The Seabird’s Cry: The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers

by Adam Nicolson

As the blind man and the dog have two different Umwelten, the trainer has to understand the perceptual and cognitive differences between them. A guide-dog, for example, will not mind if a door is only 3 feet high, but the blind man will.

If you are stuck in that anthropocentric vision of nature, you will inevitably think that the more like humans any animal seems to be and the more linguistic and even technological skills they seem to have, the cleverer they are. But as Frans de Waal says, ‘There are lots of wonderful cognitive adaptations out there that we don’t have or need … Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization.’ We have no monopoly on intelligence.

If Umwelt is the product of close and extreme attention to the things that matter in your life, and indifference to those that don’t, then we have probably reached the moment when what matters to us has expanded beyond our own narrowly and historically defined interests. For all the vertigo this thought might induce, the human Umwelt now is and needs to be global. We have, of necessity, entered the age of empathy.