Altai is an Amur, or Siberian, tiger, the largest wild cat in the world. From a population once numbering around 30,000 across Siberia, only about 500 remain in the wild, mostly in the ancient forests of the Sikhote-Alin mountains in the Russian Far East, between China and the Sea of Japan. Much of this forest is uninhabited and virgin. I know because I am one of the relatively few foreigners to have gone there.

My path to that forest and its tigers began much earlier. Some people run away to join the circus: at 16, I left home to work at Edinburgh Zoo, where I stayed for almost two years. The experience ignited in me a fascination with wildness itself, and with what captivity does and does not change in a wild creature. In those days the dangerous, glamorous animals, including the tigers, were allocated to the men, though I spent a great deal of time observing ours. After birds and marmosets, deemed appropriate charges for my age and sex, I graduated to being the largely unseen butler to the great apes.

The principle at the zoo was that animals should remain fit to return to the wild: no petting, no relationships, and no entering the enclosure of a dangerous animal. Our female orangutan would sit behind the bars watching me clean her sleeping quarters, sometimes pushing her huge fingers through. I had been warned not to respond.

One day I looked up from scrubbing the floor and saw her holding a rag, copying me. Our eyes met. I put down my brush and sat opposite her, just beyond the reach of her fingers. Look into the eyes of a great ape and there is a sensation I can only describe as someone being home. There was recognition, kinship, an almost unbearable awareness that this highly intelligent creature and I were divided only by bars and the absence of a shared language. I felt embarrassed, then terribly sad.

The zoo’s director had told me that two kinds of animal suffered particularly in captivity: the thinkers and the roamers. The orangutan was a thinker. Her suffering made sense to me because, as a primate myself, I could recognize something of myself in her.

That experience sharpened my obsession with the tigers. Look into the eyes of an Amur tiger and there is no answering sense of kinship. Asocial, solitary and accustomed to total dominance, the tiger remains illegible to us. But if the orangutan is one of nature’s thinkers, the Amur tiger is one of its roamers, and I wanted to understand it.

Not all zoos worked to keep the barrier between humans and wild animals intact. John Aspinall, the owner of Howletts, built an entire philosophy of animal husbandry on crossing it. He believed close-contact relationships between keepers and their wild charges were not only possible, but desirable. In 1980 two keepers were killed by an Amur tigress in his care; in 1994 the Head Keeper was killed by an Amur male. Aspinall nevertheless insisted the risk was worth it for the animals’ wellbeing. Although his breeding record seemed to bear out his claims, the deaths demonstrated that even undeniably close relationships between Amur tigers and humans did not suppress wild behavior.

Timothy Treadwell made a similar claim for exceptional intimacy with wild creatures, spending 13 summers among Alaska’s grizzlies, who seemed to accept his presence among them. In 2003 he described himself as a “fully accepted wild animal brother to these bears”. Not long after, he and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were killed by a bear. The error was not his love for these wild animals, but believing that love created an exemption from their nature.

Years after I left the zoo, writing my second novel Tiger, I saw my opportunity to tell a story about Amur tigers that was neither anthropomorphic nor sentimental. In late November 2017, in the depths of the Russian winter, I joined a somewhat seat-of-pants expedition into a closed-off part of the Russian Far East. I crossed 11 time zones, meeting a handful of other Amur besotteds from all over the world before traveling deep into the forest to camp with our Russian guides.

Our goal was to track tigers in the snow and capture them on camera traps. The expensive irony was that we were highly unlikely to see a tiger in the flesh. To those who know the forest, coming face to face with one is a grave failure. Russians and the indigenous Udeghe people alike pay close attention to tracks and signs, careful not to announce themselves in territory that is not theirs: survival depends on avoidance.

The habitat Altai is evolved to dominate is harsh beyond our comprehension in our temperate corner of the globe. Winter temperatures can fall to -36C, with snow six feet deep. A male, or King, Amur tiger controls a territory of around 500 square miles, patrolling and defending the scarce resources within it. Intensely solitary and rarely photographed by humans, it is known among indigenous people as the “Lord of the Forest”.

One day, on a tracking expedition, we found ourselves before the bloodbath of a recently killed boar. The blood was still wet, which meant the tiger was nearby. Our guides, carrying Second World War Kalashnikovs and flares they admitted would not stop an attack, told us to touch nothing. An Amur tiger can be 10 meters away in the winter forest and simply invisible. Its striped coat blends into the striped world of cedar and oak trunks and the shadows between. Its white belly vanishes against the snow.

Should it attack, it would come from nowhere as far as we were concerned. Its large paws make its approach silent; its flat face gathers information like a satellite dish; its ears turn independently towards the smallest sound, and its great snout pinpoints smells it does not forget. It would leap for the neck and snap it in seconds. Invisible yet omnipresent, it had earned its title.

I was afraid. Not anxious: afraid in the way an animal in danger is hyper-alert. My senses sharpened towards what I could not see but could feel. My heart beat faster. Later I would appreciate the discovery that somewhere inside this soft British woman still lies an animal self.

Suggested Reading

The pain of pet grief

By Kathleen Stock

As we stood there, the boar’s heart rolled out. Alexander, our lead guide, eyed it and remarked that it would make “great stew”. The guides debated nervously in Russian. I had read that, according to the Udeghe people, one prohibition is never to take from a tiger’s kill. The tiger, watching, will come for it wherever you go.

The Udeghe worldview is animist: all things, from rocks to tigers, are alive, and the forest is brimming with signs and communications that we in the West dismiss as superstition. But in tiger country, tracks, weather, even the bodily sensation that something invisible is nearby, are relied upon as vital information. What we might call “lore” is the application of acute attention to natural surroundings. Crucially, the tiger is practicing it too.

Our guides were disparaging of this kind of indigenous knowledge. Shamanism has been largely suppressed in Russia. Even so, when it came to it, the risk was deemed not worth taking.

“Time to go,” said Alexander, leading us away and leaving the heart behind.

To feel oneself toppled from the top of the evolutionary tree is a strange experience. In that forest we were not masters of anything, merely conspicuous, poorly adapted animals moving through the territory of a creature infinitely better fitted to its world.

In the zoo, the tiger’s grandeur lies partly in being seen. Its creamy underbelly, orange coat and vivid black stripes resemble a king’s robes: an ostentatious announcement of presence. In human culture, after all, this is how status is signaled. But in the forest, the tiger’s magnificence resides in disappearance, and in the fear of its revelation. Like most large predators, the Amur tiger avoids conflict: injury costs energy. It does not control 500 square miles by being a thug. It is supremely sensitive, cautious and single-minded, the perfect expression of its environment.

We, by contrast, blundered through that environment in deafening North Face outfits, unable to smell, hear or see much beyond what was in front of us. Even a gun could not be fired in time to save us. We were as exposed in the tiger’s world as Altai was in ours.

I think again of Altai in his exposed two-acre paddock, overlooked from every side and even from above. To us he looked regally powerful, but almost every natural advantage had been stripped away except the deepest one: the instinct to survive. Nice, calm, receptive: these are our judgments, not changes in the animal. The captive tiger had not ceased to be what he was; only the forest had been taken away.

When William Chapman entered the enclosure, the avoidance on which tiger and human normally depend was no longer possible. Altai would have known at once that the intruder was male and inside his domain. He was, perhaps, Eliot’s “broken king”, but he defended his tiny territory with the vigor of the Lord of the Forest.

When Thompson met her friends that night, she challenged them to guess what she’d just seen. When they all guessed right, her heart sank. The oinkers, it turned out, were the talk of the town, with sightings along Stoner Hill Road plastered over Facebook and the local news. Yet if Thompson was thrilled at her encounter, not all her neighbors agreed. Comments left on local Facebook groups range from the welcome, to the bemused, to the outright murderous. “Police,” said one, “should get someone out to shoot it”.

This is typical. The descendants of enterprising boars hopping farm fences in the Eighties, British wild boars are rural wildlife’s version of Marmite: a keystone species that could bring untold benefits to Britain’s biosphere — but also wreak havoc for gamekeepers and farmers. More than that, this is one of the few species in the country on which your opinion is likely to be informed by your politics. Your typical Guardian reader will see them as unjustly maligned; dirty, to be sure but, thanks to their habit of turning over the soil, capable of large-scale rejuvenation. The average Telegraph reader, though, will have been treated to many a tale of the wild boar chaos in the UK and Europe. The animals have attacked dog walkers on Dartmoor and disrupted Italian prosciutto production.

Just how divisive these animals have become is also illustrated by the hostile reaction of the New Forest Wildlife Park’s press officer when I ask to see a family of wild boar at the zoo and interview one of their keepers. It’s an impolite no. “[W]e have learnt over the years to not engage in any media requests regarding wild boar,” he says, “as the story never gets published in a true and pro-conservation-based format.”

I see the family anyway. When I approach the fence, the sow stares directly at me from inside her sty, while four brown, striped piglets chase each other in circles, before all five begin to root through the pitted earth outside. They’re looking for food: invertebrates, seeds, bulbs. Then, in a separate enclosure to her right, the sow’s mate emerges: black-eyed, tusked and much, much fatter than his partner. For a moment, he stares at the sow and her hoglets, as if pining to join them, before losing interest and waddling off, stopping occasionally to shake great clouds of brown dust off his frame.

More from this author

How AI is ruffling feathers

By Greg Noone

Though these boars don’t seem particularly fearsome, I’m also glad to see them behind two sets of wire fencing. Being charged by one, as Jake Swindells was in Sweden several years ago, can prove to be a painful experience. “It’s not fun,” admits the Countryside Alliance Scotland director. “They can open up the inside of your leg, rip the arteries. They can disembowel you quite easily if you stumble and fall.”

We’ve long known how brutal boars can be. Medieval chronicler Bartholomaeus Anglicus described them as the indomitable bruisers of the British forest, “that for his fierceness and his cruelness, he despiseth and setteth nought by death”, preferring to mount frontal charges against spear-wielding hunters even after being mortally wounded. This defiance saw the boar adopted as a symbol of dauntlessness by the elite, from the Anglo-Saxon kings sporting boar eyebrows on their helmets to the knights that depicted the creature rampant, tongue bared, on their coats of arms. That symbolism outlived the boar themselves in British forests, who were hunted to extinction by the 13th century.

Their history thereafter is one of sporadic releases of continental-born hogs — naturalist Gilbert White recorded one such occurrence in 1789, which led to the group, or “sounder” being exterminated by locals — until the Eighties. That’s when the UK developed a taste for farm-reared boar. Escapes soon followed, and by the following decade stable populations had been established in Scotland, the Kent-Sussex borders, Devon and the Forest of Dean. Taken together, there are perhaps 2,600 nationally — not enough to lead to many human-boar confrontations. In the Highlands, says Swindells, you’re much more likely to see the destruction left by wild boars, from half-eaten crops to pitted lawns, than face their tusks head on. Even then, he adds, rural communities in the Highlands are still coexisting relatively peacefully with these hairy hogs. That’s largely because populations remain relatively low compared to those in Europe. Should those sounders go forth and multiply a bit too much, controlling the population is and has been an option.

All the same, Swindells suggests that intentional reintroductions in Scotland are undesirable: while wild boars do a good job of regenerating the soil, a reintroduced population would almost certainly escape from whatever conservation area designated as their new home and march headlong toward new potential feeding grounds — farmland, back yards — where they definitely wouldn’t be welcome. In time, they’ll encounter roads and private property, and begin spinning the flywheel of negative stories about ruined lawns and car accidents all over again.

That’s clear enough in the Forest of Dean. Home to an estimated 583 boars, which Forestry England regularly culls to keep to an even 400, sounders in the area have been recorded marching past pubs, scaring motorists by rooting alongside roads and even biting off a man’s fingertip. All the same, says Chantal Lyons, the author of Groundbreakers, a history of wild boar in Britain, you’d be hard-pressed to find much hysteria in the area now. Having lived alongside them since the Eighties, concerns about the animals have “really died down” — and shown what life might be like in rural England if they were fully reintroduced.

This, says Lyons, would not only be good for the soil, but the soul, too, an infusion of the truly wild into our staid, regimented lives. As she says in her book, more and more studies point to the rejuvenating effect of short, sharp shocks delivered by hunger or intense exercise. “We don’t need animals to run in sheer terror from,” Lyons writes. “But we do need a space in our minds for the unknown — or that which can only be known through other, different beings.”

All the same, Lyons is also a realist. Plenty of species have been successfully reintroduced to the UK in recent years, she says, but they tend to be cuddly and stay out of the way of people, like most wild animals in the British countryside. But wild boar, because “they are of a size and a power that we’re not used to in this country,” test our mettle for large-scale rewilding. Because of the oft-repeated threat that wild boar might spread swine flu to pig farms, meanwhile, it’s unlikely that their legal status as dangerous wild animals will be downgraded in the near future.

Guerrilla rewilders have different ideas, with the sudden appearance of wild boar in Devon last year prompting suspicions of an illegal release. It is possible that the same thing happened outside Petersfield. In certain respects, Stoner Hill would be a much better habitat for the boar than Dartmoor. Steep and so forested it almost feels Jurassic, the terrain is forbidding to walkers and, as I can attest myself, difficult for drivers to ascend in anything higher than third gear. But descriptions of the boars’ behavior by eyewitnesses, coupled with the fact that only a handful were ever seen, suggest a more innocuous origin.

More from this author

The scandal of Portsmouth's broken homes

By Greg Noone

The fact that the boars of Petersfield were seen as often in the daylight as in the gloom, Lyons explains, indicates that they’re not genuinely wild boar — but rather recent escapees from a local farm. A landowner in Froxfield, on the western side of the plateau of farmland scaled by Stoner Hill, also suggests that they may have simply been dumped by someone too cheap to hire someone to euthanize them. It’s a wish that seems to have been granted, judging by the persistent rumors that one was hit by a car and another shot by a gamekeeper.

There is, of course, the possibility that wild boar are already living, unseen, on the West Sussex and Hampshire borders. Though often mistaken for muntjac deer in low light and thick undergrowth, local news report isolated sightings near surrounding hamlets. I also speak to a local gunsmith who sometimes hears idle chatter from gamekeepers about wild boar, albeit shyer and smaller than those recorded outside Petersfield, scampering out of sight before they can get a shot off. Then, tantalizingly, a source sends me a clip of a healthy wild boar in Colemore, four miles north of Stoner Hill, which he claims was taken days after the feral pigs were last spotted in East Meon — though, since he has deleted the original video and its metadata, this proves impossible to verify.

What if boar were to return to Hampshire in greater numbers? Eliana Thompson wouldn’t really mind. “I think it would be lovely if we had them, personally,” she says, provided people had guidance on how to react if they encounter these beasts of the forest. “They’ve got just as much of a right to be here as we have.” Perhaps. But it’s still hard to imagine that this country is ready for boars’ full-scale reintroduction. It hasn’t been for centuries. Our countryside is more crowded and slashed with borders than we appreciate, borders guarded in their multitude by gamekeepers, farmers and unsympathetic motorists. The boars that survive will be small and wily, trained by generational trauma to scamper to the safety of the next dark hollow when he hears the heavy footfall of an unsuspecting Briton. Such creatures may well have found a way to survive in the forests of Hampshire. One hopes that they have.

At a combined 13,200 pounds, Lisa and Tracy make the wiry Royal seem like a Christmas pixie. But here in Hugo, such elephantine size is unsurprising. A windswept Oklahoma town, the jumbos come each winter, as much a festive tradition as the donkeys and the shepherds. With around 5,000 permanent residents, Hugo has long been known as “Circus City, USA”, and was once the Christmas home of nearly two-dozen circus troupes. These days, festive visitors are far less common. Yet like Lisa and Tracy, some old stalwarts endure, as much for family as business — even if there may be little to replace the elephants once they finally hang up their hats.

Hugo’s three-ring history dates back almost a century. In 1941, cheap land, warm winters, and a promise of free water attracted the Al G. Kelly and Miller Brothers Circus. Hugo’s own name, borrowed from the 19th-century novelist, may also have been a draw, lending a dash of Gallic sophistication to a corner of hardscrabble prairie. Soon enough, other groups arrived, with names like ​​Famous Cole and Circus Chimera, and even today circus life is everywhere in Hugo. Statues of performing elephants decorate the streets. A section of the local cemetery — “Showmen’s Rest” — is dedicated to vanished circus greats. It acts, one grave marker reads, as “A Tribute to All Showmen Under God’s Big Top Home”.

These bonds have been strengthened by money. In small-town America, the circus is both entertainment and fundraiser. Schools and Rotary Clubs will co-sponsor a circus and push tickets in exchange for a cut of the gate. Through regular routes, a group will tour the same hamlets again and again, with philanthropy guaranteeing warm welcomes. What started off, for instance, as a one-time benefit for a blind child is now a permanent partnership between Culpepper & Merriwether Circus and the Visual Bucket List Foundation. Altogether, America’s circuses give millions to good causes, with Circus Smirkus, a youth non-profit, raising $2.7 million alone.

As for the punters themselves? All year round, but especially in Hugo at Christmas, they come for the elephants. A handful still winter in Hugo, while others, like Lisa and Tracy, now live here year-round. Semi-retired, the duo spend their golden years at the 270-acre Endangered Arc, a community for aging circus beasts. Not that they’ve lost any of their enthusiasm, swaying excitedly at the sight of a visitor. The bobbing and weaving is a disarming non-verbal plea: “pet me.” Sweet nothings and a stroke of their trunks elicit what’s best described as a purr. Kids, pogo-sticks of excitement, squeal. Parents swoon. But these circus cut-ups are professionals to the tips of their tusks. At the appointed moment, Lisa strikes her “blue steel” pose. In a Christmas snap with visitors, Santa and Mrs Claus alongside, she’s as still as a statue, her bobble hat symmetrical, her dignity intact.

More from this author

How mailmen saved rural America

By Jeff Bloodworth

Of course, Hugo’s magic is about more than its pachyderms. Take Armando Loyal, Lisa and Tracy’s minder. “They’ve provided entertainment and happiness for people all over the country, all over the world,” he says of his charges. “So, it’s their turn.” Listen to him speak, in fact, and they sound almost like family, with Loyal explaining how he cares for them on Christmas morning even before his own children.

That sense of the circus as something more than work is common here in Hugo. In Loyal’s case, it’s literally true. A ninth-generation showman, his grandparents were brought over from Italy by legendary impresario John Ringling. Some households make dentistry their lineage; for the Loyals, the “family staple”, as Armando puts it, is Roman equestrian riding, or standing atop two galloping draft horses while vaulting into a handstand. Tavana Luvas has lived a similar life. “I grew up with my family all day long,” says the fourth-generation trapeze artist, who learned her craft at her grandmother’s feet. Later, when Luvas had a husband and kids, she wondered how people could live like this.

It’s a question John Kennedy Kane, or “Eggroll” to his friends, has asked many times. Aging and balding, his career as “Canaan: the Human Volcano” feels like ancient history now. Yet his wry humor endures, as he describes the tensions of spending years on end with the same set of people. “You are with each other 24 hours a day,” Eggroll explains. “If you have an asshole that you work with, you only see them eight hours a day. I go back and his feet are hanging in my face because he’s on the upper bunk.”

But like all families, rowdy and rambunctious, circusers find a way — with every member vital to a show’s success. That means performers, yes, both four-legged and two, but also the backstage help. How could it be otherwise with such a grueling schedule? Consider a group like Culpepper & Merriwether, which over an eight-month season plays some 200 shows. The rhythm is relentless: arrive at dawn, bring down the house, then depart to do it all again tomorrow. And, in each new town, the big top must go up — without it, says Dave Williams, the Culpepper booker, “you don’t get to play”. Little wonder he reserves special praise for “the true stars of the show”: those tough folk who drive 120 stakes into the ground to hold and harness the tent.

For decades, this family effort, this “with it and for it”, paid off. Focusing on communities of less than 3,000 people, circuses like Culpepper brought out crowds — eager for some fun, but hinting again at the deep connections between big tops and small towns. “Nothing else goes there,” Williams says. “But the circus does. I think that’s part of it, another big part is that they are supporting their local group, whoever is bringing it to town. This is about civic pride.” When a circus came to Hugo in the old days, a pageant of animals and performers would parade down Broadway, the town’s main thoroughfare. Schools closed, businesses shuttered, and local celebrities rode elephants as part of the pomp.

Such festivities are getting rarer. A century ago, nearly 100 circuses and their menageries toured the nation. Today, there are 50, and that’s on a good day. Bad news for Hugo: winter retail has collapsed, and a once-bustling downtown, with its 11 department stores, now feels ominously still. Television and smart phones have doubtless played their parts here, but so too have changing mores toward the circus’s four-legged titans. “My God, protesters would be out there trying to stop us,” Eggroll says of animal-rights activists, with grand parades increasingly swapped for furtive night-time setups. “When did we become the bad guys?” Eggroll adds. “When did we become the villains?”

To be fair, there are genuine problems here, or anyway there used to be. In 2011, for instance, the Ringling Brothers circus was fined $270,000 after revelations that its elephants were chained, whipped and left in cages full of feces. By 2017, the iconic group had ended its 146-year run, though has since reopened with an animal-free show. Other challenges are harder to resolve. In September, a 37-year-old animal tamer, related to Loyal by marriage, was killed by his own tiger as his wife and daughter watched ringside.

On this second tragedy, Loyal is grimly philosophical. “We all know what we signed up for.” On the broader question of abuse, he concedes that “bad apples” will always exist: but emphasizes that throwing “everybody into one single pot” is wrong too. Turning to Lisa and Tracy, he shrugs and smiles. “Come and meet me. See how I take care of them. See how I love them.” Eggroll makes a similar point, suggesting that activism has actually changed the circus for the better. “We all saw animal treatment improved on shows because of the spotlight being on it,” he says. “Well, now — the elephants can roam free.”

The circus is modernizing in other ways too. Once upon a time, the big top was about clean-cut fun, all mimes and magic. Now, audiences craving some post-Covid liveliness go for something bawdier, with groups offering blue-humored clowns and strip teases. It may help, too, that the circus has remained gloriously apolitical, perfect for punters desperate to escape the bitterness of American politics. No wonder Royal the ringmaster describes his work as a “reply to our terrible times”.

More from this author

The revolt of the Rust Belt

By Jeff Bloodworth

Whether that’s enough to save Circus City, USA is another matter. With only three circuses now wintering in Hugo, it could soon become just another prairie town, with its rodeo team and its Walmart. Even so, circus lifers remain sure of their work. “Nobody’s farther away than about 40 feet from the ring,” Williams says. “So, you’re right on top of it. You can see them sweat. I think that’s the whole thing, and it’s the joy.” There are financial calculations here too. A ticket for four will set you back a mere $50, a godsend for people in places like Hugo, where 25% live below the poverty line and where per-capita income is less than $12,000.

Not that anyone really cares about the money. “You don’t go into show business wanting to get rich,” Williams says, who quit a stable job in accounting to book circus acts. “That’s not what it’s about. You either feel it in your heart, or you can’t do it.” Loyal is just as romantic, explaining how he can tell whether someone is a would-be circuser just by looking at them. You’re either the type to love “good trouble” — or you’re not. “Let me tell you,” Loyal says, “you can look in the crowd, and somebody that’s from the circus can tell. You can just look at people and know.” Being “with it and for it” means connection, a spiritual bond that’s invisible to most — but rainbow clear if you’re a member for life.

And, perhaps, for even for longer than that. When he dies, Jim Royal will be buried in Showmen’s Rest, and his plot will come with an inscription: “He knew how to read a lot.” Not that Royal, or the circus he so loves, is quite there yet. This, after all, is Hugo at Christmastime, a place where “with it and for it” is sung as loud as any carol. And so, for the moment, the festive parades go on, with their face paint, and floats, and a pickup truck pulling the Grinch on a flatbed. And, at the center of it all come Lisa and Tracy, swinging their trunks for all they’re worth, the Santas on their backs a sideshow for once. Oklahoma smiles a Christmas Day grin, and the circus family does too. “Look at where we are,” says Luvas. “We’re watching Santa on an elephant. Where are you going to see that? Just here.”

Obviously, after I wrote about her for the Guardian, the locals in our trendy Crouch End park soon got wind of it. They would stop us to ask if Maisie was the “Princess Diana dog” and we would joke about her being harassed by the paparazzi. One humourless reader didn’t really get the joke. He wrote to the newspaper: “Bindel has gone too far this time. That dog looks nothing like Princess Diana!”

But like Diana, Maisie was heartbreakingly beautiful, a Spaniel-Collie cross with a long coat and soulful eyes. Her legs were slightly too short for her body, which made her all the more lovable. But before she came to us, someone had abandoned her. According to her profile on a rescue charity’s website, it said she would be put to sleep the following day unless she was claimed. We did. And we were besotted.

Her reputation — and her bark — soon preceded her. Our local park has a tennis court attached, and Maisie would gallop in and grab a ball, mid-serve. The Crouch End tennis gang were rarely amused. She even made a name for herself in media circles: if ever my partner Harriet or I were doing interviews, Maisie would inevitably bark her head off. Producers would have to decide whether to rerecord the segment or broadcast her voice on Radio 4 or Sky News.

Suggested reading

The bloody truth about animals

By Mary Harrington

Maisie brought us joy in private as well as in public. With us, she was sweet, cuddly and affectionate, though she barked at everyone else. And she was insecure. If Harriet and I were sitting together on the sofa, she would try to separate us with her paws. She had never got over whatever had happened to her in her former life. We supported her with her trauma, and she helped us when we needed comfort after a bad day. Harriet, a lawyer, and I both do work that takes us to very dark places, dealing with the detail of the worst excesses of men’s violence. It’s not uncommon for us to be talking about murder, prostitution and child sexual abuse before 8am. But having a creature who would greet us joyfully, blissfully unaware of the terrible things humans are capable of, was always incredibly therapeutic.

And we repaid that joy with love and attention and vast vast vets bills. I’ve never felt more middle-class than when I had to tell an editor that I couldn’t knock out a piece in the next hour because I had to take the dog to hydrotherapy. She had fortnightly appointments ever since she developed arthritis. She also had monthly vaccinations to keep the condition at bay, and check-ups for her kidney disease and pancreatitis. People without pets will howl at the expense, but I had always felt lucky we could afford this sort of care.

Never more so than when we decided we had to euthanise her. She could no longer bound on to the tennis courts to irritate the Wimbledon wannabes; she could no longer negotiate the four steps into the kitchen or out into the garden without help. She had gone off her food. Her kidney failure had progressed and the vet suggested a new course of treatment. “No,” I said. “It’s time for her to go”. My partner and I knew we would rather let her go a day too soon than a day too late. She was 16-and-a-half and it was just before Christmas.

I know people will call me a hypocrite for promoting the value of having a pet, particularly during a cost-of-living crisis. When people are using food banks to feed their children, isn’t it bad taste to be talking about pet food banks? I hear the criticism. And I have made similar arguments myself — railing against donkey sanctuaries getting more funding than domestic violence charities. And, yes, I do think we should prioritise humans. I spend a significant amount of my unpaid time and energy campaigning to keep women and children safe from male violence. But I also donate a fair bit every month to animal charities. I want women to live without male violence; I don’t want donkeys to suffer; I want people to be able to feed their pets. These things aren’t mutually exclusive.

Suggested reading

How Ukraine is using animal propaganda

By Matt Broomfield

A couple of years ago, I wrote about about people who had to give up their pets because they couldn’t afford basic vet treatment or decent food. I wept with owners who recounted the pain of rehoming their beloved companions, feeling angry that there was little help for them. Things have only got worse since then. Figures released last week by the Dog’s Trust reveal that a record number of people are being forced to give up their pets: the charity received more than 45,000 requests from owners about giving up their animals in 2023.

If I could have kept Maisie alive, fit and healthy forever I would have. But when the time came, the vet came to the house so that Maisie could die in her own bed, with us close by. She was given a sedative, fell into a deep sleep, and then a final injection stopped her heart. She was wrapped up in her favourite blanket and carried out in a wicker basket, while we sat inconsolable, looking at her bowls, her toys, her collar.

I cry about her every day and I have barely slept since she died. Christmas was especially hard: even the cat looked bereft. I would go out for walks on my own, feeling completely weird without a dog by my side. It was so odd to not hear her incessant barking when the doorbell rang. The house has lost its soul. While researching that piece two years ago, I also spoke to experts in bereavement counselling for pet owners. Some might think going to a therapist to get through the loss of a pet is a ridiculous self-indulgence when there’s so much human suffering in the world. But I know now that such loss can bring with it terrible grief, particularly when they have been so therapeutic, as Maisie was for me

More from this author

The murder trial that broke me

By Julie Bindel

Maybe it was the quietness of the holiday season, but I ended up looking at dogs on rescue centre websites — thinking that, in the future, we would probably get another. Yes, I felt guilt, but I figured there was no harm in looking. And then, of course, the inevitable happened. She was a cross between a springer spaniel and a French bulldog, nothing like Maisie. It was only a couple of days before I surreptitiously emailed the owner, asking for more details. It was a familiar story: family dog gets pregnant, six puppies are born, they all need rehoming.

We brought Ruby home on Sunday, a month after Maisie died. She is four-months-old, and full of energy. I can’t wait for her to start barking, demanding a walk first thing in the morning. I still feel Maisie’s loss like a hole in my heart. But I didn’t want to wait just for the sake of it. I’m a fairly anxious person, an insomniac, and the nature of my work leaves me with invasive thoughts. Being able to spend time with a furry bundle of happiness reduces my anxiety and makes me forget, albeit temporarily, the painful stories stored in my head. Maisie helped me keep doing the work that I do. Now, Ruby will take up the baton — and the tennis ball.

She was the art editor at Harper’s Magazine when I worked there 20 years ago. We bonded when everybody in the office took a personality test one afternoon. It was supposed to determine whether you were a “Dreamer” or “Practical”. Stacey and I both scored 97% Dreamer. She’s hilarious and sharp and compulsively creative. As a kid in South Carolina, she used to sing in malls with her family. Her message said that her husband Sam’s book about fireflies had finally been printed.

I knew what she was talking about from having followed the project from a distance, over text. Her husband, Samuel James, is a world-class photographer who grew up in Cincinnati. When she met him, they were in the New York journalism scene but parachuted out as a couple and landed in the forested Appalachian foothills of his native Ohio, the southern part, not far from the Kentucky border. It’s the middle of nowhere, frankly, even by southern Ohio standards, but their immediate visual environment is very beautiful and state-parkish.

Stacey and Sam are both passionate naturalists. They’re home-schooling their daughter, Josephine, which for Josephine means a lot of studying biology in the woods. When it’s time to learn about metamorphosis, she goes to the pond. Twice a year she and her mother help move hundreds of DeKay’s Brownsnakes across a road that blocks their natural migration path. They count them as they go. Last fall it was 679, juveniles and adults. Sam is sometimes hired to inspect the middens of endangered Alleghany woodrats. He looks for raccoon scat, which can infect the woodrats with a deadly parasite.

Sam and Stacey had no way of knowing, when they made the move to that the particular little part of Ohio, that it was a global hotspot for firefly diversity. They found that out only by going for walks through old fields and forests, in May and June. The lightning bugs were everywhere. Some nights they would be so thick that they seemed to affect the overall light-level. It wasn’t just the number but the variety, too. Different sub-species had their own colours and patterns of signalling. They lit up during different phases of the evening and night, and in different microhabitats. Some preferred meadows; others, the trees. Some went on flashing for hours, whereas others had briefer windows.

Sam started trying to photograph them. He wanted to document the phenomenon, but also to preserve something, if possible, of what it was like to witness it. That meant capturing elements of time and rhythm. He started going to the fields before dusk and staying late, basically all night. They would all three go. Josephine watched and played until she passed out on Sam’s tripod bag on the ground — many nights of doing that, over four years, experimenting with ultra-long exposures. Sometimes he would leave the shutter open for nearly half an hour (after which point the image started to get too noisy with information). He discovered that, for whatever reason, a relatively modest Canon digital camera worked best for this sort of picture. It seemed to stay sharp longest in the low-light conditions.

Sam had made a book of this work, and now Stacey wrote to tell me that they had received the first box of copies in the mail. I had heard so much about the project, and they wanted me to be among the first to see the finished thing. I was moved. I wrote back in congratulation and excitement and said something like: “Send me a PDF!!!” After that, there was an uncharacteristic silence of one or two days. You know how you can feel, in the rhythm of texting, when there’s something not quite right about a pause on the other end?

At last, Stacey wrote to say that she and Sam had discussed the matter and were uncomfortable with the idea that my first encounter with the book should be electronic. It was not the right way to experience the object. They had taken pains to make it a work of art. The printing had been as important as the photography. I needed to see a physical copy. I told her that I understood (and did) but explained that, unfortunately, I was way up in northern Michigan, a nine-hour road trip from their house. “That’s okay,” she said. “We’re fine to drive.” She’s one of those people who vibrate through the world like that.

Suggested reading

Is this the end of the world?

By Douglas Coupland

She wasn’t being quite as intense as I make it sound. Someone in their family has a cabin up near where I was. I’d forgotten. They’d been to that part of the country before. We made a plan, and about a week later the little family came rolling up in a Jeep. Stacey has beautiful silvery hair now — she almost had a Patti Smith thing going. Sam looks like he could be Bradley Cooper’s younger brother. With them was Josephine, a precocious six-year-old pip of a girl with a winning bowl cut. She was excited because they had seen a porcupine in a tree by their cabin. I asked her what it was doing. “It was very very sleepy and just stared at us,” she said.

Inside the cottage, in the little dining area where the best light was, we spread the book open on the white wooden table. The format is 9”x12”, broad pages. The matte cover is gravitational: a picture of darkness, but darkness as Samuel James has learned to photograph it, with a tremendous subtlety of gradation between the blue and black, and the greens of the forest glowing through darkly from behind. Sometimes there is moonlight. The image has the quality of actual nighttime, as if you could walk through it into the field. It is dappled all over with small bursts of yellow, wherever a firefly has flashed.

There are technical challenges involved in printing images of the night, especially when the focus is on the bright light of the fireflies’ bodies. Doing both was the challenge — holding onto the “tones and textures in the darks”, Sam said, “and still having the flash be luminous”. The fireflies had to glow on the page. Sam wound up settling on the independent Dutch fine-art publisher Fw:Books. He worked with Fw’s founding designer, Hans Gremmen, and with the Dutch printing house Drukkerij Robstolk, which has a reputation for handling dark images. Sam and Stacey flew to Amsterdam to consult in the production process. They described standing by the press and watching the printer hand-mix a batch of what they called “firefly yellow”, using ultra-saturated Japanese paint.

“His name was Niels,” Stacey said. “He had a little pot and a spatula.”

“It was cool to me,” Sam said, “because I felt like there was a lineage, going back in history, in Holland, to book-binding and the printed page.”

The only time they intervened, Sam said, was when it came to differentiating the different firefly colours. “This was an art project, but it was also a science project,” he said. “Some of the fireflies are that brilliant yellow, but others are green, and this one” — he flipped forward several pages — “is orange. Plus there are other yellows.” Some pages showed more than one flash-colour, meaning it had been a spot where multiple species mingled. Because of the long exposure time, you could see the flash-patterns, too. Some looked dot-dot-dot. Others made short streaks. Some made long straight comet trails. Or little isolated green blobs, like floating lanterns. Crazy squiggles. Elegant curves and bows. Some flash synchronously, in rhythm. It’s very special to be in the forest when that’s happening, a thousand fairy lights blinking on and off together in unison all around you. Each species has its own code. “My favourite one is the Pyractomena angulata,” Stacey said, “because he’s orange and he just will shimmer, a lot of quick flashes off and on.”

Suggested reading

The year of the femcel

By Mary Gaitskill

It gets even more complex, Sam said, when you realise that the species sometimes mimic one another, for various strategic reasons, most having to do with reproduction. It’s the males who go around flashing, trying to attract the females. “The females are sort of hidden in the vegetation,” Sam said, “discreet. You don’t really see them.” But females can flash if they want. They do so mainly in response to the males — little winks. But there’s another, darker reason females sometimes flash: the females of certain species engage in a form of cannibalistic mimicry. By imitating the mating signals flashed by the females of another species, they lure in horny males and gobble them up. All of this communication and deception is happening above the field, in a language of chemical light. (It makes sense that Werner Herzog includes Sam’s firefly images in his new film about neuro-biology.)

I asked how many species there were in the patch of land where Sam had been shooting. “Twenty-six,” he said, “that we’ve identified. Of those twenty-six, nineteen make a flash code.”

I was surprised to hear that some don’t flash. “Some of them have evolved and foregone the whole business of flashing at night,” he said. “Too dangerous.”

I asked why there would be such great firefly diversity in that hollow where they live. “I don’t actually know the reason,” Sam said. “The Appalachians are a firefly hotspot in general.”

“It’s really dark where we are,” Stacey added. “You have to have darkness and you have to have snails. The babies eat, voraciously, snails.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, “also, the soil has to be right. And we’re next to a preserve, so there’s not a lot of spraying and farming… But as to why there are so many kinds of firefly? It’s still a mystery to me.”

Sam added that there is still a lot we don’t know about these creatures. Scientists do even not agree on how or why firefly bioluminescence evolved. Some argue that it had to do with sex from the start (a means of attracting mates). That seems to be the dominant camp. It includes Lynn Frierson Faust, a pillar of lightning-bug and glowworm studies whose work Sam and Stacey frequently mentioned. But other entomologists theorise that the fireflies began to glow because of something called aposematism, an evolutionary mechanism by which species turn unusually garish or brightly coloured, in order to warn predators of the poison they contain — or to fool predators into thinking they contain it. In the fireflies’ case, the poison is real. Their chemicals are toxic. To some animals, anyway — bats, mice and lizards. Plenty of creatures eat them.

Suggested reading

The magic of Britain's rainforests

By Aris Rouissinos

Sam turned a page of the book. “These dusk-flashers,” he said, “these yellow guys, they only flash at dusk and then they’re gone…”

In much the same fashion, Sam and Stacey and Josephine were suddenly gone, back to southern Ohio. But they left behind a copy of the book, which I’ve picked up at least 20 times since then. It absorbs you. The woods and sky are so dark in some of the images that you almost can’t see them; you have to sit there and let them reveal themselves. Meanwhile, all of this light-painting shines across the pages.

It’s hard not to feel a little melancholy, in this summer of climate horrors, looking at pictures of fireflies. There has always been something utopian about them (in my notebook I have a newspaper clipping from 1810 reporting that the “streets of Washington were lighted for the first time last week with glow worms and fire bugs, 500 of these insects being confined in every lamp…”). Their habitat is threatened — as Stacey had pointed out, they need darkness — and I see far fewer of them than when I was a kid, or even 20 years ago. God forbid there should come a day when a child will be forced to consult a book, to know what it was like to experience fireflies in full array. But if the day does come, Samuel James’s Nightairs will have safeguarded a glimmer.

As in any war, animals have suffered greatly in Ukraine, with hundreds of thousands of livestock — and millions of chickens — slaughtered in air strikes on industrial facilities and in wanton arson attacks. The bodies of hundreds of dolphins have washed up on Black Sea shorelines, the result of acoustic trauma from sonar. Ukraine has been particularly savvy in playing on Western fondness for animals as part of its highly effective media operation. And for the same reasons that Hollywood scriptwriters are advised to have their hero “save the cat” in opening sequences to ensure audience sympathy, it’s hard to be unmoved by the bravery of animal rescue charities operating under fire.

“People whose neighbourhoods are being shelled think about their animals first, and hand them over to us, sobbing,” one volunteer working in an animal-evacuation charity told me. “Military men and women, meanwhile, find comfort in these pets and see them as one of the few good things in their lives.” Even so, the focus on animals can grate, particularly when these sentiments seem to exceed the compassion extended to human victims of war. In the opening weeks of the conflict, certain neighbouring countries opened their borders to pets accompanying their owners, but failed to extend the same courtesy to African students stranded by the invasion.

The most famous animal hero in Ukraine is a mine-detection dog called Patron, a Jack Russell terrier whose name in Ukrainian means bullet cartridge. Patron was awarded the Order of Courage by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, given his own animated YouTube series, appointed Unicef’s official goodwill “ambassadog” to Ukraine, and even hailed at the Cannes Film Festival for his “dogmanitarian work”.

A similar, slightly daft personification is at play in other news reports, as with that of the “abandoned Russian war dog” who “swapped sides” and has now “learned to understand Ukrainian”. In contrast, when Russian troops “adopted” a raccoon from Kherson zoo as their mascot, there was outcry, and Russian soldiers adopting strays are accused of “kidnapping” and “abduction”.  Sporadic assertions such as the claim Russian soldiers eat dogs, while their Ukrainian opponents rescue them, serve a readily apparent purpose in dehumanising the invaders. In reality, one need not look far on social media to find equally propagandistic stories about Russian soldiers “saving” dogs from “drunken” Ukrainians.

With the assistance of sympathetic journalists, both parties in the conflict are engaging in a age-old tradition of using animals as propaganda stooges. Alexander’s Bucephalus was a steed so famous he gave his name to a city in modern-day Pakistan. Simón Bolívar’s horse, Palomo, a gift from an elderly peasant woman, became a symbol of national liberation, while Napoleon’s image was burnished by association with his horse, Marengo — the more so since, in reality, the Emperor was an inept horseman.

Suggested reading

Why Ukraine's offensive has stalled

By Edward Luttwak

By the start of the 20th century, animals were being adopted as talismanic mascots: from Old Douglas, the domesticated camel used by the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, to Private Simpson, a stretcher-bearer at Gallipoli who used donkeys to help save a reputed 300 injured men, and Unsinkable Sam, the ship’s cat rescued by the Royal Navy from the wreckage of a Kriegsmarine battleship. Increasing empathy for these war pets was reflected in their commemoration as military heroes, particularly in the Anglosphere where, ever since the First World War, animals have been decorated for their “service”. At the same time, the unthinking, slavish loyalty of tame beasts reflected principles of hierarchy, valour and blind sacrifice essential to contemporary armies — as suggested by the famous “lions led by donkeys” formula, or the recruitment poster demanding: “Even a Dog Enlists, Why Not You?” The mascots represent both personal, heroic ideals and the de-personalising effect of attrition warfare.

More importantly, the treatment of animals gradually came to be recognised as a metric of humanity and good conduct. In the 19th century, the US and UK Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children were founded after, and using the model established by, Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Come the Second World War, Joachim von Ribbentrop was pilloried in the British tabloids for leaving behind a Chow called Bärchen when abandoning the German embassy in London, in an act described as representing “the inherent brutality of Nazism that has no justice or human feeling, even for its pets”. (The British press was slower to castigate the hysterical cull on the eve of the war of more than 750,000 cats and dogs, in London and elsewhere, in panicked response to anticipated food shortages that never materialised.)

At the same time, of course, the Nazis sought to present themselves as defenders of animal welfare, opposing the alleged cruelty of kosher butchering. Nazi Germany was the first nation to ban vivisection, and to this day Germany uses animal welfare laws first introduced by the Nazis. Clearly, a rhetorical or actual commitment to animal welfare does not necessarily correlate to compassion for one’s fellow man.

Nonetheless, given public empathy for animals, accusations of their maltreatment by enemy forces are a reliable way of representing the cruelty of their opponents — as with occasional reports of Islamic militants strapping improvised bombs to donkeys. Frequently, however, the media’s representation of animal rescue operations is often designed to serve a political agenda, burnishing some group’s reputation and denigrating another’s. These contradictions are nowhere more pronounced than in Palestine, where I visited a depressing little zoo in the Gaza Strip, run by an amateur taxidermist, a lumpy stuffed giraffe standing as an unsteady testament to the destruction wrought by Israeli bombing.

Suggested reading

Why Gen Z prefers dogs to babies

By Mary Harrington

In 2019, Four Paws, a charity now involved in animal rescue operations in Ukraine, made headlines by saving starving animals at that zoo. Back then, Fathy Jomaa, the zoo owner, tried to join the dots between the grim conditions endured by his animals and a decade of blockades that have forced the majority of Gazans to subsist below the poverty line on less than $5 a day. Unable to properly feed and care for his emaciated charges, more than 40 animals, including lions, monkeys, ostriches and a hyena, were taken in by other zoos. “I feel like I’m losing my family,” Jomaa lamented. But the barrage of criticism directed at him from animal rights groups, in reports that the animals were able to “escape” a “zoo of sorrows”, suited Israel’s ends perfectly. That is the benefit of pet propaganda: weaponising animals is a surefire way to win hearts and minds, an Instagrammable distraction from the less sanitised realities of war.

On the ground, meanwhile, the negative impact of war on animals remains a serious issue, with the mass death and displacement of livestock and wildlife leading to serious consequences for human populations in ways researchers are just beginning to explore. It’s in this sense that Ukraine’s claim that Russia is committing “ecocide” must be understood. But Kyiv has also learned to play the media game: and these structural eco-issues are never going to have the same sentimental appeal as a puppy plucked from the rubble and “recruited” into information warfare.

So the ad I spotted in that Tube carriage, for the dating app Tinder, seemed particularly fitting. It depicted a smiling young couple in psychedelic clothing, with the caption: “Finally Having Kids”. They each rest one hand on a pushchair. In the pushchair is a dog.

If, given my recent experience, Londoners seem more partial to dogs than kids, this may not be the only way in which “fur babies” are on the up. According to last year’s ONS data, half of British women now reach 30 without having kids. And Pets At Home CEO Lyssa McGowen thinks some of these have redirected their caring urges toward pets. “They are taking all that time and energy and attention and putting it into fur babies, especially in urban areas,” she said.

McGowen speculates that this is happening because the classic milestones of adult life — such as getting your own place — seem increasingly out of reach to many, thanks to scarce housing, rising costs and stagnant wages. This feels plausible: in the US, studies show the stated desire for family size has remained consistent even as the birth rate has fallen. And one recent UK-based Rolling Stone investigation quoted many young couples for whom money is indeed the sticking point.

But is that all there is to it? Prospects for Gen Z are not as optimistic as for their Boomer grandparents, but in absolute terms human societies have lived through greater turbulence and gone on having kids. Birth rates remain buoyant, for example, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which consistently makes the top 10 in the Fragile States Index of most unstable countries. So what else is in the mix?

Liberal feminist Jill Filipovic argues that if more women are opting to have fewer or no kids, it isn’t so much about the financial pinch. Certainly, among dog-walking acquaintances locally, I can think of several childless, younger millennial heterosexual couples who seem, on the face of it, pretty sorted: good jobs, comfortably off, often homeowners, sometimes even working flexibly from home. Ideally situated, in other words, for starting a family. And yet, they have no kids. For some in this situation, the dog is an object of minute, loving observation and care, and plays the central role in conversation that children usually do for young parents. Watching this, my sense is that although for some economics is a factor in choosing between human babies and the fur variety, at least some of the time it’s not just about money. It goes, rather, to the heart of what we think the purpose of life is — and thus what we are.

When I took our Tube-travelling dog for a check-up recently, the vet asked if we were planning to have her spayed. In discussing the pros and cons, the vet suggested one benefit would be that, once neutered, “she can just get on with being a dog”. It stuck in my mind: after all, isn’t the reproductive cycle part of being a dog? In what sense would neutering Saffy make her freer to be a dog? What kind of dogness is actively obstructed by the organismic urge to make more dogs?

If, as McGowen suggests, a great many young adults today are directing their parental instincts toward pets, I suspect a central reason is that we’ve embraced an equivalent understanding of humanness. That is, we’ve come to believe that the preconditions for realising yourself fully — especially in the field of sex and relationships — now actively foreclose becoming a parent, or at least radically reduce parenthood to one not especially appealing option among many. Given the pervasiveness of this message, the surprise shouldn’t be that many young men and women are pouring that caregiving urge into “fur babies”, but that anyone is bucking the trend and still making the human sort.

Fertility really started plummeting with the onset of the sexual revolution. While modernity consistently drives down birth rates, in the UK (with the exception of a wartime blip) the average number of children per woman remained above the replacement rate until the 20th century.  It was only in the Sixties, concurrent with legalisation of the Pill, that rates began falling off a cliff, dipping below replacement levels in 1975, the year after contraceptives were made available to everyone free of charge. Britain’s total fertility rate has remained below replacement ever since.

More from this author

The failure of lockdown localism

By Mary Harrington

People are not without agency, of course. My birth, toward the end of the Seventies, attests to the fact that women didn’t abruptly stop having kids just because they could suddenly control fertility. But if contraception acted directly on fertility, it also did so culturally, by making it possible for the first time to treat sex and reproduction as two separate things. This was a seismic technological and cultural change; and one consequence was, as the Catholic feminist Abigail Favale puts it, that it became increasingly normal to see sex not as a “procreational” activity but a “recreational” one. And I suspect it’s this shift, more than anything else, that’s done most to undermine the once-robust cultural association between parenthood and being a fully realised adult human.

Cultural changes take a while to percolate through, but half a century on from the original revolution, this worldview is so normalised that it’s hard to imagine things any other way. For example, in Let’s Talk About It, a 2021 educational book about sex and relationships aimed at teenagers, the procreational function of sex is acknowledged in passing but the overall emphasis is on sex as — in the book’s terms — a “fun physical activity”.

A great many things follow from viewing sex in this way. Firstly, if sex is primarily recreational it genuinely doesn’t matter what sex your partner is, provided they want to have sex with you. “Reproduction aside”, the authors of Let’s Talk About It assert, “your genitals exist to let you feel pleasure with yourself or others (no matter which genitals they may have).”

Secondly, if the principal aim is recreation, then relationship type doesn’t matter. Studies have long shown that where children are concerned, growing up with two married parents is associated with better outcomes. As long as there is a general cultural consensus that sex is associated with children, then, this is likely to be accompanied by a consensus that sexual desire should be generally pointed at marriage or at least long-term relationships. But if sex is mainly recreational, babies are emphatically not viewed as part of the story. Rather, as in Let’s Talk About It, they are discussed as a “risk” attendant on sexual activity: a negative event of the same order as catching a sexually transmitted disease.

It follows, too, that if sex is just a fun leisure activity, then you can have any kind of relationship you like. Accordingly, the book gives equal weighting to monogamy, polyamory, hook-ups, and abstinence, saying only that “Sexual intimacy is a powerful way to feel good and bond with another person, whether it’s for a night or a lifetime”. Taken together, this worldview presents embodiment, sexuality, desire and intimacy as coruscating, infinitely varied expressive options in which what anyone does should be limited only by individual preference and mutual consent. And if this is what being a fully realised person looks like, then by comparison, reproductive sex — the boring old heteronormative kind — is constricting in the extreme.

Suggested reading

The animals trapped in human bodies

By Michael Bond

Imagine you’ve grown up with this set of messages, or at least something like it. Now, imagine you detect in yourself a buried hankering to be a mother or father. In order even to reach the starting blocks for doing anything about this longing, you’d need to unlearn most of your culture’s ambient assumptions about the field of sex and relationships, beginning with the received view that babies are not a source of joy but threat. Then you’d have to question the taboo on connecting sexual desire with its reproductive end, which is to say accept that, if you’re trying to make a baby, it really does matter what genitals your partner has.

In the face of all this, it’s no wonder many who have absorbed some variant of this message simply embrace it, and set out to enjoy the panoply of expressive sexual and emotional options now presented, without judgement, for selection. And this means sidelining parenthood: for within that paradigm, the organismic urge to reproduce, with all the limits it opposes on those expressive options, presents itself not as an aspect of becoming fully human, but an obstacle to the infinite ways in which we might do so. Self-neutering is now, as the vet suggested of spaying Saffy, self-actualisation. And should some glimmer of the ancient drive to care for dependents nonetheless fight its way to the surface, Tinder’s latest ad campaign has the answer.

He spoke for the nation’s 60,000 sheep-keepers. We live in fear. France is currently losing 15,000 livestock per annum to the 140 or so wolf packs that run within these borders. The European grey wolf is a canny apex predator that preys on the easiest, largest lump of protein it can kill for the least expenditure of energy: hello sheep. But also on the menu are goats, cattle, and horses. Earlier this month, wolves killed a red deer — not in the wild, but in someone’s back garden.

Humans are also now threatened by the wolf. In February, Joseph Uto, a town councillor in Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, was checking the local water supply when he was surrounded by five wolves — one of which charged him. Uto, a former soldier, managed to hit the aggressor away. After 30 minutes the pack withdrew. The incident is the first incidence of aggression towards humans since the wolf came back to France in 1992. The wolves seem to be losing their atavistic fear of humans.

The attacks on livestock, and the close encounters with humans, will logically only multiply. The national wolf-pack, which now numbers around 1,000 specimens, is enlarging by between 13% and 20% each year. In its way, the lupine advance across France is magnificent. Hunted to extinction in the Thirties, the wolf returned 30 years ago, when a small number of Canis lupus lupus crossed over the Alps from Italy. Since then, wolves have been seen in over half of metropolitan France’s 96 départements. Wolves spread naturally: annually, the previous year’s cubs depart the main pack to seek territories elsewhere. They have been spotted on the outskirts of Paris, in the environs of Dieppe. They have swum rivers, nipped across autoroutes.

Wolves also spread unnaturally. Their progress across France is state-aided. In 2018, Macron’s centrist government published a 100-page “Wolf Action Plan”, announcing its intention to increase the number of the predators on the mainland to 500 by 2023. The move was intended to increase biodiversity — or at least the modish type of biodiversity propagated by celebrity ecologist, Nicholas Hulot, recruited to Macron’s government to green its credentials. To the surprise of no-one in French agriculture, the target figure was easily doubled by the national wolf pack in that time span.

More from this author

Beavers are tormenting Britain

By John Lewis-Stempel

After all, the wolf in France has rigorous protection. Like the rest of the EU signatories to the 1979 Berne Convention and the 1992 EU Habitats Directive, France gives the wolf protected species status, meaning that it can only be controlled by “lethal means” in exceptional circumstances. Effectively, a flock has to be under direct attack for a farmer to shoot a wolf justifiably. To assuage farmers, the state agreed a 10% annual cull — undertaken by the “Wolf Brigade” from the Office for Hunting and Wildlife — which manifestly failed. Ministers have now raised the threshold to 19%.

This is unlikely to satisfy France’s shepherds — or, indeed, France’s already dyspeptic tax papers. In the event of a wolf attack, livestock breeders receive compensation for a replacement animal. Paris also grants subsidies for the building of electrified wolf-defences, “reinforced human presence” (assistant shepherds), and the breeding and training of livestock guard dogs — usually Pyrenean Mountain Dogs known locally as “Patou”. By 2020, the French government had already financed 4,258 of livestock guard dogs, and was sloshing out €38 million in anti-wolf measures and compensation. According to INRAE, the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment, the cost of protecting sheep from wolves is “exploding”.

The money is not well-spent. In the French alpine region, an area where wolves have been present for a quarter century, more than 90% of successful attacks take place on farms that have already adopted the recommended means of protection. In a sober, even downright pessimistic report, INRAE concluded that wolves are “probably taking advantage of their legal status as a strictly protected species”. They have learned to circumvent methods of herd protection.

The boom in Patou is also causing trouble: they only look cuddly. Shepherds may need a dozen dogs to protect their flocks, and 105 people reported being bitten by a Pyrenean mountain dog in 2022. Timothée Dufour, a lawyer who counts shepherds among his clients, said there had been a “multiplication of conflicts” linked to dogs, and a notable increase in lawsuits against sheep-farmers.

Meanwhile, the compensation for dead sheep is inadequate, and only covers mortalities. There are indirect impacts of predation: stressed survivors lose weight, miscarry, reduce their milk supply, and sometimes refuse to graze on the places where they experienced a wolf attack for three years. One breeder, who was reimbursed €1,850 by the state, has estimated her losses at €24,000.

The wolf’s most fervent supporters are the rewilders, who see it as a key player in plans for large-scale restoration of the wildwood that covered France in the primordial mist. Theoretically, the wolf will keep down boar and deer numbers. But the world has moved on from the hunter-gatherer Stone Age; sheep farming in France has created grassland landscapes of globally important biodiversity. The Causse in the Aveyron, for instance, is a Unesco heritage site precisely because of the 2,000-year-old relationship between pastoral farming and the environment.

Nor is the return of the wolf simply a problem for France. In Germany the wolf-pack is growing by 38% annually. In the Netherlands, to deter wolves from approaching humans, authorities are experimenting with paintball guns. In Sweden, licences to kill wolves are being issued to local hunters in blatant disregard for the EU’s wolf-protection legislation. Faced with farmer protests, the European Parliament last Autumn voted to downgrade the wolf’s protected status to facilitate more culling. The Commission, however, appears disinclined to take notice. (Although one assumes that Ursula Von der Leyen, the Commission President might at least lend a sympathetic ear: Dolly, her pet pony, was killed by a wolf in September.)

Suggested reading

How to save British farming (and the countryside)

By James Rebanks

Either way, the culling of wolves may be counterproductive: according to a 2014 study in the US, if culling is restricted to part of the pack, the remainder break up into several breeding pairs, leading to a higher population and more attacks on livestock in the future. But if selective shooting does not work, and if fences and dogs do not work, then the return of the wolf is now a problem without a solution, short of the animal’s absolute eradication in livestock areas — or the eradication of livestock and their farmers. It’s them or us.

After reading Sud-Ouest’s wolf warning of wolves moving into Charente Maritime, I went to look at my sheep — themselves grazers of biodiverse grassland, rich in fauna such as stone curlew and flora such as pyramid orchids. My shepherd neighbour Jean-Claude passed me on the track, and I asked him his view on the coming of the wolf. He pointed up the hill towards the forest: “We’ll need walls of electric fences everywhere to protect us. It will be like living in a prisoner of war camp.” He has a point. It is starting to feel like a war. And it’s the traditional shepherds, rural communities, and nature itself being taken prisoner.

I first learned about therianthropy while talking to Kathy Gerbasi, a social psychologist who specialises in relationships between humans and animals. She has an interest in furries, a fandom that dresses up as anthropomorphic animals. Gerbasi conducted a survey at a furry convention that included the following two questions: “Do you consider yourself to be less than 100% human?”, and “If you could be 0% human, would you be?” Furries feel an affinity with animals, but that’s generally as far as it goes. So, when a few of her respondents answered yes to both questions, she realised that she was dealing with people who were fundamentally atypical.

Since then, Gerbasi has held several discussion groups with therians, who she describes as “very sincere”. “They look like people,” she says. “They mostly behave like people… But if you really talk to them, they’ll tell you that deep inside they are not a person.” My friend the bear, who goes by the sobriquet BearX, lives an improbably normal life. He is married. He has two children. His career in engineering has afforded him a nice house and a comfortable middle-class life. As he says: “If you didn’t know something was up, you wouldn’t know anything was up.”

When psychologists investigate an unusual pattern of behaviour, they look for common attributes that may help explain it, such as age, gender, class or geography. So far, Gerbasi and the handful of other psychologists who have studied therians have failed to find any. While researching my new book, I talked to therians in their teens and in their seventies, of female, male and undetermined gender. The only thing that can be said about almost all therians is that they realise at a young age that they are different in body and spirit from those around them. They feel “off”, separated from humanity, and this estrangement defines the rest of their lives.

“I had an internal sense as a kid that I was supposed to be bigger, heavier,” says BearX. “Later, I worked out that bears fit everything that I felt. It led me to think that maybe I was supposed to have been born a bear and there was some kind of cataclysmic failure in the universe’s sorting system.” Caesar, a communications technician in his mid-thirties who identifies as a coyote, remembers feeling “very animal” as a child. “Maybe the best way to put it is that humans think with their emotions or on a higher level of cognition, but the way I responded to a situation was more instinctual, not calculating.”

As they grow up, therians move from having a general sense of feeling not quite human to a more concrete awareness of the kind of animal they are: their “theriotype”. The most common theriotypes are predator species such as wolves and large cats. As with furries, culture plays a role here: jaguars are more common in South America, and foxes in Japan, whose folklore contains many stories of people being possessed by a fox. Mythical or fantasy creatures are no less valid, though their owners are differentiated in the community as “otherkin”. While researching, I spoke to a couple of dragons.

Suggested reading

The bloody truth about animals

By Mary Harrington

Finding your theriotype can be a struggle. Most therians make their decision only after a great deal of research and thought. The community encourages its members to be scientifically rigorous: outlandish claims that would give ammunition to sceptics, such as the idea that it’s possible to physically transform into an animal, are dismissed as “fluff”. On therian forums, moderators frequently rebuke contributors for promoting theories that would break the laws of physics, and they are quick to correct errors in morphological or behavioural descriptions of species, such as the suggestion that wolves have red eyes, or that all canines hunt in packs.

A peculiar and often alarming characteristic of being a therian is the feeling that you have phantom body parts. Blayz, a wolf-dog hybrid, lives with the permanent sensation of a tail that wags or droops on command. “Going around corners, I will alter the movement of my frame to keep my tail from getting caught in doors or swiping cups off the table,” he says. Caesar, the coyote, is often convinced he has outsized ears that he can manipulate like antennae. I spoke with a snow leopard — an American woman in her early twenties — who has been saddled with the full range of phantom phenomena. “Even as a kid, I remember feeling like I had a tail and telling people it was invisible,” she explained. “It’s as much a part of me as my arms and legs, really. I also have constant phantom paws and a muzzle, which can make eating and drinking funny sometimes. I’m likely to miss my mouth if I’m not thinking about it.’

To feel body parts where none exist is not as biologically improbable as it sounds. Studies of people born with missing arms and legs have shown that limbs that have always been absent can still be represented in the sensory and motor regions of the brain. The psychologist Ronald Melzack, an expert on phantom pain, proposed that the brain continuously generates a pattern of impulses that indicate that the body is intact and “unequivocally one’s own”, even if it isn’t. This pattern, which Melzack called a “neurosignature”, is genetically determined and characteristic of each individual. It is not inconceivable that someone born with an atypical neurosignature might experience a body that is out of kilter with the one they possess. So far, no one has systematically examined the brains of therians to see if their neural patterns reflect what they feel.

Therians who are acclimatised to their animal side often find their phantom experiences reassuring, since they confirm an identity they have been trying hard to accept. But it can be a let-down when they recognise they don’t have the superpowers they thought they did. When Caesar realises yet again that he cannot direct his ears to hone in on a distant sound, he has the sobering thought that what he is trying to do is “in direct conflict with my own biology”. Kathy Gerbasi, in one of her studies, asked a therian who felt they had “wings” what it felt like when those wings were fully out; they told her it made them frustrated because they knew they couldn’t fly. Many therians avoid looking in mirrors because it reminds them that they are not what they think they are.

Suggested reading

You can't be born in the wrong body

By Ellen Pasternack

Some psychologists believe that the distress suffered by therians is similar to the distress suffered by people whose sex at birth does not match the way they feel. The comparison is often made by therians themselves, a minority of whom are transgender as well as “trans-species”, as they sometimes put it. (Not all transgender people are comfortable with this analogy, fearing that it complicates the public discourse and undermines their movement’s drive for recognition.) The obvious difference is that while you can change your gender, you cannot do anything about your species.

For therians, “finding yourself” — that nebulous ideal promoted by the self-help industry — is obligatory. Although discovery may bring relief, it does not help with the bigger question: why am I this way? Science doesn’t provide many answers, so they can only speculate. Therianthropy may be a developmental response to early trauma or a childhood fixation on animals, or it may be a result of abnormal brain wiring. People of a spiritual inclination might think of it in terms of reincarnation or a “misplaced soul”.

In psychiatry, therianthropy is often erroneously considered to be synonymous with clinical lycanthropy — a condition related to schizophrenia, where delusions and hallucinations convince a patient that they have transformed into an animal. In her book Unthinkable, Helen Thomson describes meeting a lycanthrope who periodically believes he has turned into a tiger; her interview with him was cut short when he suddenly started growling and threatening to attack her, a relapse his doctors blamed on his failure to take his anti-psychotic medication.

But therians are not delusional or psychotic. Their animalistic feelings are a perpetual feature of their lives and are not alleviated by medication. They are aware, often to their profound disappointment, that they can never transform into animals. The medical profession’s impulse to diagnose them as lycanthropes has less to do with clinical evidence than the age-old tendency to pathologise behaviours and conditions that challenge social norms. The most we can say about the medical status of therians is that they are neurological outliers — hardly a signal of illness.

In 2019 Helen Clegg, a psychologist at the University of Buckingham, led the first comprehensive investigation into the well-being and mental health of therians. She recruited 112 across a broad range of ages, genders, ethnicities and species. Among them were wolves, foxes, dragons, birds, a snake, a shark and a couple of dinosaurs. Clegg’s team found that a disproportionate number of them had been diagnosed with autism (7.69%, compared with 1.5% in the general US population), though it is not clear how the two conditions could be linked. They also found that, compared with a control group, many therians struggle with relationships and social skills. This could be due to cognitive factors, or it could be because social taboos around therianthropy make it difficult to talk about. When you are forced to hide your true nature, communicating with others can be a challenge.

Their study also noted that many of the therians displayed “schizotypal” personality traits, such as a tendency to have unusual perceptual experiences. But these therians mostly found their experiences enriching rather than distressing. Clegg suggests that this is because they have found a way to integrate their fantastical thoughts into a coherent narrative that allows them to make sense of the way they feel. The therians in Clegg’s study scored just as highly as non-therians on several standard measures of psychological well-being, including personal growth, purpose in life and self-acceptance. The researchers concluded: “The findings suggest that therians are functioning well.”

Azi, a Mexican wolf living in Tennessee, experiences altered states of consciousness around 30 times a day. Therian friends of his told me that his experience is more extreme than anyone they know — for much of the time, he is more wolf than human. When we initially corresponded, he was apprehensive, fearing negative publicity; when we finally spoke via video call, he was open, eloquent and precise. His perceptual changes arrive suddenly and can pass just as quickly. When they happen, he says, “the human part of me is turned off. Mentally, I’m gone. The wolf mindset is running this body… It’s very dissociative.” He often finds himself growling, snarling, down on all fours, walking on his toes or, if the opportunity presents itself, chasing deer. It can be physically exhausting. Towards the end of our video call, my cat Cecil jumped up onto my laptop and started nuzzling the screen. Azi looked away and appeared to disengage for a moment. When I asked him about this, he admitted that as a wolf, few things are more inflammatory than being stared at by a cat. He has to contend with provocations like this whenever he goes out in public — a loud noise, a fleeing animal, a bothersome human. He must always be on his guard to stop himself shifting to wolf.

Suggested reading

The empty promise of pop psychology

By Sarah Ditum

The reality of therianthropy can be hard to live with. Elizabeth Fein, a clinical psychologist who has worked closely with Kathy Gerbasi, observed that acceptance of therianthropy often brings sadness or a sense of estrangement. “It’s like, ‘I’m always going to be different, I’m always going to be kind of separate from humanity. I’m never going to have the right body.’” The scale of the challenge that therians I interviewed face in trying to reconcile their human bodies with their animal minds may be partly a function of the culture in which they live. In the West, for much of the past two millennia, we have considered ourselves distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom, elevated by cognition, intelligence, language, morality and culture. The Christian God granted humans “dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth”, and philosophers from Aristotle to Kant have emphasised our superiority over nature.

But over the tens of thousands of years of human existence, the line separating us and other has not always been so well-defined. Many cultures recognise animals as ancestors. A popular Tibetan creation myth maintains that people are descended from a meditating monkey, while in Turkic mythology people originated from a she-wolf named Asena. Meanwhile, stories about people who “shape-shift” between human and animal form have persisted throughout recorded history.

A world in which animals were treated as human and humans were treated as animals would be a lot easier for therians to live in. Their experience and their psychology are so different to most people’s that they often feel profoundly isolated. “Our lives would be immeasurably improved if people accepted it, if it wasn’t considered strange,” BearX told me. Thankfully, therians have each other. The community’s origins lie in the Nineties message boards of an online werewolf fan group called alt.horror.werewolves, and it has since evolved into a vibrant network of discussion forums and advice boards, with thousands of active participants.

Therians do disagree — about the causes of therianthropy, the distinction between therians and otherkin, and whether it is appropriate to discuss the sexual feelings some therians have towards animals. Nevertheless, Caesar the coyote told me that his introduction to the community was “unquestionably one of the happiest moments of my life: finding out that you’re not alone”. Blayz, who spent years trying to figure out his strange canine sensations, came close to dismissing them as “the delusions of a madman, nothing more than a side-effect of mental illness”. When he discovered that he wasn’t the only one who felt this way, it was revelatory. “So many of my own experiences and conclusions were echoed by this group of real people out there in the world.”

“Therians are really weird,” one of the coyotes says to me in a moment of exasperation. But in certain cultures, and in certain eras, they have been regarded as less weird — and among other therians, their behaviour is absolutely normal. Most therians want to be accepted by the wider world. In the meantime, it’s reassuring for them to always be accepted by their own. Life looks different when you’re part of a pack — whether you’re a bear, a coyote, a leopard, a dinosaur or a dragon.

This is an edited extract from Fans: A Journey Into the Psychology of Belonging, out 11th May.

This particular romance may have ended in heartbreak, but Silo and Roy aren’t unique: over half a dozen zoos around the world are home to pairs of “gay penguins”, many of which have successfully reared chicks. Wild seabirds may also be that way inclined: a study of Laysan albatrosses in Hawaii reports that 31% of pairs were female-female, raising chicks that had been fathered elsewhere. A few years ago, Labour MP Dawn Butler stated that “90% of giraffes are gay”; though this claim was roundly trashed, it seems to contain a kernel of truth, in that male giraffes have indeed been seen engaging in behaviour that looks a lot like gay sex — at least as often as they have been observed mating with females.

Same-sex couplings are everywhere in the animal kingdom, as I learned this month at a Royal Society conference dedicated to discussing possible explanations for the seeming biological paradox of same-sex sex. On the face of it, it’s a behaviour that doesn’t make sense in evolutionary terms: an exclusive preference for the same sex is a trait that’s not likely to be passed on to offspring. Even opting for same-sex partners just some of the time requires an explanation: there would seem to be a huge evolutionary advantage in focusing one’s attentions towards the opposite sex, since it would make you more efficient than a competitor who mates indiscriminately.

Theories vary hugely depending on the species and context. Insects, for instance, just may not have particularly sophisticated methods of detecting partners of the opposite sex. If your entire brain is little more than a cluster of nerves, then some cases of mistaken identity are perhaps inevitable. At the other end of the spectrum, sex has a complex social function in species like primates. Our close relatives the bonobos frequently have group sex sessions that make human attempts at polyamory and pansexuality pale in comparison. In this species, what was once an adaptation purely for reproduction has taken on an additional role in maintaining both opposite-sex and same-sex social bonds, a bit like how our tongues initially evolved for tasting and swallowing food, but are now also indispensable in allowing us to speak. It’s different again in seabirds, where the care of chicks is a co-operative enterprise requiring hard work and trust between two pair-bonded adults. If “lesbian” albatross couples are effective at raising their chicks together when there aren’t enough males to go round, then why shouldn’t they?

More from this author

You can't be born in the wrong body

By Ellen Pasternack

This abundance of teachable examples has been valuable to those wishing to refute claims that same-sex attraction is “unnatural”: clearly, it’s anything but. But there’s only so much we can learn from animals about why humans are sometimes gay. Although lots of animals mate or form partnerships with members of the same sex, this generally seems to be a flexible behaviour — as demonstrated by the fickle Silo. Our species is almost unique in that, across cultures, a small but consistent proportion of people seem biologically hardwired from a young age to desire only same-sex partners.

We know this is partially genetic: if your identical twin is gay, there’s roughly a 30-40% chance that you will be gay as well, compared with 1-2% in the general population. But how this gene manages to be passed on is a mystery, given that historically same-sex attracted people are significantly less likely to reproduce. For a while, a popular idea was that perhaps genes which predispose men to be attracted to other men or women to women persist because their relatives, who also carry the gene, somehow have more offspring as a result; either because the gene itself helps them somehow, or if childless gay uncles and aunts help to look after children. This idea was always quite far-fetched though, and unsurprisingly it has very little empirical support.

Another explanation could have something to do with reducing competition between siblings: if your brother is gay, you can be sure he’s not going to steal your girlfriend. It’s thought that this could be mediated in utero through the maternal immune system, since men who have older brothers are significantly more likely to be gay. There isn’t really any direct evidence supporting the hypothesis, either.

To me, this is one of the most fascinating unsolved mysteries of evolutionary biology. But not all biologists think so. The paradox of same-sex orientation receives disproportionately little attention from academic biology. Not only that, but some seem to be actively averse to researching why some animals are same-sex attracted. (This summary of research at Yale notes that “scientists rarely if ever actively study how often [same-sex behaviours] occur compared with different-sex sexual behaviours”.) So I was intrigued when I saw the Royal Society conference advertised. So much so that I shared it in a WhatsApp group of researchers from my department, in case it was of interest to others.

If I had given it a moment’s thought, I could have predicted the response. The event did not go down well. It “raised alarm bells”. Some discussed writing a letter to complain to the Royal Society. Other biologists wrote on Twitter that the event “could very easily go into YIKES territory” and “sent some red flags up” due to the Royal Society’s track record of giving an award to “a TERF” — referring, I assume, to neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott, who won the prestigious Michael Faraday prize in 2021. (The conference was tiny, with only about 30 people in attendance, including the speakers and organisers.)

One reason many biologists think the discipline should steer well clear of this area is to avoid any politically inconvenient results. The finding that sexual orientation seems to be innate — in other words, not a choice — has been a core part of the gay rights movement. It turned a debate about whether certain behaviours were moral into a debate about civil rights for a marginalised group. Our support for gay marriage shouldn’t depend on how sexual orientation is determined, of course; but pragmatically speaking, the message that people are “born this way” has been enormously effective at changing hearts and minds. The wide range of “gay animals” in nature has been key in shoring up this argument: the internet is full of listicles like this one by PETA entitled, “Gay Animals Who Prove Same-Sex Love Is Natural”.

In my experience, academic biologists with adjacent specialties tend to see it as not their place to comment on this area, and view it as potentially suspect to show too much interest in it. To some, asking why some people — or even animals — are attracted to the same sex is the same as asking them to justify themselves, which gay people shouldn’t have to do of course. (One comment I saw in response to the Royal Society conference made exactly this claim.) On top of this, there is a perception that the relevant groups must be deferred to as the ultimate authority on any social issue. Taken to the extreme, this can mean that anyone else who presumes to scientifically study their characteristics is seen as politically incorrect. See, for instance, controversies in archaeology where genetic research becomes problematic if it threatens to contradict the origin myths of indigenous groups. Research into sexual orientation is similar, in that it challenges the moral right for LGBT people to have the final word on LGBT issues.

Suggested reading

Test article

By Stone Age Herbalist

Of course, it’s much easier to let others who care more decide what the facts are than to weigh in yourself. Many biologists, I think, would rather their work were relevant only in the academic niche in which they find themselves; few are comfortable commenting on politically sensitive subjects. But biology — the science of who we are and what our place is in the world — has much to say about the most pressing political and moral debates of our age. It is a shame if some of the people most qualified to contribute — often qualified at great public expense — are opting out of the conversation because they see it as too political.

Science is meant to be about striving to better understand our world, just because it’s interesting, “because it’s there”, because we can. For politicised areas, a dose of plain, unmotivated interest is especially needed. If we stigmatise whole realms of research, well-meaning scientists will avoid showing an interest in sensitive topics, and only those with an axe to grind remain. Scientists must actively commit to protecting curiosity for curiosity’s sake. Asking why the sky is blue need not carry the subtext that it ought to be some other colour instead.

We assume the information our senses feed us is objective — of course we do, because what else do we have to go on? There is something almost vertiginous, then, about Ed Yong’s new book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, which confronts exactly how we perceive what we perceive. “Light is just electromagnetic radiation,” he says. “Sound is just waves of pressure. Smells are just small molecules. It’s not obvious that we should be able to detect any of these,” let alone that they should produce the particular subjective experiences that they do.

Your experience of a beach — the turquoise sea, the warmth of the sun, the screeching gull — isn’t what the beach is. The “real” beach is giving off all sorts of stimuli, only some of which a human brain uses to form a mental representation of its surroundings. There are many, many more stimuli that we cannot sense or even imagine sensing. But other species can.

Take the seabirds on the beach, for instance. Many seabird species are finely attuned to the scent of chemicals that give away the presence of the krill they eat, meaning that far from a flat, featureless expanse, the ocean’s surface has “a secret topography” of “odorous mountains and unscented valleys… invisible to the eye but evident to the nose”. Others are able to sense the Earth’s magnetic field, which guides them during migrations. And almost all birds can discriminate between “millions” of colours that humans are unable to imagine — to them, we are colourblind.

Some of the senses Yong details are delightfully surreal. A dolphin is effectively a “living medical scanner”: echolocation allows them to “perceive your lungs and skeleton… shrapnel in war veterans and foetuses in pregnant women”. Incredibly, beaked whales, which also echolocate, have “a strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps” on their skulls, which might be a form of “internal antlers” that could allow them to signal to others while retaining a sleek, hydrodynamic form.

More from this author

Feminism has a biology problem

By Ellen Pasternack

What these alien senses might feel like, we can only guess. Philosophers have long grappled with this problem of subjectivity. Thomas Nagel, in his 1974 essay What Is It Like to Be A Bat?, argued that it is impossible to capture the experience of one sense by analogy to another: for example, “red is like the sound of a trumpet”. “That should be clear to anyone who has both heard a trumpet and seen red,” he wrote. It may be tempting to talk about dolphins “seeing” the inside of each others’ bodies, but in reality, it’s possible that what they experience via their sonar sense may be so different that trying to imagine it as a kind of “seeing” is as futile as describing the colour red in terms of its musical qualities.

Similarly, images meant to show us how ultraviolet looks to the many animals that can see it often render it as a kind of glowing purple. But to birds and bees, ultraviolet is an entirely different colour, one that no human eye has ever seen. These images are chasing the same impossible dream of children who try to invent a new colour by mixing their felt-tips. The only way for humans to see an entirely new colour, as different to our existing palette as red is from blue, would be to evolve a new colour receptor.

The biological term for these unique perceptual landscapes belonging to different species is Umwelten — German for “environments” — in this case meaning not just an animal’s physical environment but the environment as it appears to that animal. The Earth’s magnetic field is not part of our Umwelt as humans — it’s there, but we don’t sense it. A barnacle might exist on the same beach as us, but is oblivious to the peachy clouds in the sky as the sun sets: it lacks the capacity to perceive them. They are not part of its Umwelt.

More from this author

You can't be born in the wrong body

By Ellen Pasternack

The German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll, Yong tells us, coined this usage of Umwelt in 1909, comparing an animal’s body to a house “with a number of windows… a light window, a sound window, an olfactory window, a taste window, and a great number of tactile windows”. It is totally impossible for a mind inside the house to gain information about the outside world except via its windows; from vantage points in different houses, with windows made from different materials or placed at different angles, the same view would appear totally different.

Except, of course, we cannot switch vantage points. Every conscious being is permanently and inevitably stuck inside its own lonely house, through which all experience of the outside world is filtered; all communication with other minds must pass through the windows of their own houses before it can reach them. Our windows aren’t just limited by our bodies and physical senses, but also by our culture and past experiences. I can guess but I can never know what it would be like to have been born blind instead of sighted, or male instead of female, or in Tokyo instead of in London.

I am moderately high in neuroticism: one of the “big five” personality traits that describes a person’s tendency to worry and ruminate. Speaking to (mostly male) friends who are much lower in neuroticism (women are significantly more neurotic than men, on average), I am struck by how alien both ways of thinking are to each other: to have an inner monologue that points out hundreds of possible but unlikely hazards every day, or to be someone to whom these thoughts would never occur. How many more features of our temperaments and histories must there be that give each individual an inescapably different perspective on the same experience?

Suggested reading

What vegan propaganda ignores

By John Lewis-Stempel

Nowhere is this more apparent than in today’s culture wars, when political opponents seem to inhabit entirely separate realities. Despite living through the same pandemic, those who think face masks in schools are a form of child abuse appear to be living on another planet from those who don’t allow their teenagers to leave the house for fear of long Covid. This is true, in a sense: we are all living in our own private Umwelten, with a slightly different view of the world filtering in through our unique windows. Perhaps the surprising thing, in a way, is that there’s so much agreement.

A century ago, we knew far less about the sensory capabilities of animals. Bat echolocation, dolphin sonar, and bird magnetoreception were all unknown — barely even guessed at — before the 20th century. These discoveries are testament to the awe-inspiring power of science, but they are also a much-needed dose of humility, reminding us of how much is out there beyond our perceptions. We hear a lot about the need to understand and defeat our “cognitive biases” — but in reality, our biases can never be escaped. They are our only window to the Immense World outside our own minds, whose full form remains permanently and tantalisingly out of our grasp.

When Byron was 20, Boatswain died of rabies. Devastated, he composed a poem that captures his grief and the sense of losing an irreplaceable relationship:

To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one—and here he lies.

Byron made provision in his will to be interred with Boatswain, but he was hardly the first human to form such a bond; the earliest known remains of humans and dogs buried together date from 14,000 years ago.

Until last week, I’d only ever kept cats, and didn’t really get the dog thing. Then we got a nine-week-old Labrador puppy. Now, my every moment and mood is shadowed by a creature who thinks I’m some kind of divine being, and who wees on the floor whenever she gets excited, which is often. It’s been intense.

But as intense as a baby? A few days into dog wrangling, a friend texted me to ask how “new motherhood” was going. There are plenty of articles which will tell you parenthood and dog ownership are comparable, or that you should try raising a puppy before you try raising a baby as a sort of trial run, or that the former is even harder.

And some dog-owners insist flat out that dogs and kids are on a level. “Am I comparing my dog to your kids?” asks young dog-owner Eva Hall. “Yes, yes I am”, because “I love him as much as you love your kids” and “let’s face it, he’s just better than your kids”. For those, like Hall, who see no distinction between dogs and kids, a puppy isn’t like parenting: it is parenting.

My already well-thumbed copy of Puppies for Dummies reinforces this, referring throughout to “dog parents”. Some of the products that cater to these “dog parents” are startlingly expensive and similar to the baby kit now in my loft. I’m not sure why a dog would need a pushchair, as puppies can walk from three weeks old; but you can still spend £350 on a deluxe dog buggy. There are slings, too; this one has a thousand or so positive reviews, many of which include photos of delighted owners carrying baffled-looking canines, slung like babies on their chests.

It’s true that in the case of both babies and puppies, you build an attuned relationship on caretaking and body-language cues rather than — as with adult friendships — conversation or shared interests. There are also broken nights, the cleaning up of bodily waste, and the sense that you’re in charge of creating a routine for a dependent other.

But I scarcely need list the reasons why a dog is a dog, and a baby is a baby. Yet many seem determined to flatten the distinction. And while it’s common to decry this as “selfish”, or blame the housing crisis for making human offspring unattainable, this trend has also paralleled a wider one, now decades old, away from boundaries, distinctions and formal hierarchies in the way we organise our social life.

More by this author

Putin doesn't have mummy issues

By Mary Harrington

Today household-name management consultancies extol the benefits of “unstructuring” your corporation, and “unschooling” advocates wonder if parents imposing rules on kids creates more problems than it solves. Beneath it all lies a profound ambivalence about authority that’s percolated even into the asymmetrical relationship between owners and their pets.

But while many now seem uncertain about whether love is compatible with being in authority, radical equality even with kids or pets doesn’t always mean more love. Or, at least, it doesn’t always mean the right kind of love.

Over my lifetime, the trend has been away from formal acknowledgement of hierarchies in schools, families and the wider social fabric, toward a more egalitarian style. Parenting norms have shifted toward empathy rather than pulling rank. Advocates of “gentle parenting”, for example, suggest “negotiating limits” with your kids instead of telling them what’s going to happen: not “we’re leaving the park in five minutes” but “how many more goes on the swing shall we have before it’s time to go?” “Peaceful parenting” challenges the idea that “kids are less than”, arguing that it’s wrong to use “privilege as an adult” to control children’s actions and feelings. Instead, the child’s autonomy is emphasised; some even advocate asking a baby or toddler for consent before changing a nappy.

And as more parents seek to place kids on the same level as them, something similar is afoot with pets. The “multispecies family” is so pronounced a trend it is the subject of books and academic research, and three American states have recently passed laws obliging courts to treat pets as family members rather than possessions in divorce cases.

This all suggests a deep ambivalence about whether love and authority are compatible full stop. For the egalitarians, this is never the case. Children are an oppressed class; and pets are “infantilised objects of resource in a speciesist society”, forced to live in environments that do “psychological violence” to them.

This would, I suspect, have baffled the aristocratic Byron, for all that he loved his dog. If Boatswain’s epitaph is anything to go by, for him the dog wasn’t a substitute baby but something more like a deeply-loved feudal retainer:

The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his Master’s own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone

It would have flummoxed my farming grandparents, too. They kept a working dog, a relationship that has the same feudal undertone as the one Byron describes. Their dog was a member of the household, scrupulously well-cared-for but given clear rules that marked her out as absolutely not on a level with the humans.

More by this author

The abject failure of Cool Britannia

By Mary Harrington

In contrast, a growing number of dog owners shrink from the idea of such a distinction in status. Such people would reject the term “owner”, preferring to anthropomorphise their canines, or otherwise emphasise the parity between them: for example by donning a matching dog costume to play with them or letting them into the bed.

But this comes with downsides, too. The arguments against swapping authority for empathy in parenting usually point to badly-behaved children. And if poorly-managed children may cover your walls in Sharpie, poorly-managed dogs may just be sharp. These are the creatures that gnaw at furniture, or maul livestock or humans — and who end up being euthanised.

And along with the risk that too-egalitarian a relationship will make for open season on misbehaviour in kids or animals, comes the creeping possibility that it will do so for adults as well. For once you argue that kids and animals are on a level with adults, and their autonomy a key factor in the relationship, you’re close to claiming — as the advocates for nappy-changing permission do — that we should elicit the consent of children or animals to the way we treat them.

If you’re arguing that kids and pets should consent, though, that implies they can. On the face of it, this sounds good and compassionate. But “consent” also implies a relationship between relative equals, in which both parties have similar levels of autonomy. Where this is understood to be the case, between adults, the modern world routinely treats consent as an adequate substitute for moral rules: we don’t need to say any action is wrong in an absolute sense, if everyone affected agreed to it.

Most people understand that the difference in capacity between an adult and dependent pet or child is so great that such a “consent” model only applies in a very limited sense. But the radical push to flatten all structures pulls us in the opposite direction — and for a minority, this leads to dark places.

Suggested reading

How Buffy revamped teen sex

By Kat Rosenfield

For it’s also now a mainstream view that consent is the sole arbiter of whether a sexual act is acceptable. So perhaps it’s not a coincidence that as parenting and pet-care have become more radically egalitarian, a few are tempted to imagine the capacity for “consent” some now ascribe to children and animals in other areas of life might apply here as well.

One recent book by a UK academic argues that while sexual intimacy between humans and animals is often abusive, it needn’t be by definition. And it may or may not be a coincidence that the same writer who declared “‘parent’ is an oppressive class” worked as Communications Director for Prostasia, an organisation that supports the “liberation” of “minor-attracted people” from stigma.

For most, the retreat from authority is not a step toward abuse, just a well-intentioned effort to avoid undue harshness when in a position of authority over kids or pets. But while authority may be misused, asymmetries of power and responsibility don’t go away just because you wish they weren’t there. Children and domestic animals are genuinely in need of adult guidance if they are to integrate into the human social fabric. Refusing to provide this isn’t compassion, it’s cowardice.

More seriously still, abdicating our responsibility to accept the obligations that come with being in authority over dependents risks abuses far worse than badly-behaved kids or pets. For pretending we’re on a level with our pets or kids doesn’t diminish the power we have over them. It just makes it easier to conceal that power, and convince ourselves they’ve consented, as equals, to whatever it is we desire. And very few individuals have no desires they’re ashamed of.

It’s not just unruly dogs that need to be kept on a leash, but also the dark side of humans. If we’re to wield power responsibly in our households, we owe it to our dependents to acknowledge where it lies.