Animal Influence I - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

ecoarttech
(F) #TraningYRHuman ecoarttech
developed many strategies to express her
dominant, aggressive personality in acceptable
ways: she is adept at sweet yet aggressive licks,
adamant displays of submission (such as doing a
Sit with a lot of expectant attitude), and obstinate
sighs of frustration when she must do as told. In
addition, she has developed advanced skills in
manipulating human beings into getting what she
wants, especially family friends, who she sees as
new animals to manage. Through Tuffy, we have
learned about the limits of humans’ imagination
of the canine species, how humans continually
give their dog-friends the wrong messages, how
dogs cannot be homogenized into one unified
category of Dog-ness, and — and this is the key
motivation for #TrainingYrHuman — that humans
are not the only ones doing the training.
While new scientific research has illuminated
animals’ behaviors, their ethical attitudes, modes
of cognition, and psychological awareness, our
everyday experiences can also tell us a lot about
our companion species if we listen carefully—
about their diverse personalities and creative
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problem-solving and the ways they invent to
express themselves and meet their needs and
desires in a human-dominated world.
#TrainingYrHuman attempts to imagine their
voices, their subjecthood, into the social media
environment. In so doing, this artwork occupies a
paradoxical position vis-à-vis humanities research,
popular culture, narrative and scientific ethology.
In his illuminating The Animal Manifesto, which
summarizes groundbreaking scientific research on
animals’ senses of ethics, justice, cognition,
feeling, compassion, love, and mourning, from
dolphins to elephants, Marc Bekoff asserts that
“science is finally catching up with what we’ve
sensed all along” (57). Turning to personal
experience, he writes: “I intuitively knew as a child
that animals are smart and passionate; it took
decades of laborious scientific inquiry to learn
how correct I was. Science is still trying to catch
up with what so many of us already understand. It
turns out that our intuitions are disarmingly correct,
and we ought to give ourselves credit for this” (12).
After publishing his observation of a magpie