Everyday life is full of situations that may pass unnoticed even though they are significant. Everyday habits, close and incorporated, which we no longer notice – behaviours, eating habits, opinions, attitudes and not least, the words we use.
There is a certain kind of words; they just exist and go unnoticed in everyday speech. Despite their indefinite meaning they have a crushing power. They don't mean much, yet they shape cultures and control thoughts. The word ‘what’ for example.
The question “What is that?” – sounds harmless, but forces the answer to take the form of a definition, a description of an object. – “What is that?” – “It is a swan!” – “What is a swan?”
”A swan is an aquatic bird that belongs to the duck family and the Anserinae subfamily. Swans do not feed their young but show where the food is and how to eat. There are seven species of Swan in the world ... the weight varies between ... the length, how many eggs, live how long, the food consists of ...”
The answer to the question ’what’ leads away from the living swan and straight onto an abstract ground where the facts of the encyclopaedias transform the concrete bird into an abstract idea. The living, present bird turns into an abstract object and ceases to exist.
There is a question that allows the individual swan to remain, a question that you formulate silently to yourself and is about the relationship between you and the swan: ”Who are you?”
The Swedish author Kerstin Ekman writes about a hunter's unconscious perspective shift from ‘what’ to ‘whom’ after a magical meeting with a wolf.
It is convenient to see reality in categories. You avoid nuances and individual deviations. It sometimes helps, especially at a time when it seems like everyone has to have an opinion on everything.
When people are placed in categories such as culture, religion, political orientation, profession, gender, or whatever you can think of, the question ’who’ shifts to the comfortable ’what’ where the definitions and descriptions are clear and ready to be used. The world becomes simplified and ironically, life becomes more complicated.
With a negligible effort you will know a great deal: how Muslims are, how socialists think, why immigration policy fails, that cyclists are reckless, politicians corrupt, in short what is a breeding ground for conspiracy theories and populism. Sorting reality with such a coarse sieve is not risk-free.
That people place each other in categories is a social problem; a civilization that regards nature as an object faces an existential dilemma.
It is not unusual that those who have seen this clip notice nothing more than two cats and a parrot that are examining a box turned upside-down. I have been through it several times. They have seen what the animals do, can describe what happened, but have not discovered that they are three individuals, three friends and their joint journey of discovery.
There are also some who have seen beyond the immediate notion and let empathy and imagination play. Perhaps they have then seen the similarity with three ten-year-olds who discovered a secret, an old abandoned underground cellar. The door is ajar. It is dark in there. A little creepy. But exciting.
They are a small group of comrades with a common task and each has their special role. Cali (the white-haired cockatoo) is initially the investigative pioneer who is encouraged to the front line by Jackson (the black cat1), but still doesn't quite venture into the box. In the end, it seems that Aubrey (the tawny cat) thinks it takes too long and decides to be first in.
Eventually all three end up inside the box, but it is not in this clip. Incredibly, all three could fit in the small box.
Watch the clip again. The pace is slow, their interplay is easy to follow—the sensitivity, the caution, the curiosity, the respect, their friendship.
That a couple of cats and a bird have something in common that is not related to food does not follow from their position in nature, but here they live in a family with humans as the hub. In security and the absence of external enemies, they have had the opportunity to discover each other and develop their relationships.
A scene like this can be seen in different ways. You can watch it without empathy, like a film or a play with some funny elements. Nice to have seen, but not an earth-shattering experience.
In the same way, you can treat the neighbor's dog as a thing that wags its tail, is called ‘Bruno’ and whine when you halt too long for a chat. Or an individual with his own way of relating to the world, someone you greet and take seriously?
To immerse yourself in the action like the video with the cats and the cockatoo is no different from being affected by the plot in a movie. Mere observation, even if done with scientific accuracy, gives no experience, no connection. Just like with a feature film, you have to try to get into the characters.
To be able to experience the individual in an animal requires, of course, a way of looking at animals in a way that makes that perspective possible. You must understand that you see are individuals, each with their own way of relating to the world, their own experiences and preferences, their own way of communicating.
The animals around the box are living subjects, three independent personalities in interaction and even if the distance from now to the recorded event is great in time and space, you can discover them as thinking and feeling beings.
”Who are you?” – Two cats and a parrot have found their respective answers without even asking the question.
Where should we draw the limits? Understanding towards the squirrel at the bird table, the daw on the chimney, the magpie in the apple tree, the bumblebee, the aphid, the earthworm, the springtail in the compost, the mould on the bread, the ant dragging away a piece of an apple, the ant under the stairs, the lilac, the rosebay willowherb, the dandelion, the rowan at the gate, the couch grass in the garden, the waybread on the path—everything may not invite immediate understanding, but even if you don't expect an answer, you can make a relationship possible by turning an ‘it’ to ‘you’ and thus show respect also towards what you do not understand yet.
Never humanize an animal's behaviour has been a common saying that has lost most of its relevance and now is more a call for precaution. Rather humanizing could be a way to understand animal behaviour. No wonder, since human behaviour is a legacy from all other animals around us.
The more non-human animals resemble us human animals, the easier it becomes to find a recognizable understanding that links us together. I am certain that a Roman snail knows nothing about highway speed limits and my understanding of decayed leaves is limited. Of course, it is easier to understand other monkeys such as chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans.
The following clip shows how easy it sometimes is to connect with a recognizable human perspective. A macaque mother as a swimming schoolteacher and an improvised amusement park with room for an adrenaline rush.
We see animals behave in ways that make them almost human. Let us look at it the other way around: it is not animals that behave like humans, it is humans who share much of animal behaviour since we are animals, one of the Great Apes. We share many biological structures—nervous system, metabolism, enzyme system, sense organs—with other species far back in evolution.
Life on Earth has developed with the need to receive external and internal information to be able to react on harmful and favourable circumstances, with the need for energy and metabolism for construction, operation and maintenance, with the need to find partners for reproduction and cooperation.
Humans have many behaviours, reactions and expressions in common with other animals. Friendship, faithful relationships, infidelity, cheating, deception, curiosity, anxiety, suffering, sadness, joy, laughter, play, anger, care, all this can be found in the wild.
The consciousness that was denied to animals during the behaviourist era of the twentieth century is now beginning to be rediscovered. Lately it has become known that also fish can feel anxiety and pain and that even insects have cognitive abilities, they can observe and reflect, something that, among other things, bumblebees have shown in several scientific studies.2
Bumblebees can not only solve problems, learn from each other, they also show different talent profiles. There is research showing that even banana flies have individual behavioural traits3.
The little penguin has been taken into care and will now be released. It is easy to guess what is moving within its soul the two times it hesitates and looks back. First immediately after it was put down on the beach. Then the deceleration that makes it almost lose its balance. It stops short, hesitates.
The sea wins in the end, a small dot among the waves. The sojourn with the people may be fading away, but perhaps something has been revealed to us.