This is about a list of suggested alternatives to “anti-animal language” that’s been circulating online. It lays out alternatives for common phrases that contain mentions of hurting animals. The results are very uncanny-valley. For instance: instead of offering to “be the guinea pig,” the list suggests the volunteer for an experiment offer to “be the test tube.”

The organization behind this weirdness, PETA, tweeted the following: “Just as it became unacceptable to use racist, homophobic, or ableist language, phrases that trivialize cruelty to animals will vanish as more people begin to appreciate animals for who they are and start ‘bringing home the bagels’ instead of the bacon.”1

Let’s zoom out for a second. The real injustice here has nothing to do with beating a dead horse (a phrase that has great rhetorical pull with animal-rescue types) or even feeding a fed one. The phrases PETA is trying to change have visceral weight, which after all the point of metaphor: to put flesh on language. The substitutes it offers are bloodless (see? It goes deep, the way power and language work together.) The real injustice here is that most of the ways animals are treated occur well within the bounds of law and accepted practice.

This is probably the place to mention that I’m a vegan. I stopped eating animals for a few reasons, but the biggest one had to do with my preoccupation with the idea of our relationship with animals. When I made this choice, I’d been working at a wool store for more than a year, constantly handling and selling animal products. I felt like I needed to be outside at least some of the ways we use animals to be able to really look at those practices.

This essay is part of CREATURE FEATURE, a weekly newsletter about animal-human relationships. Sign up to get it in your inbox on Fridays: https://bit.ly/2JH6e4v.

Becoming a vegan didn’t magically clear my skin or make me a better person. I’m still the spotty relativist I’ve always been. After an initial frisson of righteousness, I quickly recognized that it’s not possible to leave behind the power relations that shape the world around me. One privileged white urbanite’s personal choice doesn’t and shouldn’t have much weight. I still occasionally eat animal products. I still buy leather shoes.

“I think the practice [of animal use] sort of pre-exists there being a law about it,” law professor Angela Fernandez told me for an article I worked on in 2016. I was asking because I was trying to make sense of the relationships between animals and humans defined in law, and the core beliefs about animal use and stewardship that they reflect.

Law and language are both relational: this is one reason that the study of one generally requires study of the other. Law is made out of words, and language’s structure has laws. Neither makes sense in a vacuum–relations between people are what give them meaning and usefulness.

Insofar as this is true, I see PETA’s point about the power of language in defining social relationships with othered groups. The crucial thing the organization is willfully deaf to is that animals–unlike other humans–are others.

“Animals are born, are sentient and are mortal,” writes critic John Berger.2 “In these things they resemble man. In their superficial anatomy–less in their deep anatomy–in their habits, in their time, in their physical capacities, they differ from man. They are both like and unlike.”

I have no idea how to tie this up. It’s a thought I’m still having. But PETA’s action denies this unlikeness–and it’s in the uncanny valley between that unlikeness and the likeness the organization solely focuses on that our legal and linguistic relationships with other animals develop.

Endnotes
1. Queer and Black writers have responded to PETA’s damaging attempt to draw this comparison.
2. Berger, John. “Why look at animals?” in About Looking (London: Vintage.) 1992.

When I say that I grew up in Vancouver, people frequently exclaim things like “Why did you leave?!” I see why they ask: Vancouver is a city inside a snowglobe where it almost never snows, surrounded by genuinely breathtaking mountains and lively oceans.

Its insularness is one reason I don’t live there anymore. Here are three others: it’s unaffordably expensive, work of the kind that I do is scarce and I hate a lot of the ways the city changed to accommodate the 2010 Olympics. Vancouver is a city that’s constantly failing the people who live there, whose faux-progressivism is a gutless answer to the real historic and current injustices that its very existence embodies. There was a time when I thought I’d live somewhere in Greater Vancouver for my whole life, but I don’t intend to move back.

As a teenager, I spent a lot of time downtown at the Vancouver Public Library’s main branch, which is just a few blocks away from the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden. I visited the garden regularly in the mid-oughts, and once fed the koi in its vast pond on a school trip.

If you spend time on social media, there’s a fairly good chance you know why I’m talking about a small privately-run historical park in Vancouver’s besieged Chinatown. A river otter is eating the gardens’ beloved koi, some of whom are more than 50 years old. Twitter has naturally divided into #TeamOtter and #TeamKoi.

I live for rogue animal Twitter (#CapybaraWatch for life), so you’d think I’d be on #TeamOtter. Indeed, the first time I discussed this, I was. After all, the otter is a native species. “Repopulate the fish pond with otter’s favourites and let it gorge and raise other otters,” I wrote to a group of friends. “Then make all the humans disappear and maybe we can get some good done for this planet. Can you tell I’ve been writing about the national climate assessment?“

This is a stupid opinion. I refer you to this piece by Melody Ma. “It pains me to hear daily reports of their deaths, knowing that most of the city is rooting for their predator, not them,” Ma writes. “Knowing, too, that I may have met some of them when I was a young child.” Then, further on: “To me, the koi in the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen garden symbolize the heritage and culture of the resilient Chinatown neighbourhood where they are located. The koi are not foreign, but at home, where they belong.”

Vancouver has a long history of anti-Chinese and -Japanese racism. Chinatown and the nearby Japantown are places where early 1900s racist violence destroyed livelhoods and threatened lives. That racism is echoed today in the way people talk about foreign ownership driving up the real estate market. On Twitter, I’ve seen the koi called “foreigners” in ways that clearly line up with this historic and current racism, and I’m 100 percent certain it’s happening offline too.

There are a few different ways to answer the question of when and how a species stops being invasive–when it’s been there long enough that it’s just part of the environment. But the koi aren’t an invasive species by any measure. I’m glad the remaining pair were rescued before the otter could snack again, and I’m sad for the ten-odd koi that the otter consumed.

Vancouver remains the city I know most intimately. When I’m there, I can read the palimpsest, see its past and its present and how they rub up against one another. Some of those histories I lived, and some of the things it is today are totally unfamiliar to me. I don’t have all its secrets. But some of what I do know about Vancouver comes from the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen garden.

In my memory, it’s spring 2008 and the construction cranes are blooming along the skyline. I’m standing in the public part of the garden, in the valley of Chinatown where zoning prevents buildings from being too tall, looking out at the downtown skyline to the west. The koi swim over in hopes of food. I’m smiling at their fishy gulps under the rain-pocked water.

A thing about reporting on the environment right now: I find myself in new linguistic territory, trying to explain things for which the words I know offer little explanation. An example: a few weeks ago, I wrote a story with the headline “Glaciers no longer moving at glacial paces.” The Bureau of Linguistical Reality tells me this is a “whackaphore,” defined as “the loss of cultural metaphors due to rapid climate change.”1 The world around which the words I know are oriented is no longer the world it was even a decade ago.

“These are dark times, no question about that,” IUCN member Stephen Woodley told me this week. “They’re dark from a governance perspective.” The story we were speaking for is about a pair of studies that show just 23 per cent of the Earth’s landmass and 13 per cent of the oceans can be said to still be wild. Along with news of mass extinction in the new Living Planet report and the election of Amazon-threatening president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, this week’s segment of the Slowpocalypse was particularly pocalypse-ey.2

Maybe there will be a time when the world will draw together in what the Bureau would term a werríng: “a collective moment of transformation when what has seemed mired, foul and utterly messed up in a society turns into a progressive and uniting force… rotting structures and ideologies are turned into fertile ground for new growth.” For many ecosystems now on the brink, even if it comes, it will come too late.

“You can’t rebuild wilderness,” study author Oscar Venter told me for the same story. When these ecosystems are gone, they’re gone–something different might arise, but that wilderness is gone forever. When I look at wildlife, it often feels like there’s an invisible fist slowly driving itself into my gut. However wonderful they all are, however fascinating and unpredictable and real, I can’t watch a nature documentary or visit a national park without wondering when the last time I’ll see an animal is. It’s a frantic feeling.

I see that fear echoed in the lenses of amateur wildlife photographers, and that franticness in the phenomena of creatures accidentally hurt or killed as the result of their unprecedented numbers.3 An example: Banff National Park’s ongoing struggle to keep thousands of annual tourists a respectful distance from big, charismatic wildlife like grizzly bears and bighorn sheep.

Anyone who lives, as I do, in a nation that still has a large portion of relatively wild land (the boreal forests of Canada are largely intact wilderness, Venter tells me) probably knows the phenomena I’m talking out. People want to see animals living their lives, and they want to document what they’ve seen. “These moments out in nature are just about photos to us,” wildlife photographer and ethicist Melissa Groo told me earlier this year, “but for wild animals, every single moment is about survival.”

Segue: the Victorians were kind of obsessed with the idea of the “last man,” the last human being in the world. Mary Shelley wrote a novel about it, even. Maybe the people of our present are a bit obsessed with the idea of being the last animals. In a way, it seems like the ultimate conclusion of capitalism in its modern form, absolute dominion over the world and all its beings. The apotheosis of the Anthropocene, a time when it will just be us and maybe some pets and food animals.

Maybe that’s what all the photographs (gotta catch ’em all!) are about–collecting and remembering animals as they were in the time before domestication was their only remaining option. Maybe this shallow recognition of wildlife could become a werríng, in time. The compulsive need to document everything could become a recognition of intrinsic value and corresponding, productive social movement. Maybe.

There’s a documentary program about a world­ in which humans are no more — Life After People. I find watching it to be enormously comforting. At its beginning, the humans all just… disappear, as if they were no more substantial than images. The world endures. It changes, but it endures. Life goes on­­ without us, the planet slowly rewilding. I spend so much time worrying about a world without animals that to see a world without humans, where the animals thrive, is a relief. Maybe all those photographs are about capturing a moment before we lose, for the first and last time, that promise.

Endnotes:

1. You can learn more about the Bureau here.

2. Ennuipocalypse or Slowpocalypse: While media often depicts the apocalypse as a sudden and dramatic event, the Ennuipocalypse, or Slowpocalypse (slang) offers the concept of a doomsday that occurs at an excruciatingly slow day to day time scale. Slow Ennuipocalypse, may occur in a geologic blink of an eye, but for the Homo Sapiens in urban/suburban settings who are often disconnected from the natural cycles–it is painfully boring.

As a result of the perceived slow pace of the apocalypse or Slow Ennuipocalypse those who live through it feel a compulsion to distract themselves with ever faster technology, media and economic systems–all of which feed back into a disconnect from the pace of the natural systems we need to survive.

Bureau of Linguistical Reality, last accessed Nov. 2, 2018. < https://bureauoflinguisticalreality.com/portfolio/slow-ennuipocalypse/>

3. The Bureau doesn’t have a word for this yet, that I could find, but perhaps I ought to suggest one.

This essay is part of a weekly newsletter called CREATURE FEATURE. Its other element is a theme news roundup, which you can only get by signing up to receive it in your inbox on Fridays. Find other things I write on my website, kateschner.com. If you got value from this essay and would like to tip me, I am on Ko-fi.

All images used in Creature Feature are used under Creative Commons licensing. Efforts have been made to ensure that photographs of living animals or natural scenes have been taken ethically, at AZA-accredited zoos and aquariums or under safe, non-damaging conditions in the wild. If you see an issue with any image I share, please notify me.

Roundup: this is Halloween

Look, nobody loves guinea pig Freddy Krueger or a dachshund in a bun more than your friendly neighbourhood animal reporters (although maybe we also think about things like how dachshunds’ absurdly adorable longness also gives them back problems because dog breeding is eugenics.) But when the aliens show up, they’re gonna have some real questions. Join us, won’t you, for some spooky scary Halloween news.

Woodland creatures also love decorative gourd season

Assorted
Bad news, gourd-lovers. Foraging animals love jack’o’lanterns and other decorative members of the family Cucurbitaceae. News outlets across the United States and Canada are warning those of you with yards to keep these delicious treats inside. “Habituating wildlife to a human food source inevitably leads to conflicts with people,” Tucson Game and Fish spokesperson Locana de Souza told Tucson News Now. In the American southwest, javelina are the most-mentioned foe of Halloween decorations.

De Souza’s colleagues in British Columbia, Canada told CBC News that the ones to watch up are bears gorging themselves before denning for the winter. Keep jack’o’lanterns inside until Halloween night, Inspector Murray Smith says.

Regarding Canada’s national mammals: moose, the cruellest members of the family Cervidae, also enjoy eating the hard work of children. No word on beavers, but those jerks are probably just biding their time.

Pet owners will spend nearly half a billion dollars on animal costumes this Halloween

MarketWatch
According to the National Retail Federation, 31 million Americans will shell out for the dubious privilege of cramming Cindy Clawford into a Snow White outfit. Why? For the ‘gram, Andrew Keshner reports.

See? Millennials haven’t killed fun/the-crippling-anxiety-of-knowing-you are-never-enough-as-you-are yet!

Fact: the most popular pet costumes, per the NRF, are pumpkin, hot dog and bumble bee. Whee!

O.M.G. look at that dog!

The New York Times
Some people, of course, go far beyond Halloween when it comes to decorating their pets. Come to this tale of the 2018 Groom Expo for the eyebrow-raising photographs by Chris Maggio; stay for Pia Peterson’s in-depth look at the state of “creative grooming” and dog grooming in general.

Ira was painted like a rainbow–how you might draw a dog if you were given a package of neon highlighters and a hit of acid.

Essay question: Regarding the selfies of others

Like many of the ideas I want to talk about in Creature Feature, I’ve been chewing on this one for a while. It came out of a news story from 2016, or maybe a second news story at the beginning of 2017 about a second incident, about beachgoers in Argentina picking up an endangered baby dolphin and passing it around for selfies before leaving it on land, where it subsequently died.

Reactions to this news on Twitter and Facebook were necessarily performative. Seeing those little messages of shock, it pissed me off. It still makes me angry, in a way that’s unreasonable (I know I’m being unreasonable, and I have no intent of stopping. It’s my newsletter, after all.) Stop being so fucking shocked, I wanted to yell. Stop performing your surprise.

What’s surprising here? The dolphin is just one particularly weird example of a trend (the swan, also in 2016, is another.) We kill and injure animals for all kinds of reasons–some arguably good reasons. But life isn’t that cheap, I’d hope, cheap enough to be sacrificed without thought, for the sake of an image. The more interesting question, to me at least, is whether the desire to take selfie-style images with animals arose with the existence of smartphone cameras and publishing platforms like Instagram–and what’s behind that impulse.

Besides interactions in the wilderness, there are of course selfies taken with endangered wildlife like tigers, birds, and sloths.1 Those wildlife are kept in unsafe environments and sometimes (allegedly) drugged. To its credit, Instagram has started warning users that photographs hashtagged with things like #tigerselfie might be associated with animal abuse. For the people who make a living from wildlife tourism, of course, the issue is not so clearcut.

Photographs say things. Each photograph reinscribes a relationship of power between the photographer and the photographed–in the case of selfies, this can become a bit incestuous. A selfie-style photograph (even if someone else presses the shutter) showing someone with a captured or coerced wild animal… that’s complicated. Even Man With Fish, a more ubiquitous image than tiger selfies on Tinder, is making a point about his relationship with animals that’s about control.2

A selfie with a wild animal says, “I was there. I touched this wildness; I had my hands around its neck; I smelled it. I close to something real, and it didn’t hurt me — didn’t hurt me not by accident, not because I am in any way special, but because control was exercised in some to ensure I wasn’t hurt.” (This is the essence of tourism, this invisible control.) In a successful wilderness selfie, the animal was too vulnerable–for whatever reason–to pull away, to assert its boundaries.3 Any resemblance to rape cultures, living or dead, past or present, are purely coincidental.

As a rule, animals of different species don’t just hang out together, all buddy-buddy with a paw on one another’s shoulders (leave the sloths alone. They don’t want a hug.)4 If you see an animal with another animal, they might be doing their own thing in the same space, or they might be engaged in something much bloodier. When we capture photographs of undomesticated animals, we are on some level capturing photographs of the kind of brutality and raw necessity that war (and extreme climate events) force humans to engage in.5

So a photograph of someone cuddling a tiger, or holding a baby dolphin, or next to a bear, all of whom might normally want nothing to do with them? How do we explain that? I want to shift gears to talk about war photography for a second, and to talk about Susan Sontag. In Regarding the Pain of Others, her 2003 book about (mostly) war photography, she proposes that the point of war photographs isn’t just to document the brutality of war–it’s also to valorize it.6 What is being valorized in a sloth selfie?

“In an era of information overload,” she writes, more than six years before Instagram even came into existence, “the photograph provides a quick way of apprehending something and a compact for memorizing it. The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb.” 7 What of information overload now?

Instagram may be new, but the impulse to be seen with wildlife isn’t. It’s 1936 and a white woman named Ruth Harkness, poses on a rug with her arms wrapped around a baby panda. Named Su Lin after the sister of Harkness’s guide, Quentin Young, the panda, which was captured at nine weeks old, was the first to be brought alive to the United States, although certainly not the last.8

In The Baby Giant Panda, one of two books published by Harkness in 1938, she expresses ambivalence about her actions. “I began to wonder if I really wanted a Panda,” she writes; “I knew I’d feel so sorry for him that after a little while I’d want to let him go back to the jungles he loves, safe from human beings whose very scent he would fear.” Later, after Su Lin has been captured: “…I felt badly to have taken her from the mother our hunters had frightened away, so I felt I would have to make up to her for the loss of her mother.”9 By April 1938, Su Lin had died of pneumonia. Whatever scruples Harkness had about taking the panda from its home forests didn’t prevent her from bringing back a second one, Mei Mei, who shared Su Lin’s enclosure for a while before his death.

It’s not possible to look at Harkness’s actions through the lens of today–as Sontag notes, the world of the 1930s was a very different place for photographs.10 But still, I think about that pose, cuddling Su Lin on the carpet. “Me and [exoticized] nature, we’re buddies,” it seems to say. “I’m its mother.” If Su Lin clung to Harkness, that was because Su Lin was a baby, and needed someone–anyone, of any species willing–to help keep him alive.

Then there are historic photographs of figures like Ernest Hemingway and Teddy Roosevelt (who shot a panda not two years before Su Lin was captured) with trophy animals they have no intent of eating. I wonder if, today, figures like them would be content with selfies. After all, hunting and shooting an animal for sport has other implications today–just look at Cecil the lion. I’d argue that nothing about the practice of abusing animals for photographs, without thinking about it, is at all new or surprising.

What is fairly new, however, is the scale and visibility of these kinds of actions. Scroll through Instagram, with its hordes of selfies of friends posing in exotic locales on fun vacations, or Tinder, with the ubiquitous man with fish, and you’ll see something. It’s the same proverb, the same maxim over and over and over again, until it means something profound. Thanks to the lens’s eye, with each selfie, you can literally see someone encountering an animal, but in a way that makes me question how much animals are really seen at all.“I was there,” they seem to say. “I touched nature, but it didn’t touch me.”

This essay is a two-parter. The second part, which is about wildlife photography, will appear in next week’s issue.

Endnotes:

1. For a really good in-depth look at how tourism in the Amazon drives the capture of wild animals for selfies, check out Natasha Daly’s October 2017 piece for National Geographic.
2. I’m deliberately ignoring here the question of whether Man ate Fish, which will be addressed in a separate essay.
3. Sometimes, as in the case of these elk, animals are fully capable of asserting their boundaries. See also Agam Bansal et.al., “Selfies: A boon or bane?” Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care 7, no. 4 (Jul-Aug 2018), doi: 10.4103/jfmpc.jfmpc_109_18.
4. Animals do have positive or neutral relationships with other species in the wild, which we often classify as symbiosis, commensalism or mutualism. Here, though, I’m not talking about animals that humans have these relationships with (arguably, none.)
5. See r/natureismetal.
6. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (New York: Picador, 2003), 4–7.
7. Sontag, Regarding, 16.
8. Adelaide Su Lin Young was the first American woman to explore the Himalayas in the 1930s, per her fascinating 2008 Washington Post obituary.
9. Su Lin was a male panda–Harkness was mistaken regarding his sex.
10. Sontag, Regarding, 22–23.

Questions? Comments? Complaints? Leads? You can contact me with ANY OF THESE at my email or on Twitter. Find other things I write on my website, kateschner.com. If you enjoy this newsletter and would like to tip me, I am on Ko-fi.

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All images used in Creature Feature are used under Creative Commons licensing. Efforts have been made to ensure that photographs of living animals or natural scenes have been taken ethically, at AZA-accredited zoos and aquariums or under safe, non-damaging conditions in the wild. If you see an issue with any image we share, please notify me.

Welcome to Creature Feature, a weekly newsletter about animal-human relationships. It’s written by me, Kat Eschner. I’m a science reporter with a history degree and a grumpy dog. Want to get it in your inbox on Friday morning? Sign up here.

Roundup: Keeping track of animals

Because there is simply *so much* animal news out there, each week I’ll bring you headlines relating to one specific theme. This week I’m looking at how we enumerate the creatures we live among.

What happens when humans fall in love with an invasive species

FiveThirtyEight

Maggie Koerth-Baker’s latest starts out in the good ‘ol realm of wildlife conservation before taking a hard turn into bioethics and cutting-edge science–my favourite! This story of rainbow smelt in Lake Superior can get a little technical at times, but it’s well worth your read. Basically, non-native smelt populations are falling, because the lake is getting healthier and its native species are doing better. For those who fish the smelt, that’s not as good as it might seem on paper. Koerth-Baker’s story left me questioning what I thought about the idea of an “invasive” species in a world where we can, with effort, choose who to eradicate and who to leave behind.

Memorable quote: “All over the world, you’ll find invasive species that are beloved by humans — even as these foreign plants and animals alter or damage the environment.”

Why counting Central Park’s squirrels isn’t just nuts

Popular Science

As Eleanor Cummins tells us, counting animals can be about more than just the raw numbers (full disclosure: she works at Popular Science. I write for them a lot.) Cummins hunted the bushes of her assigned grid as a census-taker and interviewed the field commander of the Central Park Squirrel Census.Though her efforts are unlikely to contribute to a peer-reviewed paper, she writes, the citizen science has its own rewards. “In just a few hours, I tripled my knowledge of my furry neighbours — and the environment we shared.”

The Squirrel Census describes itself as “an award-winning multimedia science, design and storytelling project focusing on the Easter grey (Sciurus carolinensis.)”

While researching this story I also discovered the results of a British hedgehog census from 2017 and learned a bunch about hedgehog housing preferences. Fun fact: they hibernate in nests called “hibernacula.” Well, I know what my Halloween costume’s going to be now.

Time to count your chickens in Wareham-bird owners must register with town or face fines

Wicked Local Wareham

The Massachusetts town of Wareham (pop. ~21,000) is starting to require residents to register backyard fowl.Why? The city is trying to strike a balance between backyard poulterers and the other local residents who have to hear their charges, writes reporter Mary Mckenzie. “We do go out to calls at 3 a.m. that a rooster is at it again,” a local official told her, describing it as “a nuisance issue like a dog barking.”

Some other municipalities require backyard fowl to be licensed, but in the United States they’re generally in a gray zone, Menaka Wilhelm reported earlier this year for NPR’s The Salt. There are reasons to keep track of the birds, though. Backyard chickens can be a source of zoonotic disease, and without regulation, there are few mechanisms of enforcement to use if the birds are being mistreated. The gray zone that backyard chickens occupy is also that between “food” and “pet,” and, well, we license our dogs and cats. So good for Wareham, I say.

I can’t let a story of backyard birds go by without mentioning this feature by Peter Holley of The Washington Post. Read if you want to hear about $20,000 USD chicken coops and other Silicon Valley pretensions, steer clear if the above gives you the vapours.

Essay question: A shark tale

I didn’t finish my homework for this, the first week of Creature Feature! The first essay (as promised, the question will be about selfies and wildlife) will arrive in next Friday’s dispatch. But since we’re here, let me share one last animal story from the week that was.

Toronto naked guy decides to swim with the sharks

This went viral, so basically everywhere

This Tuesday, a ticketed guest allegedly stripped down and jumped into the Dangerous Lagoon at Ripley’s Aquarium in downtown Toronto, Canada. Among his companions were sand tiger sharks, which may look pretty shark-ey but are fairly chill, according to the aquarium website. There’s footage of his swim, if you’re interested, on Buzzfeed’s story about the incident.

Sounds like the man, since identified, has a lot going on. Before his dip with the elasmobranchs, he had a brush with the law, allegedly assaulting someone outside a Medieval Times. He was later arrested in Thunder Bay (translation: this is basically a Florida Man story. Like those, it deals with real people who were materially impacted by events.)

Both sharks and man were unharmed by their encounter, but not everybody who’s tried to swim with the aquarium’s big creatures has been so lucky. In 1999, the body of a man named Daniel Dukes was found in a killer whale tank at Sea World Orlando, draped over the back of an orca named Tilikum. Dukes, who was found wearing only underwear, was found to have died of drowning. It seems he either snuck into the park after-hours or remained after the other guests went home, undetected by security. For more on Tilikum, take a look at Yanan Wang’s 2016 profile of the orca for The Washington Post.

Tilikum got his name from the Chinook Jargon word for “friend,” more generally spelled tillicum. He lived for some time at Sealand of the Pacific in Victoria, British Columbia, where he was named. For more on the history of Chinook Jargon, which was a trading language but so much more in B.C., a good place to start would be David Douglas Robertson’s blog. Tilikum was actually captured in the waters of Iceland.

Questions? Comments? Complaints? Leads for stories that I could pitch for sweet, sweet money? You can contact me with ANY OF THESE at my email or on Twitter. Find other things I write on my website, kateschner.com.

Correction: Creature Feature originally misidentified Wareham as being “the UK town of Wareham (pop. <10,000)” rather than the Massachusetts, United States Wareham. We regret the error.

Flocks of bunnies grazing the quad and popping out of bushes were a welcome distraction from the stresses of being a student. They weren’t tame, exactly, but they were habituated to humans in the ways that urban animals are. If you were patient you could coax them to eat from your hand and even climb into your lap, but they maintained a healthy distrust of people. They were part of the background until I wanted the comfort of seeing them, knowing they were living lives that were entirely unrelated to term paper stress or student loan panic.

Then one day, in spring of my third year, they were gone. I don’t think I even noticed right away. The school administration said they’d been shipped to rabbit sanctuaries, although I’ve never confirmed this and many morbid jokes were made. With the rabbits gone, the campus felt empty, devoid of wonder. But by the time I graduated from UVic, I’d forgotten there had ever been rabbits there at all.

I know that’s not how extinction will happen–how it is happening, now, and how it has been happening for a long time. The animals won’t all disappear in one day, off to a sanctuary. As last week’s IPCC report highlights, there is no sanctuary from climate change for any living thing.

I also know that whatever happens to the world’s animals in the coming decades, it will mostly go unnoted. The animals are just part of the picture of climate change. I imagine that the pressing demands of survival will continue to take priority over the question of whether we’re ever going to see another Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, for example. But we’re on this planet together.

What’s happening to the natural world and our shifting understanding of humans as part of it is one of the essential stories of our time. Mass extinction is a reality, not just a prediction. At the same time, change — what some would term progress — has also allowed scientists, lawmakers, and regular people to look at animals in unprecedented ways. As many species are disappearing from view, they’re also coming into it. This is hopeful, I think — if we can see animals in general as worthy of consideration, perhaps we can mend our relations with them. But there’s a lot of information to sift through in considering our connections with the other sentient creatures on this planet.

That’s why I’m starting this newsletter, to explore the stories of our relationship with animals. Every Friday, I’ll point you to three must-read stories from the week past and tell you why they’re noteworthy. You’ll also be able to read an original reported essay from me covering one animal-related issue. In the first, I’ll look at whether selfie culture has changed the public’s relationship with endangered wildlife. The second involves roadkill — that’s all I’m revealing for now.

The first newsletter hits inboxes next Friday, and you have to be a subscriber to get it on Friday morning. Everybody else will be able to read it on Medium come Saturday. It’s aimed at the general reader, although scientists and science writers will be able to use the information too. I hope you’ll join me on this journey by signing up on Mailchimp or following me on Medium.