Kindle Notes & Highlights
He showed that many species of birds do not instinctively recognize their parents, or indeed others of their own species, but are “conditioned” into this knowledge in the early stages of life
imprinting plays a profound role in establishing a bird’s understanding of its broad social group.
when cross-fostered Whooping Crane eggs hatched, the adoptive parents diligently taught the chicks to find food and migrate, but at the same time imprinted on them a social identity that would ultimately lead to lives of isolation and exclusion.
families with foster chicks were never really accepted into sandhill society and tended to avoid confrontation by loitering on the periphery of winter-feeding flocks”
costume-rearing protocols are now utilized for all birds that will be released into free-living populations, for the entirety of their time in captivity.
Foucault (1980, [1975] 1995) taught us about the always unequal dynamics of subjectification, in which living beings are formed and re-formed through their entanglements with technologies, discourses, and institutions.
one partner knowingly manipulated the delicate developmental stages of the other to produce a lifelong attachment: a captive form of life.
an ethical relationship with a deliberately human-imprinted bird is possible, it requires a genuine commitment grounded in ongoing and dedicated care for that individual being.
Traci Warkentin (2010) has called “interspecies etiquette.” Acknowledging that we cannot ever have perfect access to the worlds of others, Warkentin’s approach emphasizes the need for ongoing practices of embodied and caring attentiveness.
Leading largely hidden lives, these birds carry out the “invisible work” (Star and Strauss 1999) that animates our hopes for the survival of the species.
AI remains a highly invasive and often stressful practice.
experimenters deliberately selected “hazardous” migration routes with hundreds of power-line crossings to thoroughly explore the nature of the potential danger and “trouble shoot solutions before [they] began with endangered cranes” (Ellis et al. 2001:141, 2003:262).
At Patuxent, for example, a quail colony has been established to play the role of “royal tasters,”
the use of “sentinel turkeys” has also been proposed: captive or free-roaming birds placed at potential Whooping Crane release sites to determine the likely impacts of various diseases and so the suitability of the sites for the cranes (USFWS
“sacrificial surrogacy” in which, by virtue of an actual or asserted similarity, one being is able/required to stand in for another and, importantly in doing so, to bear the cost or harm of that other
So you make your mistakes on the common species and then assume that the results that you get from those experiments can apply to the closely related endangered species.”
“least concern”
marking individuals of these species as available and expendable forms of life in the service of other, more needy, beings.15
killing or causing suffering for conservation can often still be “necessary, indeed good, but it can never ‘legitimate’ a relation to the suffering in purely regulatory or disengaged and unaffected ways”
“If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows.”
In terms of cooperation and the coordination of behavior, the consolation of mates after conflict, self-recognition, and the attribution of mental states to others, corvids seem remarkably good at understanding and interacting with one another and the wider world
for Heidegger (1996:246–49) humans are unique in our relationship with that ending, in our ability to be consciously oriented toward our deaths—in his terms, to “die.”
Dastur’s thought seems to center on the notion that the political and cultural dimensions of human life inevitably “reference” the dead: whether directly, in the sense that the dead continue to live among us and act on us as spirits or ghosts, or “simply” in terms of the meanings, values, memories, and ideas that we individually and collectively inherit
What else might it mean to a fox or an elephant to bury or cover the body of another or to return to their bones, again and again?6
The captive Hawaiian Crows who are thought to have lost parts of their vocal repertoire in the absence of free-living adults to learn from (Lieberman, pers. comm.) also offer a powerful example of a nonhuman community that has traditionally drawn from and referenced those who are no longer living corporeally among them.
In thinking in these ways about emotions like grief and empathy, we do productive work in undermining human exceptionalism by drawing our own responses to death into an evolutionary continuum.
What does it mean that, in this time of incredible loss, there is so little public (and perhaps also private) mourning for extinctions?
mourning may be an act of bearing witness to the deaths of so many individuals and species at this time in Earth’s history.
What does it means to bring an abrupt ending to this particular way of life? What does this loss mean inside its specific multispecies communities? How are “we” called into responsibility here and now, and how will we take up that call?
The environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III (1999) offers a typical example in his discussion of a goat “eradication” program on San Clemente Island, off the coast of California. Around 14,000 goats were shot (and many others trapped and removed) to conserve three endangered plant species.
Here, ideas about animals as lesser subjects are formed through interactions with, or are justified with reference to, animals that we increasingly force to live in diminished conditions with limited and disturbed socialities.
For a discussion of the possibility of “culture” among New Caledonian Crows, see Hunt (1996) and a reply from Boesch (1996). W. C. McGrew (1998) also offers useful insight into various ways of understanding “culture” and its presence among nonhumans, with particular reference to nonhuman primates.
I would suggest that a “failure” to grieve may more often result from an inability to “get” (at various experiential levels) how one’s own life and world are shared with these dying others.
Australian Women’s Weekly. 1956. “When Summer Comes . . . Penguins at the Bottom of Their Garden.” December 12, 22–23.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Nature, March 2, 51–57. Bastian, Michelle. 2011. “The Contradictory Simultaneity of Being with Others: Exploring Concepts of Time and Community in the Work of Gloria Anzaldua.” Feminist Review 97:151–67.
Bataille, Georges. 1997. “Death.” In The Bataille Reader, edited by Fred Botting and Scott Wilson. Oxford: Blackwell.
Brault, Pascale-Anne, and Michael Naas. 2001. “Editors’ Introduction: To Reckon with the Dead: Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Mourning.” In The Work of Mourning, by Jacques Derrida.
Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Calarco, Matthew. 2002. “On the Borders of Language and Death: Derrida and the Question of the Animal.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 7, no. 2:17–25.
Crist, Eileen. 1999. Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
2001. The Work of Mourning. Edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hall, Matthew. 2011. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. Albany: State University of New York Press.
2013. “Sowing Worlds: A Seedbag for Terraforming with Earth Others.” In Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway, edited by Margret Grebowicz and Helen Merrick. New York: Columbia University Press.
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Plumwood, Val. 2002. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge.
2007. “Human Exceptionalism and the Limitations of Animals: A Review of Raimond Gaita’s The Philosopher’s Dog.” Australian Humanities Review
2008b. “Tasteless: Towards a Food-based Approach to Death.” Environmental Values 17:323–30.
Read, Peter. 1996. Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2012. “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species.” Environmental Humanities 1:141–54.
