Animal Daydreams

The Internet is awash with odd couples. From orangutan and hound dog to sloth and cat (below), these sets of seemingly improbable pals are one of the newest frontiers in animals gone viral.

Buzzfeed alone has over 50 posts tagged “interspecies friendship”  and you can find entire tumblogs devoted to collecting this stuff (sometimes with an attempt at brash charm, see: Fuck Yeah Interspecies Friendships). While these interactions obviously have a huge cuteness appeal, there must be something else here that draws our attention. Despite the fact that humans have some of the most diverse friendships with all manner of species on the planet, we tend to write those relationships off as a little ordinary.

Now, I’m by no means an animal-studies guy (see here, here, or here), but I have a feeling this comes down to something I can only describe as human privilege. That is, much in the same ways white privilege takes whiteness for granted, or male privilege normalizes the really weird (and often ugly) dimensions of masculinity, human privilege normalizes human-animal relationships while viewing all other, non-human, interspecies friendships as exceptional.

The fact there’s a whole ecology (if you will) of sans-human animal bonding out in the world becomes a huge novelty. And, much in the ways that various forms of social privilege among humans tend to obscure the agency of “minority” positions (only white dudes have ever done anything that mattered), human privilege makes us imagine that in all of our human/non-human relationships, we’re the ones doing all the work.

We’re used to making friends with all sorts of creatures, but few of us rarely take the time to think about the active role those animals are playing to make friends with us. Pet owners, farmers, zookeepers, animal trainers, and so on are obviously going to be a lot more thoughtful on this front, but even in most of those cases I suspect humans still mostly imagine themselves to be the active party or the initiator in those friendships.

And so when we find evidence that the world’s critters are going off and independently finding companionship outside the bounds of their particular set of chromosomes, well, we’re surprised. It’s suggestive about a depth of animal choice and personality that we can only guess at. It messes with our human exceptionalism a little.

Similarly, it strikes us as a little weird when wild animals come to us apparently seeking help. Probably one of the more famous examples from the world of viral videos is Michael Fishbach’s experience freeing a humpback whale from a fishing net in the Sea of Cortez:

(It’s long, so you may want to skip to about 5:20)

Incidentally, Radiolab dedicated a large chunk of an episode to this story.

Then there’s the wild raven that needed some assistance after a nasty encounter with a porcupine:

The video’s description says the bird “hung around for the day” after some obliging humans pulled three quills from his/her face.

And finally, in the most bizarre thing I’ve seen this week, there are the wild koalas that went begging humans for water during a 2009 heat wave.

These images (see more at KoalaTracker) are completely fascinating and got me to all sorts of daydreaming.

It looks as if these wild animals left their eucalyptus forests to search for water in decidedly human landscapes. While we’re constantly observing our non-human neighbors, how often do we stop to think about the ways they’re observing us? How much do these creatures recognize humans and our activities? Did they just know that by following roads or “breaking into” homes, they would find relief? Will we see more wild animals reaching out to humans as climate change makes for increasingly extreme weather around the world? Despite the fact that we’ve done a heck of a job messing with the planet and its inhabitants (both human and not), there’s a strange way in which these images made me feel as if we could all be in this—the Anthropocene—together.

Obviously, those are just anthropomorphic daydreams, but still….