84POETRY AS FIELD GUIDEmultiple filters, scales, and degrees of focus in our perception of ani-
mals, and so it is worth dwelling on the question of why poems about
particular species of animals are so common, and why defining species
would seem to Muldoon a natural topic for poetry.
The simple answer to the question of why poets focus on animal spe-
cies is that they are doing something we all do—that species poems
reflect something intrinsic not just to how poets look at the animal world
but to how people have always looked at the animal world. This desire,
and indeed our ability to distinguish specific kinds of animals, appears
to be hardwired into our animal brains. A condition of animal life is the
ability to distinguish one’s own species from others, as well as to recog-
nize animals as prey, predator, nuisance, danger, innocent, and so on.
With our large and flexible primate brains, we are no doubt capable of
recognizing more than most other animals,^2 and culturally we have
produced various systems (Aristotelian, Linnean, Darwinian, etc.) that
have allowed us to identify many more—several million so far. Carol
Kaesuk Yoon presents impressive evidence for this ingrained predilec-
tion for taxonomy, present across cultures, history, and age groups. We
might also notice (and remember) that children begin to classify as
they learn language, that their first words often include “dog” and “cat.”
Indeed, it is clear that all animals recognize other animals as members
of kinds, according to their varying abilities to identify prey and possi-
ble predators. That a Great Dane can recognize a Chihuahua as a mem-
ber of its kind is one of the minor miracles of the animal world. We
interact with the world by sorting it, finding patterns, and giving names
to those patterns; species appear to be fundamental elements of the nat-
ural world, so that the act of naming an animal kind is not necessarily
reductive but is a means of becoming aware of sets of defining charac-
teristics. Moreover, the very nature of observing most animals, espe-
cially wild ones who flit in and out of our gaze, means that species
identification is as far as we can go in making out the distinctiveness
of animal being. It is an achievement, a production of knowledge, to be
able to attach a name to a set of specific characteristics, even if we know
that this set is incomplete and allows us to miss finer details. Species
identification is always an act of naming or learning the name. Edward