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Nathaniel Stickman |

The other animals have bewitched us humans, it seems, since the very beginning of our history. Who doesn’t look out mesmerized over the array of creatures accompanying us?1 And who hasn’t longed for the prowess of a panther, the velocity of a falcon, or, perhaps, the adamantine resilience of a tardigrade?2 More compelling, though, is the fact that other animals are, like us, sentient, a quality which is the gist of the deepest connections we have with our fellow animals. It’s the quality that makes humans like philosopher Jeremey Bentham proclaim, “the question is not, Can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But, can they suffer?"3 We are undoubtedly bewitched to witness others who, like us, experience the world.4

Already, our closest neighbors — the other humans — confront us with the wonder of others experiencing the world similarly to us. We may neglect that fact, but give yourself over to a moment of surrealistic musing on the fact that you share the world with other humans. The person sitting next to you is also experiencing the room and has experienced other rooms you never will; her perspective is fundamentally similar to your own, and yet uniquely shaped by her experiences, just as your perspective is shaped by your experiences. Aestheticists and philosophers often frame art as appealing to that same sense of wonder at others' experiences.5 In contemplating art, we peer into others' inner lives and into their subjective senses of the world. Take, for example, Claude Monet, an impressionist painter who developed cataracts far into his career.6 His deteriorating eyesight showed in the character of his paintings — a dull, “blurry” effect — but, rather than detracting from these works, the effect added another degree of meaning for many art admirers.7

Other animals open even wider this maw of wonder. Consider the mantis shrimp (or stomatopod). Stomatopods come up frequently in conversation mainly for two qualities humans have found remarkable: its quick and powerful pinchers, generating waves in the surrounding water strong enough to injure or even kill prey8, and its complex eyes, with twelve cones compared to humans' three.9 Both prompt us, in different ways, to imagine what it would be like to experience the world with similar qualities. There’s a consideration of a different way of interacting with the world: How would it feel to have arms strong and swift enough to concuss those nearby? And there’s a consideration of a different way of perceiving the world: What is it like to see so wide a range of light?

While a mantis shrimp’s world may sound a world away, our fascination lies in the fact that it’s still this world, the one we share with the wondrous mantis shrimp. Other animals don’t just make us consider what other experiences are like — as if through them we imagine an expanded range of possibilities for human experience, an increase in fundamental human powers. Other animals remind us that we’re animals experiencing the world, too, and that we are in a world experienced by not only vastly different species — from humans to mantis shrimp to tardigrades — but similarly by a vast array of individuals even within these species.

This world is one we share, experiencing it together and learning and growing closer to it as we understand how we and others experience it. For that reason, and to that end, this blog seeks to engage with animals in terms of their worlds, the spaces that shape and populate their minds. As we do so, we’ll begin to more clearly imagine the unique subjective landscapes other animals live in, and, in turn, maybe we’ll begin to expand our own worlds.

One of the most significant environmental factors in animals' (including humans') lives right now are those stemming from climate change. While this blog doesn’t aim to be about climate change, it would be disingenuous to ignore it when considering animals' lives and their lived experiences. Many are being endangered and suffering right now due to the effects of climate change.

If you want to know more about climate change, some helpful resources are included at the end of this post, with an additional link to these resources on the blog’s menu. I encourage you to read these and other resources toward deepening your understanding of the evidence and making more informed, critical decisions. Because of the overwhelming consensus in the evidence, and because this issue is not its focus, this blog won’t directly address climate change arguments, but will hopefully inspire you to pursue further learning and engagement.

Climate Change Resources

The splash image is Till Niermann, Koala in Zoo Duisburg, August 25, 2019, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Koala_in_Zoo_Duisburg.jpg. It is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

  1. That diversity, however, has been decreasing more rapidly in recent years. See “UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’” UN: Sustainable Development Goals, May 9, 2019, https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/. ↩︎

  2. Alina Bradford, “Facts About Tardigrades,” LiveScience, July 14, 2017, https://www.livescience.com/57985-tardigrade-facts.html. ↩︎

  3. Jeremey Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, eds. J. H. Burns, J. R. Dinwiddy, F. Rosen, and T. P. Schofield (London: Athlone Press, 2016). quoted in “Jeremy Bentham,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, January 29, 2019, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bentham/. ↩︎

  4. Debate is substantial over this point — to what extent other animals have subjective experiences and to what extent we can know. See “Animal Consciousness,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, October 24, 2016, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-animal/. The debate won’t be addressed here, however. Instead, this post starts with the assumption that any animals (including humans) that seem to have subjective experiences likely do. ↩︎

  5. See James Dewey’s Art as Experience, for instance, and the summary thereof in “Dewey’s Aesthetics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, February 8, 2016, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey-aesthetics/. ↩︎

  6. Anna Gruener, “The Effects of Cataracts and Cataract Surgery on Claude Monet,” Br J Gen Pract 65, no. 634 (May 2015): 254-255, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4408507/. ↩︎

  7. Tracie White, “Eye Diseases Changed Great Painters' Vision of Their Work in Their Lives,” Stanford News, April 11, 2007, https://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/april11/med-optart-041107.html. ↩︎

  8. Sarah Nightingale, “How Mantis Shrimp Pack the Meanest Punch,” UCR Today, January 16, 2018, https://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/50629. ↩︎

  9. Stephanie Pappas, “Aggressive Mantis Shrimp Sees Color Like No Other,” Live Science, January 23, 2014, https://www.livescience.com/42797-mantis-shrimp-sees-color.html. However, some humans have four cones — a condition known as “tetrachromacy”. See David Robson, “The Women with Superhuman Vision,” BBC, September 14, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140905-the-women-with-super-human-vision; Kimberly A. Jameson, Susan M. Highnote, Linda M. Wasserman, “Richer Color Experience in Observers with Multiple Photopigment Opsin Genes,” Psychometric Bulletin & Review 8, no. 2 (2001): 244-261, https://web.archive.org/web/20120214002707/http://www.klab.caltech.edu/cns186/papers/Jameson01.pdf. ↩︎