đ«AIP 115 What Animals Taught Me About Human Relationships
"The only true voyage⊠would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes⊠to see the hundred universes that each of them sees." - Marcel Proust
This quote emphasizes one of the deepest truths about human relationships animals taught me.
âIt started once I became Vegan a few weeks ago.â People kept asking me: "what made you change, why are animals so important to you? I answered with the basic yet fair ethical, environmental, and health reasons most of you have likely heard some variation of.
And yet, I felt insecure. Despite being a hunter my whole life, I didn't actually know what was going on in animals' heads. Like most vegans, when I heard a pig squeak in terror while hearing its friends fall into vats of boiling water up ahead, I thought: "sounds like suffering to me, let's stop it."
I felt like a fraud, like I was borrowing someone else's convictions and hoping they'd fit. I cared deeplyâI just couldn't articulate why in a way that felt true. And that gap between what I felt and what I could express stung.
I sensed the characteristic tingle on my neck I needed to learn more, and so I dove into An Immense World by Ed Yong. In the book, Yong explores the sensory landscapes of animals which we tend to unconsciously project our human sensations onto. Yet, our sensory landscape--or Umwelt, as Yong calls it--is limited; it just doesn't feel limited. To us, it feels whole. Complete. But that's only because it's all we've ever known.
We stop dogs from sniffing dog poop because, "ewww," why would anyone want to sniff dog poop? We block our cats from scratching our precious Ikea furniture. We project our senses onto them when most of us have no clue how they sense.
The fact is NASA has been wasting its time looking for alien life: it exists right here, on Earth.
Animal's sensory landscapes differ wildly because each species is constrained in different ways. Sensory organs are expensive. Mother Evolution doesn't want to invest in children who won't replicate future generations. So every animal evolves its own sensory Swiss Army Knife with just the tools it needs for the terrain and none of the flashy extras that weigh down its evolutionary backpack.
As a result, animals' sensory landscapes differ dramatically. Take the classic five senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. Most animals have sensory landscapes with these things, and yet they are often much different from our own.
Dogs noses are so powerful they inhale time itself, reading the past and present from invisible scent trails layered like perfume on the wind. Moles fingers are the star-shaped "nose" on its face so sensitive it can detect the tiniest vibrations, turning a seemingly empty dirt cavern into a buffet. Scallops see the world through up to 200 tiny mirrored eyes that bounce light like disco balls into their retinas, creating a fragmented, alien mosaic of motion.
And that's only the beginning. Animal sensations go well beyond the classic five senses.
Pit vipers wield infrared vision through heat-sensing pits on their faces, allowing them to hunt warm-blooded prey in total darkness like serpentine night-vision goggles. Bees can see ultraviolet patterns on flowers, invisible to the human eye, but runway lights that lead to nectar for them. Elephants can detect subsonic rumbles through their feet, feeling distant herds' thunderous gossip miles away.
As I read more about these creaturesâeach experiencing a wildly different reality than I ever willâI started to feel something odd: not distance, but closeness. Because for all the alienness, something felt familiar.
It reminded me of⊠us.
The truth is, we're not that different from these animals. Sure, I can't see ultraviolet light or detect subsonic rumbles, but the differences between how you and I see the world are arguably just as bizarre. For one, I'm a politically left-leaning, white, English-speaking, U.S. native. I'm a Westerner, which studies show, on average, means I'll see individual aspects of a scene over the whole picture in contrast with an Easterner who, on average, will look more at the holistic scene. I like my tofu firm.
Sometimes, I feel like we're each a different species who just happen to look similar to each other and have mistakenly come together in cooperation. A few weeks ago, a friend was visiting my parents for a night. My parents, being my parents, were incredibly welcoming and kind. After dinner, the friend approached me and said they needed "to take a walk because my parents were so kind it hurt." Later, I learned their childhood had taught them anyone who was kind to them had an ulterior motive. While they knew my parents didn't, their fossilized defense mechanisms turned on nonetheless, screaming for them to get out. I didn't know what to say. A part of me felt proud of my parentsâanother part mourned that what felt ordinary to me could feel like a danger to someone else.
It only gets stranger. âA few weeks ago I wrote an article on moralityâ, where I explored how moral reasoning is based more on our intuition and what we were raised to value, than logical thought. Talking to my conservative and Christian friends as a liberal can feel like trying to speak morse code with a candle. The fundamental values we have toward the world are different.
As animals have entirely different Umwelts to us, we have entirely different Umwelts to each other. Recognizing this for animals made me respect and value them more. Recognizing it for humans has as well.
We're all chunks of matter floating through a rock in space. None of us know what the hell we're doing. We don't even know what the heck is going on in the heads of our fellow human beings.
I went vegan for the animals. But I didn't expect how much they would teach me about people.
The next time you find yourself feeling something negative about someone else. Pause. Ask yourself. What is going on in there? As Proust said, there are a hundred universes going through their mind. Maybe you'll find a little empathy along the way.