Have you ever looked into the eyes of your dog as they are wagging their tail? Or caught the gaze of a squirrel stealing a tulip bulb in your garden, or made eye contact with a robin guarding her nest? These experiences have all happened to me recently, and each encounter makes me stop, forget about everything else in the world for a brief moment, and wonder: what are they thinking? And do they wonder what I’m thinking?
While we may never have an exact translation, these communications between the human and animal world are powerful, and they are explored in this week’s show, "Eye to Eye Animal Encounters."
This summer I’m reading a book that takes me deep into all of the animal senses, Ed Yong’s, "An Immense Journey." Yong is known for his excellent reporting on COVID-19 for The Atlantic. His nature writing is meticulously reported, annotated with historical context, and yet full of surprise, curiosity and respect for the animal world.
Yong writes about staring into the eyes of a spider, who looks back at him. He also delves into a word for a creature’s sensory bubble, "Umwelt." It stems from the German word for "environment" and was used by Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexkull in 1909 to describe an animal’s senses and experiences. We, as animals, could live in the same environment, but might not have the same Umwelt – some can hear unusual pitches and sounds, others feel temperatures differently. Our senses help us interpret our environment. Yong writes "Uexkull saw animals not as mere machines but as sentient entities, whose inner worlds not only existed but were worth contemplating."
–Shannon