13

But ask now the beasts, and they    shall   teach   thee.

Job 12:7

If  a   lion    could   talk,   we  would   not understand  him.

LUDWIG  WITTGENSTEIN^1

Nevertheless     the     difference  in  mind    between     man     and     the     higher

animal, great   as  it  is, certainly   is  one of  degree  and not of  kind.

CHARLES DARWIN^2

Him all same    man,    only    different   shirt.  Him know    everything, know

traps,  know    angry,  know    all around  ... all same    man.

DERSU   UZALA^3

IN 1909, AN ESTONIAN-BORN BARON-TURNED-

PHYSIOLOGIST NAMED Jakob von Uexküll introduced the concept of
Umwelt to the world. Uexküll is considered one of the fathers of ethology,
which is also known as behavioral ecology. It is a young discipline whose
goal is to study behavior and social organization through a biological
lens. “To do so,” wrote Uexküll in “A Stroll Through the Worlds of
Animals and Men,” “we must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around
each creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions
which it alone knows. When we ourselves then step into one of these

bubbles, the familiar ... is transformed.”^4 Uexküll called this bubble the
umwelt, a German word that he applied to a given animal’s subjective or
“self-centered” world. An individual’s umwelt exists side by side with
t h e Umgebung—the term Uexküll used to describe the objective