Thinking With Animals

As I was loading Hank-dog into the car after our walk one warm afternoon this week, I saw something odd on the other side of the river, down over the bluff we’d just come up. I thought it was a person, sitting on the cobbles, which seemed odd. It’s not a place where there’s public access, and it didn’t look like a pleasant place to sit. Maybe it was someone hunting agates? I pulled out the binoculars, and it was a bear.

A smallish black bear, with a light brown snout, sitting upright, on a warmish afternoon. Bears look so odd when they sit like that. Like a child’s toy bear — with their legs straight out in front of them. This bear appeared to be taking in the thin sunshine, perhaps warming themself on the cobbles. Just hanging out. Not moving, not doing anything, just being.

I’m still thinking about animals. Actually, I’m nearly always thinking about animals.

And because I’m also still thinking about Daisy Hildyard, and arguing with her in my head (which to be clear, is not about her, personally, but about the strain of dualism I find so perplexing in her work), I turned to Donna Haraway, the delightful feminist scholar and writer who, has spent the past forty years challenging binary thinking and exploring the relationships between humans, technology, and nature. One of her most accessible books, The Companion Species Manifesto, riffs on her most famous essay — The Cyborg Manifesto — published in Simians, Cyborgs and Women. In this only slightly tongue-in-cheek little book, as she notes in this lecture on the same topic, she posits that dogs might be the new cyborgs. I have a hunch Haraway is one of those figures who seems like old hat to younger ecocritics, and yet nonetheless I feel like her ideas have not penetrated into mainstream thought to the extent they deserve. Haraway’s work was instrumental to my thinking about literature and wilderness that formed the core of my PhD research, and in 2015, I drove over to Moscow, Idaho for the ASLE conference because she was the keynote speaker, with Anna Tsing, whose Mushroom at the End of the World has penetrated into the mainstream. At any rate, that’s when I first heard Haraway talk about how she’d fallen in love with agility training, and with her specific agility dogs.

I love when theorists fall in love with something in the world. “Dogs are not surrogates for theory;” she writes in Companion Species. “They are not just here to think with. They are here to live with. Partners in the crime of human evolution …”

Wild animals are also not just here think with, although they provide a powerful jumping-off place to think about our relationships with the natural world, with wildness, with the damage we continue to do to the planet. They are both something to think with, and an actual black bear, sitting on the cobbles, enjoying the sunshine.

Haraway is one of the great thinkers of kinship networks, of the ways that everything is connected — animals and plants and humans and technology. Unlike Hildyard, who finds these inter-relations “horrific,” Haraway believes they are the foundational ontological relationship that we need to reckon with. And so, since I’ve been thinking about animals, both domestic and wild, as well as thinking while I walk Hank-dog about the materiality of animals, and about how the ways we think and talk about them reveal those sticky places where we’re still held by dualistic patterns of thinking — I went back to Haraway to see how she was thinking with animals, as, later in life, she found herself involved in a really intense world of animal training.

I grew up with animal trainers. I come from at least three generations of horse trainers — both hunter/jumpers and reining trainers. We all started riding before we could really walk, either in front of our parents or grandmother in the saddle, or, as here, in the baby saddle on the ancient and trustworthy pony Obediah.

I haven’t had a horse for decades, but the feeling of a horse’s head near yours, the nickering breath out of those big velvety nostrils, the tender lips snuffling up a carrot, or handful of sweet feed —these are things I know in my bones. I also want to point out that there are four subjects in this photo — me and my grandmother, and Annie and Obediah. Annie and Obediah were not just generic “horse” or “pony” — they were subjects we lived with and knew for decades. My mother and her siblings learned to ride on Obediah, who lived on our farm for at least 25 years. Annie was my grandmother’s favorite horse, a creature she was in intimate relationship with for years. They were both other in that they weren’t human beings, but they were others with whom our family had a long and intimate relationship.

Training animals is one of the most potent ways we can not just think with animals but live with them, engage with them. The work of interspecies communication that takes place when you’re training a young horse, or a dog, is not unitary. I mean, you can break a horse or dog by imposing your will on them as a training method, but that is not training. Training is a two way street. It’s a form of deep engagement between an animal and a human.

This time of year, driving out of the rural subdivision where Chuck’s cabin is located, you have to navigate through a small cow-calf herd. The calves are brand new, zipping around in little bursts, or deciding to be bold and stand down the car. They’re always so bouncy during these first weeks of life (before they get their little balls cut off). Some mornings I have to creep through a crowd of them, making cluck cluck noises through the open window, asking the babies to move, telling the cows not to worry, I’m not going to run them over. Yesterday morning, Alvin, the rancher, drove in as I was surrounded by calves, then ducked off the road to the right in his flatbed and they took off after him, waiting for the big round bale to start unfurling off the back of his truck. When they’re this little, the calves nestle in the warm hay on cold mornings.

I live with animals in this sort of concentric manner — the inner circle are my household animals, the dog, the cat, the chickens — then there are the other domestic animals, Alvin’s cattle, the neighbor horses, other dogs in town — and finally the wild animals. But even the wild animals exist in different networks of relationship with us — we have a very different relationship with the generations of bunnies who’ve lived under the garbage can pallet at the cabin, or the bats who come back to roost every year in the shed, than we do with the deer and elk in the yard, or the foxes, coyotes and occasional wolf (or that one gigantic mountain lion) we sometimes catch on our game cameras. All of those animals know we’re here, as we now know they’re here too. So far, on our little bench on the side of Emigrant Peak, everyone is staying in their lane. The predators aren’t eating Alvin’s calves, and we generally don’t advertise what we’ve seen in the neighborhood, so as not to draw the attention of the people who still believe in hunting predators.

When I studied with Gary Snyder all those years ago he used to say it was important to be polite, to “get to know the neighbors.” That we don’t see these wild animals as neighbors, but as “resources” is one of the reasons I keep writing about them. It’s the reason that dualistic thinking about the natural world, thinking that defines the world by what is human and what is not, is such a problem. Even David Abram’s use of the term more-than-human still makes the human being the definitional point.

Whether animals are domestic or wild seems far less important than whether we regard them as neighbors or not. I remember in graduate school, when the only professor who was even remotely interested in nature or wildness introduced Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden with a little lecture about how “the pastoral” and “the wild” are in opposition to one another.

I was shocked.

Farms were the first real natures I knew — my first wild places were edge spaces, those little copses of woods along a creek between fields, or on the edges of new subdivisions. The pasture at my grandmother’s farm, a place that looked, from the house, like A.A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood — although smaller. It was only a 40 acre wood in the middle of the farm a typical midwestern oak opening, with the creek running around the outside of it.

Close up it was less inviting. My brother Patrick and I got stuck out there once, as children, stuck in a thicket of Russian thistle taller than we were. It was August, and they were dry and brown and terrifying. It was like the animated thicket of thorns that grow up around Sleeping Beauty in the film. It was one of the earliest short stories I wrote, the two of us, unable to go forward or back because we were small, and barefoot, and there were thistle prickers everywhere. On the horse path, in the air, no place was safe from those barbed needles.

We finally had to give up and yell for help, had to give up and yell not just once, but for a while, until our grandmother heard us up at the house, a couple of hundred yards away, heard us where she was happily reading a mystery novel upstairs, in her little library nook, her shoes kicked off. She had to put them on, come down to the pasture. There was scolding as she put Patrick on her back, as she kicked off her moccasins for me to walk back in, shoes that were way too big, and weirdly warm, but that protected me from the thistle spines. She’d always rescue you, my grandmother, but she’d scold you at the same time.

It was perhaps my first real encounter with a nature that was spiky, a nature I couldn’t navigate, a wild nature.

I find binary thinking perplexing, and it’s persistence, especially among writers thinking about the ontology of the natural world kind of astonishing. There’s a persistent strain of Cartesian dualism I’ve seen in some younger UK writers, like Hildyard, Helen Macdonald, and even Rebecca May Johnson that I wonder isn’t a byproduct of the UK university system. It’s why I go back to Haraway when I find myself getting agitated, find myself having arguments in the air on dog walks, arguments that Hank finds perplexing, arguments that bring him back to me with the quizzical look herding dogs get when they think you’re giving them a command, but an unclear one.

Haraway notes that feminist theory as she has practiced it all these years is defined by:

“… refusal of typological thinking, binary dualisms, and both relativisms and universalisms of many flavors, [it] contributes a rich array of approaches to emergence, process, historicity, difference, specificity, co-habitation, co-constitution, and contingency. Dozens of feminist writers have refused both relativism and universalism. Subjects, objects, kinds, races, species, genres, and genders are products of their relating. ” (Companion, p. 7)

In this, it’s not just about women. It’s about what the ways we think about gender tell us about the ways we think about everything else. In this, it resembles so much of the exciting new writing we’re seeing from indigenous thinkers — not just Robin Wall Kimmerer’s rightly celebrated Braiding Sweetgrass, but books like Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta, Kin: Thinking with Deborah Bird Rose edited by Thom Van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew, and Becoming Kin by the Anishaabe writer Patty Krawec.

Typing out this list, it occurs to me I’m probably wrong about my earlier assessment that Haraway’s work on co-constitution, on what she calls “situated knowledges” hasn’t entered the mainstream the way Anna Tsing’s work on mycellial networks has. Perhaps she helped open a space in which all this related work by indigenous authors can be seen, and valued, and published. Kinship networks operate in a lot of different ways, among them the kinship networks of ideas. Ideas get out into the world, and make connections with other ideas, and the more people talk about them, the more legible they become. Or perhaps it’s the other direction? Perhaps all these brilliant indigenous thinkers are opening retroactive paths via which we can re-visit earlier theorists like Haraway, in much the way that Kate Briggs, Kate Zambreno and Brian Dillon, each of whom have been writing about Roland Barthes in recent years have brought a renewed attention to his work, have brought new ways of seeing it to the current discourse.

One of the reasons there hasn’t been a newsletter in a bit is that I was pulling together materials for a contest. As I was reworking an essay from the book, I needed to look up details about grizzly bears. On one of the first real hikes Chuck and I ever took together, more than a decade ago now, we had a grizzly encounter. We were walking along a small ridge between the trailhead and where we were going to head up the mountain when Chuck motioned to get down. I was watching the Icelandic horses on the other side of the barbed wire fence. We dropped to the ground, and crept up to where we could peek over the side of the ridge.

There was a grizzly boar about 50 yards away, digging tubers out of the creek bank.

I was terrified. Chuck kept handing me the binoculars, saying unhelpful things like “look, you can see his gleaming incisors.”

We watched that bear for a good fifteen minutes, until he ate his fill, and ambled further down the creek. The whole time, I was braced for a charge. I kept handing the binocs back to Chuck, expecting them to be filled with charging grizzly.

I’ve written about this a couple of times, and I’ve kind of downplayed the danger when I have. Perhaps to keep myself from really thinking about it. We live in one of the few places where humans aren’t the top of the food chain, and most of the time it’s just cool. Like my little black bear this afternoon. Oh look, a bear — what’s it doing?

But looking up stats on how big a young adult grizzly boar might be led me to a sequence of shots from an incident in Yellowstone in 2022, where a sow grizzly in heat, and the gigantic boar who wanted to mate with her, attacked and killed a subadult grizzly (who was her cub) on the side of the road, in full view of tourists (and the ranger who was trying to keep everyone in their cars). Don’t click over if you’re squeamish. It’s a brutal set of photos, of a brutal event.

We live just outside the North Entrance to the park, the one that stays open all winter because it’s the only way folks in Cooke City and Silvergate can get in and out once the Beartooth Pass road closes. Which means we have the wolf people around all winter. You’ll see them at a pullout, with thousands of dollars in spotting scopes, and they’re usually really nice. They’ll let you look through their scopes, will tell you what the wolf packs have been up to — but they’re also really prone to anthropomorphizing the wolves. They give them names, and ascribe characteristics to them — usually in a sentimental way. Their wolves are all noble beasts. Their wolves would never instigate an attack like the one on that sow’s own cub, an attack in which she participated, an attack that left the cub mortally wounded, piled in a heap behind a downed tree. Their wolves would never turn on their own, leaving bits of dismembered wolf scattered around a glade, like the one Chuck found years ago while horn hunting. Their wolves would never go into a killing frenzy and leave dead lambs strewn across a pasture.

I’m not in any way arguing against the reintroduction and protection of wolves. The return of wolves has been a gigantic boon to the local ecosystems. One of the most amazing mornings we had at the cabin involved spotting a pair of wolves way up on an outcrop where Chuck was looking for bull elk, and going outside on the back porch where you could hear them howling.

But I am arguing against the cute-ification of wolves. Or bears. Or mountain lions. Or, if we’re being honest, even the bunnies under our garbage can.

It’s the thing about wilderness, right? It’s both an idea — a site to think with for writers with our sparkly primate brains and shiny laptops — and a very real, material, site of entanglement between humans and animals. One minute, you’re walking on a trail looking at the Icelandic ponies on other side of the barbed wire, and the next minute you’re flat on your belly, peeking over the edge of the hill to watch an actual, real live grizzly bear who is RIGHT THERE. An actual real live grizzly bear who could, if he caught wind of you, or was having a bad day, or thought you were a threat be up that hill and on top of you in a moment.

In those moments, it doesn’t really matter how you are thinking with animals, it matters how you have learned to be with animals. And how they have learned to be with humans. In those moments, if you’re lucky, a real moment of interspecies communication opens up in which you manage to communicate that you are not a threat, or you manage to evade detection at all (though I’d argue that evading detection is a form of communication, especially for narcissistic humans, who tend to think everything is All About Us). In that moment, you are entangled with wild nature in very real ways, which have very real consequences.

In those moments, as our local bear guy, Doug Peacock, once said to me: you’re having a real experience.