highwaywoman by her sense of smell. The odor of butyric acid, that
emanates from the skin glands of all mammals, acts on the tick as a
signal to leave her watchtower and hurl herself downwards.” Uexküll
was, through science and imagination, trying to put himself inside the
body and experience of another creature, much as the wizard Merlin
enabled the boy King Arthur to do by transforming him into different
animals in T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone. Uexküll’s exhaustively
detailed descriptions and analyses are all the more remarkable when one
considers his contemporaries’ general lack of interest in, and
understanding of, the subjective experience of other species. “These
different worlds,” wrote Uexküll in 1934, “which are as manifold as the
animals themselves, present to all nature lovers new lands of such wealth
and beauty that a walk through them is well worth while, even though
they unfold not to the physical but only to the spiritual eye.”^6
These ideas became more mainstream in the 1960s when, in the wake
of the civil rights movement, the individual experience, and even the
rights, of animals began to be considered more seriously (one result being
the Animal Welfare Act of 1966). Nonetheless, there remains a schism
between strict behaviorists and ethologists. The former reject the notion
of animal consciousness and firmly believe that they are merely
biological machines: bundles of instinct and base reaction that are all but
unconscious in any measurable sense of the word. It is here that language,
arguably the signal difference between us and our fellow creatures,
becomes our greatest liability. As the science writer Stephen Budiansky
wrote in If a Lion Could Talk, “we have no means of describing cognitive
processes that do not involve words.”^7 Ultimately, the problem comes
down to umwelt; we are such prisoners of our subjective experience that
it is only by force of will and imagination that we are able to take leave
of it at all and consider the experience and essence of another creature—
or even another person.
In fact, the ability to step inside the umwelt “bubble” of another
creature is not so much a newfound skill as it is a lost art. Successful
hunting, it could be said, is an act of terminal empathy: the kill depends