I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union
And makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion
An’ fellow mortal!
- From ‘To a Mouse’ by Robert Burns
I remember asking Judith Kerr if the tiger symbolised the 1960s sexual revolution where normal mores and suburban life became upended by this wild and exotic creature. She told me no, it was about a tiger coming to tea.
- Emily Maitlis on interviewing the author of The Tiger Who Came to Tea
One hot rural summer in the early 80s, my mother rescued a mole. Healthy moles are a rare sight above ground, their presence usually signalled by earth-piles from tunnelling. It was about five or six inches long, with two pink shovels for paws, tiny eyes, and a bleeding nose. She put it in a shoebox to cool down, adding water and greenery, worms being impossible to find in the baked earth. Mole soon began to perk up. When the rain arrived at last, she returned it to the same spot. The next time she checked, the mole had vanished, plunged back into its subterranean world.
I am slightly obsessed with this story, probably because growing up my favourite books involved wild animals and animal companions. My family had many pets over the years: rabbit, dog, cats, hamsters, an unintentionally expansive clan of guinea pigs. But bonding with a wild animal, a lost fox cub or hedgehog or squirrel, was (and remains) the dream. Yet within this fantasy a tension exists, between respecting the wildness of undomesticated animals and the longing to interact with them on a basis of mutual affection.
I was reminded of this ambiguity while watching David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet on Netflix, the naturalist’s self-described witness statement about ecological destruction over his lifespan. Rather sheepishly, I admit that I find it hard to concentrate on most Attenborough-narrated documentaries for their full runtime. Although breath-taking, the time-lapsed, high-definition images have a kind of hyperreality that creates a glaze of remoteness. The sight of the crew following and filming the animals is mostly erased to favour a style of omnipresence (separated ‘filming-of’ segments are included at the end), with Attenborough’s pleasantly soporific narration the very voice of God.
A Life on Our Planet includes footage from earlier BBC programmes, beginning in the 1950s with Zoo Quest. Here, Attenborough appears within the camera frame, and not just as the lone hero: local guides and tribespeople are also present. In these clips, they pick up, hold, and carry all sorts of animals. Leaving aside the obvious issue of changes in the ethics and practices of conservation and wildlife filmmaking over the decades, I am struck by how dramatically my engagement deepens when shown these grainy snippets of humans and wild animals together.
When I mention this to my pal Magda, she tells me about mirror neurons, which were discovered during trials in the 80s and 90s involving macaque monkeys, and later observed in humans and songbirds. The theory goes that mirror neurons are stimulated both when we perform an action ourselves and when we observe another performing the same action. Some scientists have suggested that this aids learning through imitation and the ability to understand others’ intentions. When I see Attenborough handling wild animals, my mirror-neurons react as though I were the one holding the snake or the platypus, creating a greater sense of empathy and intimacy.
This mirroring in nature can extend to the realm of nurture, where fairy tales and animal stories give shape to dreams of wild companionship. As a child, like the characters I read about, I wanted to ride on a polar bear to an enchanted castle in a mountain, shapeshift to learn animal wisdom with Merlyn, have a sarcastic cat mentor accompany me on a quest, and commune with Aslan, the magical golden lion who is ‘good’ but not ‘safe’. * The prevalence of these kinds of stories in myth, folklore, art, and literature across the world reveals a profound desire to pair animals and humans.
*
John Berger’s 1977 essay Why Look at Animals? envisions a human-animal dynamic as a way of seeing, a gaze across ‘a narrow abyss of non-comprehension’. This produced a unique sense of companionship due to animals’ like and unlike-ness, their ‘parallel lives’. In Europe and North America (Berger specifies), processes of capitalism, imperialism, and technological advances physically marginalised animals and sentimentalised their significance. In a 70s urban zoo, where children complain about the lack of movement from lethargic animals in cramped enclosures, Berger encapsulates a sense of profound disconnection:
That look between animal and man, which may have played a crucial role in the development of human society, and with which, in any case, all men had always lived until less than a century ago, has been extinguished. Looking at each animal, the unaccompanied zoo visitor is alone. As for the crowds, they belong to a species which has at last been isolated.
Berger is writing both about a physical diminishment of proximity and a psychological state of dislocation. The habitats of iconic zoo animals are usually those ‘exotic’ to the UK; imagined in distant lands removed from humans (although every place is local to someone). Wildlife documentaries, unlike zoos, can conceal the bars of the ever-shrinking cages created by deforestation, pollution, and melting ice (although, I should note that, in response to mounting criticism, Attenborough documentaries have started to show the effects of climate crisis with a greater sense of urgency). As these environments are destroyed, many people express a yearning for a rediscovery of ‘the wild’ or ‘the wilderness’. Certain conservationists and farmers campaign for a ‘rewilding’ in Britain to increase biodiversity, including the reintroduction of apex predators like lynx or wolves, but these proposals have proved polarising to say the least.
Meanwhile, British culture often lionises individuals (usually men) who possess an affinity with wild animals. Other than Attenborough, there is the naturalist Gerald Durrell, whose My Family and Other Animals (1956) was another book I read repeatedly when I was younger. It describes his time on Corfu as a child in the 1930s, collecting and learning about animals amidst the humorous misadventures of his family. It has been adapted for television at least three times, the latest being a sun-drenched series on ITV. Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water (1960) recounts the relationship between the author and an otter called Mijbil, brought from the Iraqi Marshes to live on the shore of the idyllic Camusfeàrna (Sandaig in the Scottish Hebrides).
In the book, Maxwell seems to collect animals compulsively. Between otters, he briefly keeps a ring-tailed lemur called Kiko in his London flat (returned zoo-wards when she slashes his tibial artery, almost causing him to bleed to death), then a bush baby (‘a really crashing bore’), before settling on some tropical birds. This reflects a contemporary culture where it was possible to pick up a lion cub from Harrods department store (curtailed by the Endangered Species Act of 1976). Despite its charm and humour, Maxwell’s narrative at times comes across as narcissistic, confirming his singularity among his own kind. He is particularly proud of the taxonomic practices that result in Mijbil’s subspecies of otter being named after him (Lutrogale perspicillati maxwelli). Thus, he joins the club of men who have an ‘aura of romance’ as
creators, partaking a little of the deity who had contributed to the panorama of bright living creatures.
There are many instances in Bright Water when the suffering of animals appears acute. For example, the fiasco of a series of interconnecting flights transporting Mij from Iraq to London, while superficially amusing, ends with the young otter in a temporary coma of travel-shock. At Camusfeàrna, Mijbil becomes accustomed to wander freely and is killed by a local man on the road. Yet despite this and other tragedies after the book was published, Maxwell never questions his entitlement to keeping otters and other wild creatures as his household pets. Too often, the wish fulfilment of human and wild animal interaction is to the detriment of the latter. This demand for closeness and handling without consideration of the creatures’ wellbeing underlies current abusive practices in parts of the wildlife tourism sector, fuelling the creation of dubious ‘sanctuaries’ and cruel practices like elephant-trekking and bear circuses.
*
Despite the authentic love and fascination that many people show towards them, ultimately animals are often treated as the moons that revolve around human planets. But is it even possible to decentre the human in our relations with wild animals? My Family and Other Animals does to an extent, the interweave of eccentric human and animal behaviour creating a kind of Spotter’s Handbook encompassing all species.
Wild animals’ like and unlikeness to humans draws attention to the ways in which they simultaneously invite and resist symbolism, revealing the uncertainties of anthropocentric perspectives. Yoko Tawada’s novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear plays with this balance of proximity and distance while telling the stories of three generations of polar bears. Memoirs begins with an unnamed bear in the Soviet Union writing her autobiography after attending a conference. Her daughter Tosca is a circus performer in East Germany, and her son Knut is raised in the Berlin Zoo after reunification. Through them, Tawada explores the enlodgement of animals in systems of meaning and knowledge, while also imagining what it is like to inhabit their creaturely world. The bears’ sense of smell, for example, shapes their experiences and perceptions in a fundamentally different way to humans, who usually rely more on sight.
Tawada’s dreamlike narrative has a sliding scale of how anthropomorphised the polar bears are by those around them, a cyclical giving and rescinding of ‘human rights.’ At the zoo, Knut observes how humans insist on saying that he comes from the North Pole despite being born in Berlin; he is not considered a Berliner because of his white fur. He dreams of his ancestors and the Arctic, imagining the North Pole to be ‘as sweet and nourishing as mother’s milk’. The bears’ experiences evoke the processes of othering and assimilation familiar to many immigrants or refugees, including Tawada herself as a Tokyo-born writer living in Berlin and writing in both Japanese and German.
Yet the bears also disrupt the musings and analogies of humankind’s projections. Knut’s carer Matthias, who initially looks after the little cub round the clock, picks him up because he wants to stare into a polar bear’s eyes like an old explorer in a book he once read:
‘Your eyes aren’t empty mirrors – you reflect human beings. I hope this doesn’t make you mortally unhappy.’
But:
Knut wanted to be a wrestler, not a mirror, and attacked this boring man who was trying to be a philosopher for a while.
Both Tosca and Knut really existed. Knut (2006-2011) was hand-reared at the Berlin Zoo after being rejected by his mother. He became a media sensation, raising awareness around climate change and earning the zoo millions of euros. This proved controversial, with animal rights activists suggesting that he should have been put down rather than raised by humans. In this instance, the polar bear, despite being born in captivity to begin with, is insufficiently wild, not separate enough.
Yet Tawada’s narrative, at times desperately sad, still celebrates cross-species connection, claiming space for genuine companionship between humans and wild animals. Sometimes they bond through being just as constrained as each other. At the East German circus, Tosca and her human co-performer Barbara share dreams with each other. The close of their popular act is a delicately performed kiss, where Tosca scoops a sugar lump from Barbara’s mouth. At Berlin Zoo years later, Knut reveres Matthias ‘for having sucked and cared for a creature like me who was not at all similar to him.’
The boundaries between bear and human collapse. Matthias is ‘a true mammal’.
*
Is it possible to strike a balance that gives wild animals their autonomy without reifying a division that merely confirms human exceptionalism? I am not certain but, as I write this, rather than daydreaming which animal would be my ideal companion, I wonder: Am I a good companion to wild animals?
Even in the nature-depleted UK, we are still surrounded by undomesticated creatures. They are not always as charismatic as an otter or polar bear cub. Encounters can be as mundane as a spider crawling across the ceiling or scruffy pigeons on a telephone wire. Curiosity about and empathy with other beings, including other humans, can produce more complex and thought-provoking understandings of what animals and humans mean to each other. In an interview, Yoko Tawada reminds us that
Matter morphs constantly and is immortal, though a human being won’t return as such but will be part of the soil, of plants, and perhaps of animals […]
Maybe wild companionship does not require a relationship between a special individual and a certain species. It simply means an awareness of being companioned every day by the non-human world around us.
Nevertheless, I will still be keeping my eyes open for any moles above ground.
*North Child by Edith Patou; The Once and Future King by T.H White; The Abhorsen Trilogy by Garth Nix; Song of the Lioness and The Immortals Quartet by Tamora Pierce; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and other Chronicles of Narnia by C.S Lewis.
Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear was first published in 2014, with an English translation by Susan Bernofsky published in 2016. Check out your local library, or order it here.
I hope you enjoyed this issue! I am conscious that there are many ways of seeing human-wild animal companionship and animal stories that I had to omit. What are some of your favourite human-animal stories? What do you think about zoos and wildlife filmmaking? Did you have any favourite children’s books with wild animal companions? Have you ever rescued a wild animal?
Earth-born companions pt. 1
When I was wee (6 or 7?) my Dad visited and we stayed with some of his friends in the countryside near Oxford. We found a disorientated Mole that kept wandering back into the road. I was delighted and nervous when Dad picked it up and brought it home to look after overnight, before returning it the next day. The best part was that it peed in his pocket!
Something I took away from reading 'Braiding Sweetgrass' by Robin Kimmerer was the call to observe and learn what plants / animals / the natural even 'inanimate' world can teach us. That changes the balance of authority and power and would be a humble way to see ourselves in the world.
Loved this, reminds me of my "pet" hedgehog. Also, love the question " Am I a good companion to wild animals?". That's really something to think on...