perhaps around the time the connection between chicken meat and actual chickens becomes apparent—we are encouraged to stop. Animals disappear from our books; we grow up and get real.
But writers who write for adults have begun trying to find ways to tell the story of what is happening to animals. They’re writing about animals in ways that go beyond fact and go deeper into art, into feeling: Yoko Tawada with her Memoirs of a Polar Bear, Robbie Arnott’s Flames, Tracy Sorenson’s The Lucky Galah, John Brandon’s A Million Heavens. I feel like this is something we are on the very edge of, the margin of—that here and there it’s starting—trying to find ways to write about the sixth great extinction, about the mass ecocide happening on earth. Perhaps there will be a time when animals will be able to tell their stories themselves, or when we’ll learn better how to listen to what they’re already telling us. But for now there’s no one to bear witness to those lives or to tell those stories but us.
Of course, most of the authors listed above aren’t exactly household names. But what if Tim Winton’s next novel was narrated by a shark? What if Jack Reacher, alone for so long, met a coyote side-kick in his next adventure? Imagine if Liane Moriarty’s suburban mums were foxes. I know, it sounds preposterous. So does the idea of setting Livy’s History of Rome in a rabbit warren, but despite that Watership Down went on to sell 50 million copies worldwide. Sometimes it’s worth taking a punt.
“This plummet into ecological oblivion,” says nature writer Richard Smyth on the Dark Mountain website, “is a big part of the truth about the world, and no-one’s really writing about it. It’s like having no novels about war, or songs about love, or poetry about birdsong.”
If we are writing novels about the world, if we are reading novels about the world, the stories of what’s happening to the animals around us should be part of that.
Or as environmental writer Gregory Norminton says on the same site, “If, in our time of moral and ecological collapse, the novel cannot find ways of encompassing the non-human as well as the human—if it cannot broaden its sympathies in the way that we all, as a species, must do in order to survive—then the novel will have lost its claim to speak for the human condition.”
