By Solana Kline, (honorary four-legger)
Humans are weird. I say this when trying to imagine why a species would choose to live so out of sync with their ecological systems that they rely on for survival.
I’ve spent my career as a cultural anthropologist and human geographer, exploring human-nature relationships and seeing how our learned cultural norms impact our ecological communities in positive and negative ways. My doggie comrades are not just honorary PhD’s but are also partial impetus for my research representing the rights and agency of our more-than-human comrades here on Earth. More-than-humans are the non-humans or other-than-humans who we share the planet with.
The more-than-human research field is full of creative methods to try and capture the activity, communication, life, actions, agency, and communities of more-than-humans. Researchers are literally putting their noses to the ground to experience the world as closely to the more-than-humans as possible. For some, this means sitting still for hours as the boulder does, and for others it means crawling hand over foot, belly to the ground as the water monitor does.
Think about different scales of space-time for each species or piece of matter, where time and distance (or space) are relative to the being who is experiencing it. Think of how long it might take a minuscule mite to travel ten feet, versus how long it would take you to walk it. Or how your perception of the world might change based what senses are keen in your species, or how massive a human would seem to a stink bug raising his rear in warning out on the trail. This is the relativity of space-time and the importance of perspective.
In industrialized human cultures, humans assume they are exceptional, or better-than other beings. This keeps us from empathizing, connecting, and feeling the world with them—a detrimental way to live on a planet that’s made of interconnected and interdependent webs of life and livelihoods.
As much as we’d like to think we are special: we aren’t, we are just weird! Stepping into the paws and hooves of our four-leggers sure can make a difference in how we are able to empathize with our pack/herd mates. Their own unique and relative space-time impacts how they experience the world, how they interact with us, and how they express their needs.
So, in best efforts to walk a mile in their paws, I’ve been going full canine, following Betty and Mickey’s lead into every bush and gully, putting my bare hands and feet on the ground, awkwardly ambling around after them—admittedly feeling a bit jealous that I don’t have a tail to wag. Imagine the freedom to poo immediately when the need arose? Or to sprint off wildly after a squirrel’s chirp?
I squat down to Betty’s Terrier vista: she can barely see above the golden Winter grasses blowing against her snout and shoulders, relying on her senses of smell and hearing to geolocate the underground mouse tunnels she is tracking. Betty has always been one to find the highest point to survey her territory, so I lift her up to my gaze height and she perks, eyes and ears and sniffs on point to gather in all of this new information.
I try it with Mickey too, but he is a dense boy, so he got about half again as tall but enjoyed the new perspective all the same.
I get down on all fours to wrestle, bum-slamming the dogs, mouth open, snorting and growling, pawing their sides, copycatting their play styles. As soon as I move down to their height and body position to play, they immediately include me in their wrestling, whereas when I am an upright two-legger, they wonder how to encourage me to join in.
Out on a trail run, they catch a rogue sniff on an outbound breeze and follow it into the hillside, I pursue, and while I can’t smell 1/10,000th as well as they can, I use my other senses to understand what they are doing. I see jackrabbit tracks and pellets in and out of the terrain, but when the pups stop to gulp down an occasional rabbit dropping, I decide I’ve got enough fiber in my diet.
I get on all fours at the top of a staircase. Jeesh, that is steep! No wonder Mickey descends with both front feet together, followed by his rear feet together, awkwardly bucking his bum side to side while he rocking-horses down.
Betts barrels through a wall of tumbleweeds and screeches to a halt, looking stuck and worried. A branch of tumbleweed is wrapped into her hair across the insides of her rear legs, effectively shackling them together with desert prongs. If I had a relatively sized prickly bush stuck between my legs, I imagine it would be three feet wide.
The hounds drift off into dreamland, feets and nosers going a hundred miles an hour, eyes fluttering to match their light dreaming woofs. I lay next to them, mimicking their motions and trying to imagine the who/what/where/why of their dreams. Galloping across Spring grassfields to a steak dinner? Hounding through hill and burrow, hot on deer musk?
I join in Betty and Mickey’s morning ritual of snug-grubs, where they simultaneously decide upon waking up to flip-flop onto their backs, full beast-mode, wriggling wildly and scratching their backs and lovingly clashing their open mouths together. They welcome my joining-in, full smiles wrapped around all our mugs, being in the moment and in joy to start the day with my pals. Yes, please!
Going more-than-human with our packs and herds is more than just a silly experiment, it is a potent means of thinking and viewing and feeling and living as other and together. This becomes an essential practice for us humans as we ponder how we want to co-exist with our planetary comrades, including with our fellow humans. The more we consider others in our world, the more we are part-of our world.
It reminds us that we’re embedded within and inseparable from the infinitely intricate and deliciously delicate balance of species and matter all around us—we belong to all these more-than-humans, and we belong to our fellow humans. And while you might be leery to risk being known as the weirdo on the trail, or in your neighborhood, practicing being more-than-human is sure fire way to remember our innate connections to all life on the planet, and it all starts right here with our four-leggers.
