Thinking with Animals

Donna Haraway, bears, and training as thinking ....

Not the bear I saw, a similar bear off the internet

As I was loading Hank-dog into the car after our walk one warm afternoon this week, I saw something odd on the other side of the river, down over the bluff we’d just come up. I thought it was a person, sitting on the cobbles, which seemed odd. It’s not a place where there’s public access, and it didn’t look like a pleasant place to sit. Maybe it was someone hunting agates? I pulled out the binoculars, and it was a bear.

A smallish black bear, with a light brown snout, sitting upright, on a warmish afternoon. Bears look so odd when they sit like that. Like a child’s toy bear — with their legs straight out in front of them. This bear appeared to be taking in the thin sunshine, perhaps warming themself on the cobbles. Just hanging out. Not moving, not doing anything, just being.

I’m still thinking about animals. Actually, I’m nearly always thinking about animals.

And because I’m also still thinking about Daisy Hildyard, and arguing with her in my head (which to be clear, is not about her, personally, but about the strain of dualism I find so perplexing in her work), I turned to Donna Haraway, the delightful feminist scholar and writer who, has spent the past forty years challenging binary thinking and exploring the relationships between humans, technology, and nature. One of her most accessible books, The Companion Species Manifesto, riffs on her most famous essay — The Cyborg Manifesto — published in Simians, Cyborgs and Women. In this only slightly tongue-in-cheek little book, as she notes in this lecture on the same topic, she posits that dogs might be the new cyborgs. I have a hunch Haraway is one of those figures who seems like old hat to younger ecocritics, and yet nonetheless I feel like her ideas have not penetrated into mainstream thought to the extent they deserve. Haraway’s work was instrumental to my thinking about literature and wilderness that formed the core of my PhD research, and in 2015, I drove over to Moscow, Idaho for the ASLE conference because she was the keynote speaker, with Anna Tsing, whose Mushroom at the End of the World has penetrated into the mainstream. At any rate, that’s when I first heard Haraway talk about how she’d fallen in love with agility training, and with her specific agility dogs.

I love when theorists fall in love with something in the world. “Dogs are not surrogates for theory;” she writes in Companion Species. “They are not just here to think with. They are here to live with. Partners in the crime of human evolution …”

Wild animals are also not just here think with, although they provide a powerful jumping-off place to think about our relationships with the natural world, with wildness, with the damage we continue to do to the planet. They are both something to think with, and an actual black bear, sitting on the cobbles, enjoying the sunshine.

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