Relating with Our Creature-Kin, Part 2
On last Sunday’s blog, we began exploring the wild world of our creature-kin. (https://prairiewoods.org/wild-thing-you-make-my-heart-sing/) We looked at our perception of other-than-human kin in their own integrity, rather than who they are solely in relationship to us humans. Now we shift our attention to our ethics, our practical ways of relating with our creature-kin in light of what we’re learning. Some of what we are learning by going deeper into the topic is a matter of shifting our perspective from anthropocentric (human-centered) ways of seeing to other-centered ways.
Many Prairiewoods friends know about my Siberian Husky, Wolfie, who was nearly 18 years old when she died. She was among my greatest and most beloved teachers in life. (https://prairiewoods.org/wolfie-wisdom/) Since she required daily walks in the trees for her sustenance, I always carried water with us for the journey, especially in the hotter months. Each time after she would lap up what seemed like gallons of water to slake her thirst, she would make a beeline to me to give me a kiss. For about 10 years, I was thinking that she was offering a quid-pro-quo affectionate acknowledgment of my forethought in being a good dog-mom! It was not until encountering a wolf biologist and his photographer in the back country while hiking in Glacier National Park that I learned something else might be going on with our daily exchange. I had interpreted Wolf’s kisses as gratitude and affection, but the wolf aficionados had observed wolf mamas in the wild giving their (and other pack’s!) babies a drink after they themselves had their fill of water. As a member of her “pack” in which she considered herself the alpha, Wolfie may have been ensuring that I received the water from her mouth, a sign of her care-taking of me. She also did this with Albie, the white Husky puppy who was the omega-male of our pack for 3 1/2 years. Wolfie was mothering. She was taking care of me. What shifted was that I started seeing her from her wolf-mama’s vantage point, rather than exclusively with my dog-mom’s eyes.
The all-important shift in perspective can help us understand and relate with greater compassion and awareness for the “other’s” way of seeing and being. In her book, Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love. theologian Elizabeth Johnson challenges another prevailing interpretation in evolutionary theory that humans are in some way superior and “lords of the jungle,” instead insisting that we humans must reverence, protect, and learn from the creature-kin with whom we share creation, not dominate and “own” them. We must learn from them that we are all part of one comprehensive whole, that we need each other in a fiercely inter-connected way. Johnson dismantles the oft-cited dictum of Darwinian enthusiasts, the notion of “survival of the fittest” as incongruous with Darwin’s main contribution to understanding the process of evolution. Darwin’s theory of natural selection highlighted cooperation and interdependence among species and noted how they play a prominent role in species evolution, significantly more than competition and dominance. Creatures communicate and cooperate at a fantastically complex level, allowing them to adapt and thrive in less-than-hospitable environments and among natural predators, and that consistent practice actually alters their course of evolution. The strongest, indeed the “fittest” among them, evolve to include skills for inter-dependence and cooperation precisely because such skills enable them to survive and thrive where other species fail. In other words, they are masters at the art of collaboration much more than in the realm of competition, which is admittedly harsh and brutal, as we humans know from our own species. When a common predator or environmental danger threatens the whole group, their strength is in their communication, cooperation and union.
What can we learn from the advanced cooperation among the exquisite variety of species of creation? For humanists, the lesson may serve as a blueprint of sorts for building societies based on the notion of the common good. For believers, love of the natural world in its profound abundance and diversity is intrinsic to faith in a loving Creator, and our concomitant care and protection of all creation is paramount to an ethical life. We cannot be faithful to our vocation as planetary caretakers without a serious reconsideration and realignment of our relationship with our creature-kin. We are not created to dominate, own or control our creature-kin, but to care for, reverence and learn from them. Cooperation, inter-dependence, unity. Trees know how to do it. Birds, fish, rodents and wolves know how to do it.
Can we humans learn the same? Or does our ego, self-centeredness, desire to be #1 or even our perennial sadness get in the way?
Eco-philosopher David Abram, in his book Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, has this to say about our kinship with Earthly creatures:
“Is it possible to grow a worthy cosmology by attending closely to our encounters with other creatures, and with the elemental textures and contours of our locale? We are by now so accustomed to the cult of expertise that the very notion of honoring and paying heed to our directly felt experience of things—of insects and wooden floors, of broken-down cars and bird-pecked apples and the scents rising from the soil—seems odd and somewhat misguided as a way to find out what’s worth knowing … Here, as before, the sensuous world—the creaturely world directly encountered by our animal senses—is commonly assumed to be a secondary, derivative reality understood only by reference to more primary domains that exist elsewhere, behind the scenes … This directly experienced terrain, rippling with cricket rhythms and scoured by the tides, is the very realm now most ravaged by the spreading consequences of our disregard. Many long-standing and lousy habits have enabled our callous treatment of surrounding nature, empowering us to clear-cut, dam up, mine, develop, poison, or simply destroy sensuous earth as a subordinate space—whether as sinful plane, riddled with temptation, needing to be transcended and left behind; or a menacing region needing to be beaten and bent to our will; or simply a vaguely disturbing dimension to be avoided, superseded, and explained away … Even among ecologists and environmental activists, there’s a tacit sense that we’d better not let our awareness come too close to our creaturely sensations, that we’d best keep our arguments girded with statistics and our thoughts buttressed with abstractions, lest we succumb to an overwhelming grief—a heartache born of our organism’s instinctive empathy with the living land and its cascading losses. Lest we be bowled over and broken by our dismay at the relentless devastation of the biosphere.”
—David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, p. 4–8
Already, great sea-changes are occurring in our everyday language and awareness. For example, many “pet owners” have begun re-languaging their familial relationship with their canine, feline and other domestic dwellers, objecting that they do not “own” their creatures, but they are really part of their family. They live with their creature-kin gratefully, with reverence and joy, learning from them, trusting them, loving them with profound affection and joy. Many humans truly do consider their creatures as members of their human families, or the humans as adopted into their creatures’ “packs.” When we begin shifting to a wider, wilder “We,” we begin asking questions about how we relate with our creature-kin in our daily lives. What do they need, require or want as members of the global community, not just how can they serve our needs, do our bidding and make us feel more fulfilled? How might we serve to protect the WHOLE living biosphere with our creature-kin as our teachers and mentors?
Whoever/whatever we draw closer to and learn about, we can grow to love. Once we can grow in love, we nurture, protect and grow in relationship. Once we grow in relationship, we can see/experience a wider “We.” How wide is our “We?” How wide do we want it to be?
Questions for Reflection:
1) What does our new learning about our creature-kin teach us about how to relate with them in their own right?
2) How can we continue to shift to other-centered perspectives, to learn new languages of our creature-kin?
3) What questions does this new learning raise about the ethics of:
- environmental protection for wildlife habitat, including resources of clean water, food, clean air and territory for nesting and hunting;
- other-than-human creature rights;
- breeding and consumption of other-than-human creatures primarily as food;
- use of other-than-human creatures for medical research, labor, “entertainment” such as racing, fighting, competing for prizes;
- use of creatures for clothing, jewelry, furniture upholstery, floor coverings, hunting trophies, souvenirs;
- zoos and aquariums;
- abuse, neglect, or euthanasia of unwanted creatures;
- other questions raised for you while considering this topic?
—Laura Weber, Prairiewoods associate director and retreats coordinator