WILD SOULS: What makes an animal wild?
We want landscapes to be wild, 'untrammeled by man'. But we need to rethink the word 'wild'. What matters is not purity but autonomy. Wildness can be re-conceived as creatures doing what they want to do.
BOYCE UPHOLT: Before Zion was a name for a national park, it was another word for Jerusalem. Eventually, it morphed into a metaphor, shorthand for the promised land. Its most famous description appears in the book of Isaiah: in Zion, the wolf “shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.” As Emma Marris notes in her new book, Wild Souls, most of us interpret this as allegory. Instead we understand the opposite to be true: eat or be eaten—such is life in the wild. But at least a few people think that the ideal posited in the biblical text is one worth striving for.
The nonprofit Wild Animal Initiative, for example, believes we should reduce all kinds of animal suffering, even, perhaps, suffering due to predation. Is this a leap forward in ethical thinking, or softhearted nonsense? That’s one of the questions posed by Marris’s fascinating work, which examines our responsibility as humans toward wild animals. Though Marris is trained as a journalist, here she finds herself “doing philosophy,” as she puts it early on…
The most famous philosophical works on animals—like Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, a central text in the veganism movement—have focused on pets and domestic livestock. As for all the less than tamed creatures, our ethical obligations “are often presented as being straightforward: we should simply leave them alone and protect their habitat,” Marris writes. Wildness is a synonym for the nonhuman, right? So our presence can only muck things up.
This has led to an obsession with purity. We want landscapes “untrammeled by man,” as it’s put in the Wilderness Act, a seminal 1964 law that protected nine million acres. We want wolves that are wolves—wild beasts, their bloodlines undiluted. Marris describes a recent case in Washington State in which a black wolf was impregnated by a domestic sheepdog. One animal was an endangered species, the other someone’s property; each is enmeshed in an entirely different legal infrastructure. What would the pups even be? State officials had a clear answer: a threat. The hybrids might taint the genes of nearby wolf packs. So the expectant wolf mother was captured and spayed…
Marris believes that our idea of wildness—our obsession with purity—is misguided. No animal remains untouched by the human hands. And not just because we’ve entered the Anthropocene. Yes, sure, our fossil-fuel economy has completely reshaped the landscape (Marris notes that one of the most obvious steps we can take to help wild creatures is to fight to keep the atmosphere as cool as possible), but even thousands of years ago, Indigenous people were grooming and cultivating nearly every corner of the earth. To call something wild is not just to indulge in romanticism but also to engage in a “colonial power play,” as Marris writes: “Our ‘wildernesses’ are just places where colonialism left the trees standing.”
Once you toss out the fetish for the “natural,” new options emerge. We could, for example, build a high-tech Zion, a world where we feed tigers cutlets of cellular meat that’s been raised in labs. Or if we can’t end predation, we might temper it, planting sedative pellets under animals’ skins so that when the kid is seized by the leopard, a sensor can note that it’s time to release the drug. Marris, though, after conjuring this vision, concedes that it’s “faintly disgusting.” Humility matters, even if purity doesn’t.
She’s not convinced humans are smart enough to pull off such a grand intervention without making ugly mistakes. Instead she counsels readers to rethink the word “wild.” What matters is not purity but autonomy. Wildness can be reconceived as creatures doing what they want to do. This leaves room for humans to have a meaningful relationship with nature, so long as it’s by mutual consent… To grant to every animal this kind of autonomy requires a grand act of imagination. According to one estimate, there are more than a hundred billion wild vertebrates on land alone… The real challenge is the ethics, the act of imagining our appropriate place in that world. SOURCE…
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