What’s it like to be a goat (or any other animal)?

The concept of umwelt

“We are by now so accustomed to the cult of expertise that the very notion of honoring and paying heed to our directly felt experience of things—of insects and wooden floors, of broken-down cars and bird-pecked apples and the scents rising from the soil—seems odd and somewhat misguided as a way to find out what’s worth knowing.” ~ David Abram, Becoming Animal

It’s one thing to know how we experience and perceive the world and quite another to imagine how other inhabitants of your place might be perceiving the same place at the same time. In the book, To Know the World, Mitchell Thomashow coined the term ‘perceptual reciprocity.’ He posits that all living things perceive. And even communities, like species, forests, and habitats, perceive as well. By perceptual reciprocity, he means that all of these different types of perception inform each other. 

For example, when I visited a local pond on a regular basis to observe the turtles and other living things, I realized how aware the turtles were of me. At first, they would jump off their logs into the water as soon as I appeared but eventually they became familiar with me and weren’t so skittish. 

Do you think the forest perceives you when you’re walking amongst the trees? Research shows that the forest has a vast communications system through the underground mycelial network which shares information about what’s happening in its environment. So, why wouldn’t a forest perceive you? 

Umwelt

Thomashow says that one way to deepen perceptual reciprocity is by imagining what other creatures experience, a concept called ‘umwelt,’ a method for imagining the sensory experience of other creatures. 

Science writer Ed Yong has just come out with a new book on just this topic which is getting a lot of buzz. It’s called An Immense World and here are a few articles where he talks about the book: How Animals Perceive the World (The Atlantic) and How Animals See Themselves (The New York Times).

Rob Walker of The Art of Noticing recently wrote about ‘umwelt’ in his Substack newsletter. He calls it “the sensory bubble in which any given animal (including me, including you) exists,” then quotes Yong from this New York Times essay.

“Umwelt is an animal’s bespoke sliver of reality. A tick’s Umwelt is limited to the touch of hair, the odor that emanates from skin and the heat of warm blood. A human’s Umwelt is far wider but doesn’t include the electric fields that sharks and platypuses are privy to, the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes and vampire bats track or the ultraviolet light that most sighted animals can see.”

In her book, On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes, Alexandra Horowitz explores a similar idea by showing that each of us humans also has our own expertise and sliver of reality such that, even if we do something together, we each experience it differently. One of the “experts” that Horowitz includes on her walks is her dog, whose sense of smell is far superior to hers. 

We can never know for sure what anyone or any species is truly experiencing, but we can imagine and appreciate our differences.

Practice

Choose one particular animal to observe this week and imagine what their deeply felt experience might be like. I am going to choose the chipmunk who lives in my backyard. Write about or just observe their comings and goings, habits, etc. Learn something about them that you didn’t know. 

Please share what this exercise was like for you and what you discovered in the comments or on Instagram. Add the hashtag #seeingyourplace2022.

Resources 

Book: Becoming Animal by David Abram and On Looking by Alexandra Horowitz (and my post on this book).

Suzanne Simard’ s TED talk on Finding the Mother Tree