Chapter 10 - Multispecies

Summary

Busy with our own world, we often think that animals are just a part of it, minor players in the large, smart, progressive lives of humans. But if we flip the point of view, things change. What are the animals’ worlds that remain inaccessible to us? Be they wild or domestic, animals hold for themselves seething multitudes of points of view that work below the surface of our own ways of understanding them. An encounter with an animal is a moment in which we come to recognize that animals have lives beyond us. In this look from myriad nonhumans, we realize there are more points of view than our own, and that there are other ways of dwelling on earth that are just as important to these animals as ours are to us. This allows us to better consider the ecosystems of which they and we are a part and to change the narrative about how we live with other animals on this shared earth.