!Kung and Nanai hunters (among countless others) have used this
approach to great effect while hunting, the ascription of recognizable
emotions and motives to animals causes problems for Western scholars,
not least because they are awfully hard to prove in a lab or defend in a
dissertation. Such claims are what lawyers and philosophers refer to as
“arguments from inference”: anecdotal and unprovable. Under these
circumstances, the potential for hair-splitting, semantic quibbling, and
“definition objection” is endless, but it also misses the point: these
feelings of trans-species understanding and communication have less to
do with animals being humanized, or humans being “animalized,” than
with all parties simply being sensitized to nuances of the other’s presence
and behavior. If you spend most of your life in a natural environment,
intimately connected with, and dependent upon, the animals around you,
you will undoubtedly—necessarily—feel a certain kinship with those
creatures, even if you have no conscious intention of doing so.
A striking example of this unintended intimacy occurred in present-day
Namibia in 1940. In May of that year, two German geologists, Henno
Martin and Hermann Korn, having already fled Nazi Germany, chose to
disappear themselves in the desert rather than risk being interned in their
host country (South Africa) as enemy aliens. The two men were
experienced desert travelers and, after making careful preparations, they
loaded a truck with bare necessities, including a dog named Otto, and
descended into the vast and labyrinthine Kuiseb River canyon, 120 miles
southwest of Windhoek. Always fearful of discovery, and at the mercy of
hunger and thirst, they crept about like persecuted anchorites, living in
caves and stone shelters, hunting game with strictly rationed ammunition,
and sleeping by their kills to keep the hyenas away. For two and a half
years, they survived in this desiccated underworld, an environment in
which neither the plants nor the animals had changed significantly in a
million years.
The Kuiseb canyon contained reservoirs of last resort and, when the
waterholes on the plains above went dry, leopards, jackals, hyenas,
ostriches, antelope, and zebra would descend to the canyon floor in order
to search among the stones for springs and sumps. For Martin and Korn, a
ron
(Ron)
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