Talking with ‘other-than-human persons’
And why life on Earth might depend on it
What the dog has to say
Do you ever talk to a pet? I talk to the dog who lives with me all the time. I tell him, in English, to “get off me,” or to “go find your ball.” Sometimes I ask him questions, also in English, like, “What do you think you’re doing?”
But in the last few months, I’ve started to wonder about the soundness of this practice. I’m working on moving away from talking to my dog, to talking with him.
Reflecting on her experiences with the Nayaka people in South India, Nurit Bird-David has written about this distinction, and why it matters. In contrast to the modernist impulse to understand a tree by cutting it into pieces, Nayaka understand the tree by “talking with” it:
‘‘Talking’’ is shorthand for a two-way responsive relatedness with a tree— rather than ‘‘speaking’’ one-way to it, as if it could listen and understand. ‘‘Talking with’’ stands for attentiveness to variances and invariances in behavior and response of things in states of relatedness and for getting to know such things as they change through the vicissitudes over time of the engagement with them. To ‘‘talk with a tree’’ … is to perceive what it does as one acts towards it, being aware concurrently of changes in oneself and the tree. It is expecting response and responding, growing into mutual responsiveness and, furthermore, possibly into mutual responsibility.
When I talk to the dog who lives with me, I am privileging my position in our relationship. I talk to him in a language that wasn’t built for his understanding, and in which he cannot reciprocate. My talking-tos are almost always commands—things that I want him to do. And I expect him to comply.
Instead, talking with the dog who lives with me might mean attending a little more to what he wants and less to what I want. This insight runs counter to even the most “progressive” strands of thought in the world of dog training, which—even as they emphasize positive reinforcement—are ultimately about a unilateral shaping of the dog-animal to meet the needs of the human-animal.
This is not to say that no “training” is necessary. After all, if the dog hadn’t changed, our relationship would never have worked out. When the dog and I first started cohabiting, he peed on the bed and latched his jaws onto my rear end when he wanted things. He had to change in certain ways if we were going to continue living together.
However, these days I’m making an effort to remember my own responsibility to change, too. In addition to communicating at him, I have a responsibility to attend to him as well.
This is difficult. He doesn’t speak English, so he barks to get my attention. After that, I can sometimes intuit what he wants, based on past experiences. Sometimes a standoff ensues. Sometimes we stare into each other’s eyes, quiet and tense. What do you want? I can sense his frustration in me for not doing what he desires. But it is in these moments that he challenges the object-status I have assigned to him. He becomes dog-person.
And the dog is only the beginning.
Rethinking personhood
We are humans, so inevitably we see the world from a human perspective. But what if this is leading us (us in the the modernist, capitalist, Western world) to mistake the world as being full of mere things?
What if, instead, the world is full of things that are alive? And not just in the throwaway sense in which we acknowledge, “Oh yeah, of course the trees in the forest past which I am now driving in my carbon-fueled sports car are alive.” Duh. No.
Try to forget, for one second, what “rational” “science” has “taught” you.
In Animism: Respecting the Living World, Graham Harvey writes about many other ways that humans on this planet have of perceiving what is alive. One perspective that I find personally aspirational was recorded by Irving Hallowell during his visits with the Ojibwe people of central Canada in the early to mid-twentieth century. Harvey recounts some of these ideas in his book, and I want to share some of them with you.
While they do distinguish between persons and objects, the Ojibwe also challenge European notions of what a person is. To be a person does not require human-likeness, but rather humans are like other persons. Persons is the wider category, beneath which there may be listed sub-groups such as ‘human persons’, ‘rock persons’, [‘]bear persons’ and others. Persons are related beings constituted by their many and various interactions with others. Persons are wilful beings who gain meaning and power from their interactions. Persons are sociable beings who communicate with others. Persons need to be taught by stages… what it means to ‘act as a person’. This animism (minimally understood as the recognition of personhood in a range of human and other-than-human persons) is far from innate and instinctual. It is found more easily among elders who have thought about it than among children who still need to be taught how to do it.
You may be skeptical. I do not blame you. Maybe it sounds crazy. But I wonder: What might be the consequences of not seeing the world in this way? What might be the consequences of continuing to act in and on the world as if it is full of mere things, instead of persons?
You are not a person… yet
I’m not trying to be an alarmist, but life on this planet is feeling a little tenuous these days. Species go extinct every day, and many of them we never even had the chance to talk with before habitat destruction, pollution, and climate change forced them out of existence.
At the risk of being a tiny bit imperialist in my appropriation of some of the indigenous ideas considered above, I want to say that I’m trying to become a better person. I don’t mean that in a self-help sort of way. What I mean is that if ‘acting as a person’ means coming to recognize and respect the living world, then perhaps I have not achieved full personhood yet.
What would happen if we stopped questioning the personhood of the other-than-humans with which we share this world, and started questioning instead whether we humans are living up to the standards of personhood ourselves?
Learning to talk with the world is just like building any other habit. It’s hard work. Just like when I catch myself slouching and make an adjustment, I often catch myself denying the personhood of others around me. I am a work in progress. I too often buy coffee in to-go cups, I drive my car when I don’t need to, and I do myriad other things that support the depersonalization of the living world. Some things, too, are outside of my control. They are built into the systems our societies have constructed, and from which no one individual can opt out. But changing those systems starts with the recognition that they are destroying the livelihood of persons.
Say hello to a person today whom you didn’t recognize as a person yesterday—and then to stop and listen to what that person might have to say to you in return.
