499
53.2 Ineluctable Recognitions
Much that is paradoxical in the history of the natural sciences concerns that inevitable recognition, usually hitting hard quite early in a human life, of violence
throughout biology. Assiduous philosophies to counteract aggression are unlikely to
ever impede carnivory, within our own homes, and certainly not out beyond our
personal borders of control. The Serengeti is not showing signs of a major transformation, in that domain, despite the fact so much of the biomass, from shrub land to
the elephant, and the largest assemblage of other large vertebrates (all of the ungulates) are herbivores. But the biological paradox is more than violence/non- violence.
It speaks to the relations between beings and exacts an expectation, if often unrequited, of some kind of chance recognition. When people connect with one another,
it is a currency; the parlance of everyday; a fluent reality. When we do so with other
species, the amplitude at once invents a new form of equilibrium that is typically
cast in the form of awe; and not infrequently, gratitude for the experience.
With so-called companion animals the joy has become customary for thousands
of years. But our sphere of such companions is limited to so few species (for most
people) that they number about the same as those few remaining chosen apple cultivars, a few hundred, where—not that long ago—there were, according to Dan
Bussey’s seven-volume Illustrated History of Apples in the United States and
Canada, over 18,000 varieties.
9
In seeking to expand the realms of communication
with other species, we tend, from a daily practical standpoint, to focus on very few.
A dog, a cat, a bird, a rabbit, a hamster, a turtle, a fish, a horse, for example. It then
gets very complicated on farms and ranches, where alleged love easily turns to complicity in killing or abandonment, the price of doing business.
Underlying all of the suffering that is inflicted in the goal of achieving some level
of soul satisfaction in the company of another species (pet stores teeming with the
caged and forgotten) is an altogether lost language of companionship. To be sure,
there are millions of people who derive the vast majority of their true solace from
dogs and cats. But we’re speaking of the encounters in the wild where, for so many
it is the mere distant glimpse of a non-domesticated Other that is transformative.
Our epiphanies make their way, into the biological languages (and whole careers)
that have sought to catalogue and gain some kind of understanding, beyond mere
two-week photographic safaris which, when they come to their inevitable ends, see
us hastening, as a species, to familiar domesticities. To lives surrounded by,
immersed in images (multimedia) and memories. These are community ordained,
socially prescribed modes of communicating with one another.
The source of that lasting injunction to be forthrightly attuned to Nature, is probably somewhere else, back out in the wild. And all fears aside, what most humans
actually crave are those non-human encounters. Lacking them, a train of ants across
9 Numbers worldwide would have been triple that. See “Meet the Man on a Quest to Document
Every Apple in North America,” by Rohini Chaki, Atlas Obscura, June 18, 2019, https://www.
atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-apples, Accessed July 17, 2020.
53.2 Ineluctable Recognitions
53.2 Ineluctable Recognitions
Much that is paradoxical in the history of the natural sciences concerns that inevitable recognition, usually hitting hard quite early in a human life, of violence
throughout biology. Assiduous philosophies to counteract aggression are unlikely to
ever impede carnivory, within our own homes, and certainly not out beyond our
personal borders of control. The Serengeti is not showing signs of a major transformation, in that domain, despite the fact so much of the biomass, from shrub land to
the elephant, and the largest assemblage of other large vertebrates (all of the ungulates) are herbivores. But the biological paradox is more than violence/non- violence.
It speaks to the relations between beings and exacts an expectation, if often unrequited, of some kind of chance recognition. When people connect with one another,
it is a currency; the parlance of everyday; a fluent reality. When we do so with other
species, the amplitude at once invents a new form of equilibrium that is typically
cast in the form of awe; and not infrequently, gratitude for the experience.
With so-called companion animals the joy has become customary for thousands
of years. But our sphere of such companions is limited to so few species (for most
people) that they number about the same as those few remaining chosen apple cultivars, a few hundred, where—not that long ago—there were, according to Dan
Bussey’s seven-volume Illustrated History of Apples in the United States and
Canada, over 18,000 varieties.
9
In seeking to expand the realms of communication
with other species, we tend, from a daily practical standpoint, to focus on very few.
A dog, a cat, a bird, a rabbit, a hamster, a turtle, a fish, a horse, for example. It then
gets very complicated on farms and ranches, where alleged love easily turns to complicity in killing or abandonment, the price of doing business.
Underlying all of the suffering that is inflicted in the goal of achieving some level
of soul satisfaction in the company of another species (pet stores teeming with the
caged and forgotten) is an altogether lost language of companionship. To be sure,
there are millions of people who derive the vast majority of their true solace from
dogs and cats. But we’re speaking of the encounters in the wild where, for so many
it is the mere distant glimpse of a non-domesticated Other that is transformative.
Our epiphanies make their way, into the biological languages (and whole careers)
that have sought to catalogue and gain some kind of understanding, beyond mere
two-week photographic safaris which, when they come to their inevitable ends, see
us hastening, as a species, to familiar domesticities. To lives surrounded by,
immersed in images (multimedia) and memories. These are community ordained,
socially prescribed modes of communicating with one another.
The source of that lasting injunction to be forthrightly attuned to Nature, is probably somewhere else, back out in the wild. And all fears aside, what most humans
actually crave are those non-human encounters. Lacking them, a train of ants across
9 Numbers worldwide would have been triple that. See “Meet the Man on a Quest to Document
Every Apple in North America,” by Rohini Chaki, Atlas Obscura, June 18, 2019, https://www.
atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-apples, Accessed July 17, 2020.
53.2 Ineluctable Recognitions