A Congress of Animals

If you look at the thumbnail images on the homepage of any streaming service, there is one thing featured on almost all the thumbnails for the various movies and TV series: people. People are the dominant form in these images, even if sometimes they are cartoon people. 

Try this. Go to Netflix, HBO Max, Youtube, or any other streaming service and scroll through the thumbnail images. People are ubiquitous. Occasionally, you will come across a people-less image, but it’s pretty rare. And even then, the featured image for a show might be an image of a cake, or a house or some other object that is for human use or consumption. How often do you see images of trees, for example? Just trees. Or non-human animals - without the humans? To be fair, there are several nature programs to choose from but compared to the human-centered content, it’s still a very small percentage.

I didn’t really notice this myself until my short film, “Tides,” started making the rounds on the film festival circuit a few of years ago. When I would scroll through the catalogue of festival films, I would see a cascade of images of people: person sitting in a recliner looking despondent, people in car, people hiding next to car (to avoid being shot, I assume), person with arm around other person, “bad guy” person looking menacingly through thin veil of a curtain, three young people in living room frozen in comic tableau, two people sitting in a diner and so on. Among the sea of people images, the thumbnail image for “Tides” featured an early morning coastal salt marsh at low tide. No people anywhere. This is when I first started noticing the wall-to-wall-people effect of our media content.

“Tides” (2020)

What’s my point? 

Why is this significant? 

Well, obviously digital media is a big part of our lives. I’m typing this post on an electronic transmitter of several forms of media. I spend a lot of time, perhaps to the confusion of my dogs, looking at glowing rectangles. Media shapes how we see our place in the order of things. We’re very people-centric and while that may seem like an obvious result of us being - well - people, our media output also says something about how we see (or don’t see) the non-human world. I wonder if we keep other lifeforms at the periphery (except for our pets) because it’s easier for us to navigate through the world if we don’t have to share it with toads, or Canadian geese or mosquitoes - especially mosquitos. Of course we do share it, like when we slow down to let a squirrel cross the road. But we only share up to a point, if you consider the fact that human development inevitably displaces plants and animals. It really is odd, when you think about it - that we just assume that the planet is our real estate - and we tolerate other life forms as long as they are not invasive.

I’ve had a strong interest in the more-than-human world all my life. And I still have yet to fully realize that we share the planet with other lifeforms. Of course we do. But - and maybe this is a product of my cultural upbringing - I don’t always get that, really. The 1961 science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land coined the word “grok” to describe a state of complete, experiential understanding. For example, when I was a kid, I knew what adults were and how they generally behaved and I could tell you all about adults. But it wasn’t until I became an adult that I could truly grok what being an adult was. Similarly, a few decades into adulthood, I am slowly coming to grok that we share a planet with other lifeforms and that this planet no more belongs to us than it belongs to them - no really - it belongs to them too. I’m not saying this to exude some sense of moral superiority but rather to remind us both of this fact, because I still have trouble really grokking it.

When it comes to that area of our collective attention that we partition off for environmental concerns, we tend to focus on climate change and less on the sixth great mass extinction event. It furthermore seems that we zoom in on climate change as it relates to humanity - sea level rise as it will affect our coastal cities, global warming as it affects our economy (and even our cup of coffee). The media doesn’t seem to spend nearly as much time on how climate change displaces animals and other life forms. 

~ There are people, and there are animals. ~

That in and of itself is a weird statement. We might more accurately say, there are people and other animals. Or better yet, there are human people, and dog people, and elephant people and dolphin people, and so on. I find my perspective shifts with relation to other animals when I add “people” after each type of animal. For example, I’m typing this blog post on the beach as some bird-people fly over in v-formation. I’m hoping I can look out at the waves at some point and see a dolphin person or two.

I mentioned to my wife this thought I had of appending the word “people” to non-human organisms. “Why non use the word ‘voices’ instead?” she suggested. Why not people? This sent me down a mini rabbit hole. I wanted to find out what constitutes a person because, in my mind at least, it’s easier to see other life forms as fellow citizens if I see them as people. Again, I realize this speaks to me being a product of my culture. According to orthodox schools of thought, what makes a person a person is self-awareness, other-awareness and rational thought. Does this mean then that human babies aren’t people and if not, when exactly do they eventually become people? As it turns out, an evolving scholarship claims that other animals who exhibit these traits can in fact be classified as persons. Mark Rowlands, author of Can Animals Be Persons? makes precisely this point. I don’t think this is a radical idea - certainly no more radical than corporate personhood.

I started thinking about our ecosystem crises and how we human people tend to see our best hope as having other human people find solutions. It makes sense on a certain level. We created the mess so we should clean up the mess, right? But I wonder if part of why we are in the mess in the first place is because we didn’t consult the non-human people. Should we have had a multi-species governing body - a Congress of Animals? (I haven’t forgotten about the tree people or mushroom people or the people so tiny I don’t even know what to call them. But I think it’s easier for us to conceptualize meeting with non-humans if we start with our closest non-human relatives, the animal people, and go from there). 

I know this sounds like it plays better as a cartoon than a serious discussion (though my discussions are never too serious). But if we really do share this planet with other lifeforms - and to me it seems logical that we do - it also makes sense that we would need to engage in this multi-species collaboration.

I have no idea what the hell that would look like but it would be pretty far out.

***

I feel there is another dimension to this that needs clarification so that this post doesn’t fall into the anthropomorphic trap. I had mentioned the cartoon aspect earlier and one thing cartoons are great at is anthropomorphizing animals. So you get upright dogs with pockets who carry on logical conversations and things like that. Basically human-animal hybrids. Maybe we have a tendency to turn animals into people because we recognize that we do share something with other animals to varying degrees. We don’t often get, however, that it’s not a matter of making animals more like humans but rather recognizing that there is this weird liminal place in between a non-human and a human animal. In another post “Speaking As Trees” I list a few animals and the percentage of DNA we share with each of these animals. For example, we share 98% of our DNA with pigs (though of course this DNA is arranged differently). There must be a place where we and the pigs meet, that is neither human nor pig but some alien yet familiar place in between.

I feel like I’ve had those rare moments with my dogs - especially as they get older for some reason - where we do meet in the neither human nor dog realm but rather a broader mammal realm. I remember the first time this happened. I was folding laundry on the bed while our first dog, a Chiweenie named Dru, lay on the duvet right next to a stack of bar towels. At one point, she casually craned her head around to look up at me and I felt like I was seeing beyond her dog-ness as she made eye contact. It was almost as if she was thinking, “they put me in this dog suit. What’s it like in the human suit?” I realize I’m probably projecting that bit of imaginary dialogue, but Dru’s look still transcended pure dog-ness. I’ve tried to see it in our newest and youngest dog, a Cheagle named Cordy. Nothing. Cordy is all dog. Maybe as she gets older things will change but right now Cordy seems to have no interest in exploring beyond her dog identity.

This has all made me wonder if in the Congress of Animals (and eventually Congress of Lifeforms) there exists a common language. I would imagine that this language is so strange and alien to our modern sensibilities that it would disrupt our sense of reality. To provide a sense of just how strange this might be, imagine for a moment that the trees we notice as we walk outside are also noticing us - but where that noticing takes on a vastly different form. At first, it would be a major paradigm shift, but eventually this common language could help us - all of us - find solutions to this existential crisis.