54 The New York Review
little sense of how to act around them.
Rather than simply trying to curb Olli’s
disruptive behaviors, Meijer observed
his reactions to different situations and
tried to interpret them. Over time, she
says, dog and human settled on a “com-
mon language” of words, gestures, and
behaviors through which she could un-
derstand when he was nervous, bored,
or joyful—and what he wanted to do
about it. While the visible results of
these negotiations differed little from
those of traditional dog training, Meijer
says she began to see her surroundings
from Olli’s perspective. “His views, for
example, on dog [leashes], the number
of dogs in this city, cars, large noisy ma-
chines, humans, and houses has made
me experience these in a different
way,” she writes.
Such interspecies exchanges can
have practical benefi ts for both parties.
Meijer points out that animals consid-
ered to be pests—such as the geese
that congregate on the rich grasslands
around the Amsterdam airport, deer
that mow down shrubbery, and ele-
phants that trample crops—can often
be persuaded to change their behavior
once humans understand what the an-
imals are trying to accomplish. In the
Dutch university city of Leiden, where
nesting seagulls became so numerous,
noisy, and destructive that some local
leaders proposed a shooting campaign,
a national bird- protection organiza-
tion proposed creating islands near
the coast to serve as alternative nest-
ing grounds, fi rst testing out differ-
ent locations in order to assess which
ones the birds preferred. Similarly,
Meijer suggests that stray dogs would
be happier—and ultimately present
fewer problems to humans—if animal
shelters taught both dogs and people
to safely coexist, then allowed dogs
to come and go from shelters as they
pleased rather than confi ning or killing
them. (In Moscow, she points out, a few
stray dogs have even learned to use the
metro system, allowing them to sleep in
the safer suburbs and commute to the
city center to forage.)
Such measures may not, on the sur-
face, appear particularly signifi cant.
Yet the incorporation of other species’
perspectives into what are usually as-
sumed to be unilateral human deci-
sions, Meijer writes, “can function as
the starting point for envisioning new
ways of interacting.”
The animal- welfare and animal- rights
movements grew out of public concern
about the suffering of domesticated
animals, especially those used by hu-
mans for food and labor.^2 Meijer, as an
animal ethicist, is likewise focused on
domesticated animals and those capa-
ble of adapting to human- dominated
habitats—dogs, seagulls, geese, deer,
earthworms. She touches only briefl y
on the implications of her work for non-
domesticated animals—the millions of
free- ranging species more sensitive to
human activities—missing an opportu-
nity to broaden its reach.
Advocates of ecological protection,
much like advocates of animal welfare
and rights, have focused almost ex-
clusively on what humans should stop
doing: stop destroying habitat, stop
destabilizing the climate, stop driving
other species into extinction. They
have, in general, been slow to recogni ze
that preventing extinction, whether of
whales or dragonfl ies, is necessary but
not suffi cient—that only when animal
populations fl ourish can they survive
more or less independently from us.
Despite this shared challenge, de-
fenders of ecological protection and
animal rights traditionally operate
in isolation from each other—both
intellectually and politically—and
when they meet, they often disagree.
Supporters of ecological protection,
whether conser vation scientists or envi-
ronmental advocates, tend to see their
counterparts as dangerously sentimen-
tal, willing to prioritize the survival of
individual animals over the persistence
of a species; supporters of animal
rights, whether scholars or activists,
tend to see theirs as heartless
utilitarians, willing to tolerate
the slaughter of individuals for an
abstract greater good.
Both camps, however, aspire to
an ethical relationship between
humans and the rest of life, and
to that end they need each other.
Animal- rights advocates can help
ensure that the large- scale culling
of invasive animals—such as the
extermination of introduced rats,
cats, pigs, and goats that threaten
endangered seabird species on
many remote islands—is a last
resort, undertaken only when less
intrusive measures fail to stop a
species’ slide toward extinction.
Advocates of ecological protec-
tion can help ensure that captive-
born animals are not freed unless
they can survive on their own,
and their new environment can
also survive.
Meijer emphasizes that ani-
mals are not passive objects for
humans to ignore or argue over—
or collect, Tiger King–style—
but “individuals with their own
perspectives on life,” and members of
communities with which our species
coexists. That animals are in this sense
political actors is an underrecognized
and, to my mind, potentially pow-
erful point of convergence between
the animal- rights and ecological-
protection movements: both traditions
hold that animals have needs and wants
that humans are more than capable of
understanding, and should attend to.
The Canadian philosophers Sue
Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, in their
book Zoopolis (2011), proposed that
humans treat nondomesticated ani-
mals as citizens of “sovereign commu-
nities” and domesticated animals as
“full citizens of the polity.” While they
acknowledged that most animals arebelieved to lack the capacities for self-
refl ection and political expression usu-
ally required for citizenship, they drew
on disability- rights theory to argue that
the interests of animal citizens could
be represented by human guardians.
Meijer takes this proposal even further,
speculating that interspecies commu-
nication might advance to the point
that animals reveal previously unrec-
ognized capacities, and human guard-
ianship of animal citizens becomes
unnecessary.
Here, too, I think Meijer misses an
opportunity. As the naturalist Henry
Beston wrote in 1928, animals “are
not brethren, they are not underlings:
they are other nations, caught with our-
selves in the net of life and time, fellow
prisoners of the splendour and travail
of the earth.” Even domesticated an-
imals, as Meijer acknowledges, can
form their own communities, establish-
ing hierarchies and systems of reward
and punishment. Instead of stretching
the concept of human citizenship to
include members of these “other na-
tions,” why not focus on understanding
other species’ societies?
Citizenship, after all, is not the only
way to expand the political rights of
animals within human society. In New
Zealand in 2014, after a series of nego-
tiations between the national govern-
ment and the Maori people, Te Urewera
National Park was replaced by a new en-
tity, known simply as Te Urewera, that
has the legal rights of a person. Three
years later New Zealand’s Whanganui
River, which people had developed forhydropower and polluted with urban
effl uent, gained the same status. Under
the Whanganui agreement, two guard-
ians—one chosen by the Maori and one
by the national government—will act
as legal representatives for the entire
river system. In these cases, the rights
granted are not citizenship rights, but
more akin to universal rights possessed
by citizens and noncitizens alike.
These and similar initiatives, though
still in their early stages, could formal-
ize a place for both domesticated and
nondomesticated species’ perspectives
in human society, and provide the
“translators” needed to ensure they
are heard—fostering the ethical inter-
species relationships that, as Meijer ar-
gues, are crucial to us all.Two other recent books explore the
potential for greater interspecies com-
munication, one through science and
the other through a combination of
science and music. In Animal Internet,
the German writer Alexander Pschera
refl ects on the signifi cance of the “digi-
tal revolution” in wildlife ecology—the
recent explosion of small, relatively in-
expensive cameras and satellite track-
ing devices that have allowed humans
to follow animal movements in great
detail.
Scientists are now collecting streams
of data from tens of thousands of in-
dividual animals ranging from insects
to snow leopards, many of them from
species whose behavior was until re-
cently largely unknown. Networks of
motion- sensitive cameras have docu-
mented new species such as the grey-
faced sengi, a giant shrew that lives in
Tanzania, and rediscovered species
long believed to be extinct, such as the
silver- backed chevrotain, or “mouse
deer,” a rabbit- sized, toothy mam-
mal that lives in the lowland forests of
southern Vietnam. Today, any smart-
phone user can track the progress of
a single sea turtle as it migrates across
the Pacifi c, or a seabird as it fl ies thou-
sands of miles south for the winter. The
ICARUS (International Cooperation
for Animal Research Using Space)
system, installed on the International
Space Station in 2018, can pick up sig-
nals from tiny sensors attached to ani-
mals almost anywhere on earth.
While Pschera acknowledges the
dystopian possibilities of these inno-
vations—will animals, too, need
data- protection laws, to shield
their information from poach-
ers?—the idiosyncratic essays in
Animal Internet focus on their
potential for changing humans’
relationship with the rest of
life. Animal- tracking technology,
Pschera believes, erases the per-
ceived line between technology
and nature, and between civiliza-
tion and wilderness. “Technology
is no longer the eternal adversary
of nature,” he writes. Instead, “it
has emerged as an ideal, adapt-
able interface between humans
and their natural surroundings.”
This, surely, is far too optimis-
tic. But the new avalanche of in-
formation about animals’ daily
lives is certainly of practical use
for conservation—it’s impossible
to effectively protect a species if
you don’t know where it goes in
the winter, for instance—and
Pschera suggests that it also has
practical use for us: data on an-
imal movements could provide
early warnings of earthquakes
and volcanic eruptions, and could be
used to study the spread of infectious
diseases from animals to humans. He
argues persuasively that the “animal
internet” is full of possibilities for in-
terspecies communication. Technol-
ogy, in this case, could allow humans
to temporarily adopt an animal’s
perspective, seeing a near or distant
place as a member of another species
might see it. By acquainting us—via
our screens—with the typical habits
and behavior of other species, track-
ing technology can also teach humans
to pay more attention to the animals
we encounter in real life. As Pschera
speculates, technological access to an-
imals’ lives may, ironically, restore our
sensory access to them.(^2) See Ernest Freeberg,
(Basic Books,
2020).