Entangled lives of humans and non-humans

In our pursuit of the modern version of conservation we have obscured much of the richness that for millennia has enmeshed the lives of humans with those of other animals. The western scientific notion of a species flattens the much richer, and often contradictory, ways in which animals are understood in their interactions with humans. For example, people view tigers in a myriad of ways: transformed humans, beloved by the gods, man-eaters, objects to adorn wealthy tourists, flagships for fund-raising efforts, ecosystem structurers, objects of ridicule and awe in zoos, stuffed animals, hybridizing with humans in graphic novels, and many more.

Animals’ lives are so entangled with those of humans that the boundaries separating the two are not always clear. It is no surprise that some traditional Mexican jaguar costumes worn for ritual dances have mirrors for eyes that reflect the spectating humans, or that many cultures feature werecreatures: werebears, werejaguars, weretigers, and, of course, werewolves. The daemons, animals in a spirit form, featured in Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy are just the latest incarnation of the longstanding cross-cultural tradition that humans and animals are inextricably connected. A person's daemon is so much a part of that person that when the two are violently separated, death results for both.

We sit behind our desks writing articles about minimum population sizes and genetic structure, enchanted by the magic of GIS layers, statistical tests and peer reviews. Yet when we step out into nature, we are enchanted all over again by the non-human world: the deadly beauty of a goshawk stooping down from out of the clouds, the monochromatic richness of a bog in bloom or the glimpse of a bluefin tuna, breaking the ocean waves in pursuit of something that we can only think of as joy. Despite our best intellectual efforts, the species we study will not remain as objects of the scientific gaze, but insist on shape shifting and demanding that we open our narrowed scientific minds to embrace the wider ways that humans and animals interact.

The conservation community has created an artifice in which humans must be treated separately from the other organisms that inhabit the earth. From studies of animal culture and intelligence to the contested arguments of compassionate conservation to emerging science of microbiomes with its thousands of microbe species making up the second human genome, we conservationists are being cajoled, tempted, educated and forced to think differently about the relationship between humans and non-human animals. These two books, Crooked Cats and Elephant Trails, enthusiastically join this effort.

Nayanika Mathur's Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene is a hard-hitting argument by a political scientist about the cultural (both human and leopard) and institutional ways in which big cats, particularly leopards, cohabit with humans in India. Based on years of fieldwork and inspired by a leopard that killed and ate seven people in the town where she was working, the author examines the ways that large, wild felids are reintegrating themselves in towns and cities throughout India. Her particular interest lies in the ways in which Indian political systems and individual citizens, moulded by the history and geography of the country, manage and interact with so-called ‘crooked cats’—her umbrella term for leopards and tigers that attack, and often consume, people. This complicated set of interactions is cast within the overarching concept of the Anthropocene and the changes it brings to people and non-human nature.

The book is a fascinating look at the political ecology of human-eating big cats and the responses of humans from the relatively powerless to the more powerful as mediated through governmental bureaucracy. Through interviews across the spectrum of people involved with this problem, fieldwork with biologists, and examination of written records and social media accounts, Mathur paints a complex picture of the variation in leopard–human interactions in different social and economic settings. We learn of leopards left in peace as they rest on luxury cars in a hotel car park in one part of India, whereas elsewhere their presence is not tolerated. We also learn that in some parts of India there is a conviction that human-eating cats captured by the government are purposefully relocated to poor mountain communities to advance the government's desire to force these villagers off their land.

For a social scientist keenly tuned to issues of power and language, the author is surprisingly loose in her language regarding non-humans. She is enamoured with the term ‘crooked’ to describe big cats, and it occurs up to three times per page. ‘Straight’ leopards, on the other hand, receive no attention. She also likes terms such as ‘beast’ and ‘rogue’, refers to ‘inexplicable’ behaviour and describes some of the stories as ‘tragic tales’. Yet these are very much normative terms based on human values; cats are crooked because they ‘went off the straight and narrow path’ (p. 1) even though later on she says that they are not to blame for this. The keen skills Mathur uses in seeking to understand the human side of this relationship are in little evidence when thinking about her story through the eyes of the leopards.

The author would like the book's argument to be more ambitious than it can support. For example, the incorporation of a climate change dimension at the end of the volume sits uncomfortably with the rest of the argument, and the claim that ‘big cats are behaving and will behave more crookedly than before’ (p. 157) strikes a sour note. Yet the book is well written and engaging and filled with the stories of individual animals and the ways their lives intertwine with the human worlds in which they also live. The work of conservation does not come out very well in this book and I am sure that a lively discussion will take place between that community and this author.

Nigel Rothfels’ book Elephant Trails: A History of Animals and Cultures is a very different book: a gentle, sad rumination on how elephant lives have intersected with human ones and how we have used elephants to make sense of the world and our place in it. Featured are elephants in the sights of a safari hunter's gun, taxidermized and placed in a museum, flensed, cleaned and stored in museum drawers, paraded in circuses and displayed in zoos.

Though ostensibly about elephants, the book is really about people and how their perceptions of elephants have changed over time. And it's not about all people, but mostly those living in the developed world, particularly Europe and the USA. It is not about all elephants either, as the author seems more interested in those from Africa; elephants from Asia do make appearances, although mostly in zoos and circuses. The gaze and interpretations of that gaze are all human, and, even in this small subset of humanity, they can be extremely varied. The author quotes Romain Gary who in 1956 wrote: ‘there is almost no limit to what you can make an elephant stand for’ (p. 5).

The author is a historian with a passion for elephants and a student of zoos, and the book reflects those interests. There are chapters on early Western accounts of the wonderous beasts that included stories of the virtues and strange attributes of these beasts yet to be seen by most authors; chapters on hunting of African elephants by the likes of the then-ex-president of the USA, Teddy Roosevelt, and the tension between the acknowledged threat hunting posed to elephants and the overweening desire for trophies and money from the sale of ivory; and a considerable part of the book is devoted to the acquisition, display and treatment of elephants in US zoos and circuses.

Throughout these accounts, Rothfels muses on what elephants think and feel and how human lives are affected by encounters with elephants. Of particular interest to him is the display of live elephants and the human gaze that watches them, including his own many encounters with zoo elephants and the people who care for them. The elephant trails of the title mark the many things that people think they know about elephants that, he argues, will always be structured by how they perceive these marvellous animals. Being afraid of mice, or wise, or fighting with dragons, or feeling grief are all human projections onto elephants that reflect more what we think about them rather than what elephants really are.

Both of these books illustrate the eternal intertwining of human and non-human animals and our hubris in believing we know what these other animals are. Ultimately, our lives are impoverished by the loss of non-human species; with their loss, we lose parts of ourselves.