Saddest thing ever is reading an academic paper about a threatened or declining species where you can tell the author is really trying to come up with ways the animal could hypothetically be useful to humans in a desperate attempt to get someone to care. Nobody gives a shit about the animals that “don’t affect” us and it seriously breaks my heart
“No I can’t come out tonight I’m sobbing about this entomologist’s heartfelt plea for someone to care about an endangered moth”
This is how I learn there's a moth whose tiny caterpillars live exclusively off the old shells of dead tortoises.
@fatehbaz
Inevitably, ‘the language of the honeybees’ raises abstruse questions that behavioral scientists have often sought to sidestep: whether man is the only species with language; whether ‘language’ can be defined in a way that allows for the possibility that non-human animals may possess it; the plausibility of the distinction between ‘intentional action’ and ‘non-intentional behavior’ to demarcate human and animal life; the validity of regarding invertebrates as ‘lower forms of life’; and the nature of cognition and awareness of the animal world. […] So, can an insect speak? And if yes, do we understand it? Wittgenstein maintained that ‘if a lion could speak we would not understand him’, by which he implied that we do not share the ‘form of lion-life’ that would make lion language fully transparent to us […]. A similar insight was eloquently expressed by the early 20th-century naturalist and honeybee research Maurice Maeterlinck. The irony that he wrote these words before the discovery of the dance makes their wisdom all the more poignant: Beyond the appreciable facts of their life we know but little of the bees. And the closer our acquaintance becomes, the nearer is our ignorance brought to us of the depths of their real existence. But such ignorance is better than the other kind, which is unconscious and satisfied. [Source: Eileen Crist. “Can an Insect Speak? The Case of the Honeybee Dance Language.” Sociology: Social Studies of Science. 2004.]
Slugs, like other often uncomfortable companions such as microbes […], bees […], cougars […], test our resolve to live ‘convivially’ with non-humans […]. Yet live we must, for the lives of humans and slugs are stuck together. Composition is the work of building a common world […]. [E]very [interspecies] meeting in fact reminds us that the being we meet is and always shall be strange to us […]. [E]verything is not just related, but also that there is something singular, irreducible and vast behind each relation. When beings meet there is a distance between, such that in encountering the slug we also encounter something beyond the slug – a multitude of life we cannot sense. The ethic that emerges from this space ‘between relation’ is, as Yusoff puts it, part of a ‘virtual ecology’ that exceeds encounters with matter. So despite shared histories and the close proximity in which slugs and gardeners live, the slug retains a certain darkness as a creature apart; something is held in reserve […]. And so fleeting awareness of the irretrievability of the lives of others intensifies poignancy, such that despite a gulf separating the gardener from other creatures, some connection, however, fleeting, is made to something – however strange. Refusing to dismiss the everyday and the banal is an ethical response. […] Slugs are there: sliming, chomping, and oozing around quietly and that should be enough to give them consideration. [Source: Franklin Ginn. “Sticky lives: Slugs, detachment and more-than-human ethics in the garden.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 2013.]
