Animals and home

One of my Christmas gifts was the book, The Ponies at the Edge of the World: A story of hope and belonging in Shetland by Catherine Munro. I finished it a couple of days ago. It was as much about Shetland sheep as Shetland ponies, so it was kind of a win all the way around. What I found most interesting were the authors thoughts about the confluence of the idea of home and the purpose of animals. As I'm keenly interested in both those things, I've been chewing on it ever since. I'll share some with you and you can ponder it as well.

"As I wrote my thesis, I noticed the theme of stories recurring throughout the chapters. I particularly loved these lines written by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing:

Over the past few decades, many kinds of scholars have shown that allowing only human protagonists into our stories is not just ordinary human bias; it is a cultural agenda tied to dreams of progress through modernization. There are other ways of making worlds. Anthropologists have become interested, for example, in how subsistence hunters recognize other living beings as 'persons', that is, protagonists of stories. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? Yet expectations of progress block this insight: talking animals are for children and primitives. their voices silent, we imagine well-being without them. We trample over them for our advancement; we forget that collaborative survival requires cross-species coordinations. to enlarge what is possible, we need other kinds of stories -- including adventures of landscapes.

Stories are part of the fabric that makes our world; they are generative, shaping our world and what futures are possible. And so the stories we tell about domestication, how humans and animals live together, matter.  ...

One line in particular from Tsing's quote really stood out to me: 'we imagine well-being without them'. We have told stories of human exceptionalism, of our separation from animals and landscapes, for so long that many of these connections are becoming forgotten. In the UK (as is the case in many countries around the world), lives are becoming more urbanised and technology-focused. Fewer adults or children spend time in rural landscapes or have the opportunity to interact with animals as a part of their everyday lives. Even when people live in rural areas, changes to farming practices mean that there are fewer opportunities to interact with domestic animals. These separations, connected to and sometimes forced by economic and ideological systems, work to make us feel isolated from worlds we are invariably part of. This encourages us to ignore the possibility of more-than-human interactions, and fail to notice the ways these worlds affect us, which closes down possibilities for future connections. If our identities are shaped through our relationships with others, what does this mean for humans?Are we suffering without understanding what we are missing, cut off from networks of relating that we depend upon? And how can we re-engage in ways that cultivate the possibility of mutual flourishing?  ...

I learned that domination was not the founding principle of these domestication relationships. It was domus meaning 'home': a home shared with animals, a home comprising myriad meaningful interspecies relationships. This history of shared lives and hopes for positive futures emerged from relationships in time and place, and I came to understand the domestication is an ongoing, changing relationships between people and ponies in Shetland. Each live and become with the other, and these relationships matter, shaping ideas of home and belonging." (pp. 252-254; 256)