Abstract
‘Life’, in its astonishing diversity, escapes a decisive definition. Frequently, one is offered a roll call of what life does rather than is—it can change, reproduce, adapt, and die. Very significantly, a living being is usually defined as something with the capacity to ‘respond’ to the fluctuating conditions of its wider environment and, by extension, the other living beings that inhabit those natural worlds. The nature of these physical responses is critical to the building of relationships both within and between species, and between creatures and their wider worlds. Significantly, however, new research, in the field of sensory ecology, reveals an extraordinary range of sensory abilities. These are ways of sensing—ways of perceiving and being—far beyond our own. In this chapter, we want to illustrate the significant potential of an animal-orientated sensory turn. We want to make the case that it is substantially through the senses—by thinking about what sensory experiences were and what they meant in the context of human-animal relations—that we can draw closer to the lived realities of past animals—and their people.
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Notes
- 1.
Aristotle, De Anima ii 4, 415b27–415b28.
- 2.
Steven Benner, “Defining life”, Astrobiology, no. 10 (2010): 1021–1030; Edward N. Trifonov, “Vocabulary of Definitions of Life Suggests a Definition”, Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics, no. 29 (2011): 259–266.
- 3.
Stephen Burnett, “Perceptual Worlds and Sensory Ecology”, Nature Education Knowledge, no. 3 (2011): 75.
- 4.
R. T. Mason and R.M. Parker, “Social behaviour and pheromonal communication in reptiles”, Journal of Comparative Physiology A, no. 196 (2010): 729–749.
- 5.
A.S. Feng et al. “Ultrasonic communication in frogs”, Nature, no. 440 (2006): 333–336.
- 6.
G. P. Bell, “The sensory basis of prey location by the California leaf-nosed bat Macrotus californicus (Chiroptera: Phyllostomidae)”, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, no. 16 (1985): 343–347; J.U. van Dyke and M.S. Grace, “The role of thermal contrast in infrared-based defensive targeting by the copperhead, Agkistrodon contortrix”, Animal Behaviour, no. 79 (2010): 993–999.
- 7.
Kathrin Steck, Markus Knaden and Bill Hansson, “Do desert ants smell the scenery in stereo?” Animal Behaviour, no. 79 (2010): 939–945.
- 8.
J.H. Poole, et al. “The social contexts of some very low frequency calls of African elephants”, Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology, no. 22 (1998): 385–392; K. McComb et al. “Long-distance communication of acoustic cues to social identity in African elephants”, Animal Behaviour, no. 65 (2003): 317–329.
- 9.
Peter A. Coates, “The Strange Stillness of the Past: Towards an Environmental History of Sound and Noise”, Environmental History, no. 10 (2005): 636–665; Melanie A. Kiechle, Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Urban America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019); Alice Would, “Fleshing Out the Animals of British Taxidermy in the long Nineteenth Century (1820–1914)”, Doctoral dissertation, University of Bristol, 2021.
- 10.
Erica Fudge, “Milking other men’s beasts”, History and Theory, no. 52 (2013): 13–28; Christopher Plumb, “Reading menageries: using eighteenth-century print sources to historicise the sensorium of menagerie spectators and their encounters with exotic animals”, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, no. 17 (2010): 265–286; Jonathan Saha, “Colonizing elephants: animal agency, undead capital and Imperial science in British Burma”, BJHS, Themes 2 (2017): 2–17 and Brett L. Walker, “Animals and the Intimacy of History”, History and Theory, no. 52 (2013): 45–67; 129–189.
- 11.
British Animal Studies Network, https://www.britishanimalstudiesnetwork.org.uk. They provide audio recordings of many of the papers.
- 12.
L. Febvre, “Smells, Tastes, and Sounds”, in idem, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: CUP, 1982); Sandra Swart, “The World the Horses Made – A South African Case Study of Writing Animals into Social History”, International Review of Social History, no. 55 (2010); Sandra Swart, Riding High: Horses, Humans and History in South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2010).
- 13.
This section draws on Swart, Riding High, 217.
- 14.
Clifford Geertz, “‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding in Culture Theory”, in Richard Shweder and Robert LeVine (eds), Culture. Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion (Cambridge: CUP, 1984); Douglas Hollan and C. Jason Throop, “Whatever Happened to Empathy?: Introduction”, Ethos, no. 36 (2008): 385–401, 385.
- 15.
Sensory history is sometimes also labelled the ‘history of the senses’, or sensate history.
- 16.
Constance Classen, The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination (London: Routledge, 1998); Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986); Elizabeth D. Harvey, “The Portal of Touch”, American Historical Review, no. 116 (2011): 385–400; and Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting and Touching in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
- 17.
For example, ‘Historical empathy is the process of cognitive and affective engagement with historical figures to better understand how people from the past thought, felt, made decisions, acted, and faced consequences within a specific historical and social context’ [emphasis added]: Jason L. Endacott, “Negotiating the Process of Historical Empathy”, Theory & Research in Social Education, no. 42 (2014): 4–34. On ‘affective empathy’, see Elisa Aaltola, Varieties of Empathy: Moral Psychology and Animal Ethics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018).
- 18.
Vinciane Despret, “Responding Bodies and Partial Affinities in Human–Animal Worlds”, Theory, Culture & Society, no. 30 (2013): 51–76. See also Aaltola, Varieties of Empathy.
- 19.
Gruen’s entangled empathy involving ‘reflectively imagin[ing] ourselves in the position of the other’, and then to making ‘judgment[s] about how the conditions that she finds herself in may contribute to her perceptions or state of mind and impact her interests’. Lori Gruen, “Navigating Difference (again): Animal Ethics and Entangled Empathy”, Strangers to Nature: Animal Lives and Human Ethics (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012: 213–233. Some go so far as to argue that empathy requires the sensory, especially ‘touch’. Betty Stoneman, “The Dichotomy of Sight vs. Touch: The Harm of the Primacy of Sight for Empathy”, Sloth: A Journal of Emerging Voices in Human-Animal Studies, no. 2 (2016). For an overview of the disputes over embodiment’s links to empathy, see Nivedita Gangopadhyay, “Introduction: Embodiment and Empathy, Current Debates in Social Cognition”, Topoi, no. 33 (2014): 117–127; Alvin Goldman and Frederique de Vignemont, “Is Social Cognition Embodied?”, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, no. 13 (2009): 154–159.
- 20.
For a history of vision in one specific context, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
- 21.
On more-than-human sensory adaptations, see Kenneth Katana, Great Adaptations: Star-Nosed Moles, Electric Eels & Other Tales of Evolution’s Mysteries Solved (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).
- 22.
Thomas W. Cronin, Sönke Johnson, N. Justin Marshall and Eric J. Warrant, Visual Ecology (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 2014); Michael F. Land and Dan-Eric Nilsson, Animal Eyes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
- 23.
O. Dangles et al., “Variability in sensory ecology: Expanding the bridge between physiology and evolutionary biology”, Quarterly Review of Biology no. 84 (2009): 51–74.
- 24.
Donald R. Griffin, Listening in the Dark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958).
- 25.
Thomas Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?”, Philosophical Review, no. 83 (1974): 435–450.
- 26.
Cristina Gonzalez-Liencres, Simone G. Shamay-Tsoory and Martin Brüne, “Towards a neuroscience of empathy: Ontogeny, phylogeny, brain mechanisms, context and psychopathology”, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, no. 37 (2013): 1537–1548.
- 27.
Konrad Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring (London: Routledge, 1952, 2002).
- 28.
Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring, 129.
- 29.
Despret, “Responding Bodies”, 71.
- 30.
Monika Baár, “Prosthesis for the body and for the soul: the origins of guide dog provision for blind veterans in interwar Germany”, First World War Studies, no. 6 (2015): 81–98.
- 31.
Steven Connor, “The Menagerie of the Senses”, Senses and Society, no. 1 (2006): 9–26, 15, 23.
- 32.
Val Plumwood, “Being Prey”, Kurungabaa, no. 4 (18 January 2011), https://kurungabaa.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/being-prey-by-val-plumwood/.
- 33.
For a basic introduction to key concepts in Disability Studies, see Tom Shakespeare, Disability: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2018).
- 34.
Lennard Davis, The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013).
- 35.
Donna Haraway, ‘”A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991): 149–181.
- 36.
Christopher Kyba, Sara Pritchard et al., “Night Matters—Why the Interdisciplinary Field of ‘Night Studies’ Is Needed”, Multidisciplinary Scientific Journal, no. 3 (2020): 1–6; John Jackle, City Lights: Illuminating the American Night (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialisation of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Jeremy Zallen, American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). For environmental histories of darkness, light and night, see Andrew Flack, “Dark Trails: Animal histories beyond the light of day”, Environmental History, no. 27 (2022): 215–241; Andrew Flack, “Dark Denegerations: Life, Light and Transformation Beneath the Earth, 1840–c. 1900”, ISIS, no. 113 (2022): 331–351.
- 37.
See Earth at Night (Apple, 2020); Night on Earth (Netflix, 2020).
- 38.
See, for instance, Travis Longcore and Catherine Rich, “Ecological Light Pollution”, Frontiers in Ecology and Environment, no. 2 (2004): 191–198.
- 39.
“Bird notes from Irish lighthouses”, Country Life Illustrated (8 December 1900): 727–728.
- 40.
See Longcore and Rich, “Ecological Light Pollution”.
- 41.
Walter Albion Squires and Harold E. Hanson, “The Destruction of Birds at the Lighthouses on the Coast of California”, The Condor, no. 20 (1918): 6–10.
- 42.
See, for instance, “Correspondence: animal casualties on the road”, Country Life (3 February 1966): 245.
- 43.
See Longcore and Rich, “Ecological Light Pollution”.
- 44.
See Catania, Great Adaptations.
- 45.
“Night cries in the wood”, Country Life (16 September 1954): 902.
- 46.
See Nina Edwards, Darkness: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2018).
- 47.
Donald R. Griffin and Robert Galambos, “The Sensory basis of obstacle avoidance by flying bats”, Journal of Experimental Zoology, no. 86 (1941): 481–506 and Donald R. Griffin and Robert Galambos, “Obstacle avoidance by flying bats: the cries of bats”, Journal of Experimental Zoology, no. 89 (1942): 475–490.
- 48.
On Spallanzani, see Sven Dijkgraaf, “Spallanzani’s unpublished experiments on the sensory basis of object perception in bats”, ISIS, no. 51 (1960): 9–20.
- 49.
René Sigrist, « Louis Jurine, Chirurgien et naturaliste (1751–1819)», Le Rhinolophe, no. 11 (1995): 1–8.
- 50.
Walter Louis Hahn, “Some habits and sensory adaptations of cave-inhabiting bats”, Biological Bulletin, no. 15 (1908): 135–164.
- 51.
Griffin and Galambos, “The Sensory basis of obstacle avoidance by flying bats”, 481–506.
- 52.
“Birds and Lighthouses”, Country Life (9 February 1935): 142.
- 53.
“Dangers of Migration For Migratory Birds”, https://magpie.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/natures-home-magazine/birds-and-wildlife-articles/migration/dangers-of-migration/#:~:text=Dangers%20of%20migration%201%20Bad%20weather%20Bad%20weather,7%20Sticky%20death%20...%208%20Protecting%20migrants%20 [accessed October 13, 2021).
- 54.
Equine colour vision resembles ‘red-green blindness’ in humans.
- 55.
Bart Westerweel, “The well-tempered lady and the unruly horses”, in Theo D’haen, Rainer Grübel and Helmut Lethen (eds), Convention and Innovation in Literature (Utrecht: John Benjamin’s Publishing Company, 1989): 115.
- 56.
Bart Westerweel, “The well-tempered lady and the unruly horses”, in Theo D’haen, Rainer Grübel and Helmut Lethen (eds), Convention and Innovation in Literature (Utrecht: John Benjamin’s Publishing Company, 1989): 115.
- 57.
Draws on Sandra Swart, “The World the Horses Made – A South African case study of writing animals into social history”, International Review of Social History, no. 55 (2010); Sandra Swart, Riding High. These historical sensory negotiations may now be seen in equine facilitated healing encounters where, for example, veterans suffering PTSD are encouraged to engage with each of the horse’s (five) sense in order to engage with their own. Brooke Lichter, “From combat to calm: equine therapy with veterans”, in Megan E. Delaney (ed.) Nature Is Nurture: Counselling and the Natural World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020): 151.
- 58.
Maria Vilain Rørvang, Birte L. Nielsen and Andrew N. McLean, “Sensory Abilities of Horses and Their Importance for Equitation Science”, Frontiers in Veterinary Science (2020).
- 59.
Drawn from Swart, “The World the Horses Made”; Sandra Swart, “Horses in the South African War, c.1899–1902”, Society & Animals, no. 18 (2010); Swart, Riding High.
- 60.
M.A. Levine, “Botai and the Origins of Horse Domestication”, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, no. 18 (1999): 29–78.
- 61.
Or in the technical words of scientists: the process of domestication may have favoured the development of the ability to appreciate heterospecific emotions. Jan Ladewig, “Body language: Its importance for communication with horses”, Journal of Veterinary Behavior, no. 29 (2019): 108–110; Agnieszka Sabiniewicz et al., “Olfactory-based interspecific recognition of human emotions: Horses (Equus ferus caballus) can recognize fear and happiness body odour from humans (Homo sapiens)”, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, no. 230 (2020): 105–172; S.M. Stone, “Human facial discrimination in horses: can they tell us apart?”, Animal Cognition, no. 13 (2010): 51–61.
- 62.
K. S. Trotter, Harnessing the Power of Equine Assisted Counselling (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012).
- 63.
Some smells—like fire—trigger action in this odd-toed ungulate who evolved in flammable steppe grasslands.
- 64.
S.L. Crowell-Davis, K.A. Houpt and C.M. Carini, “Mutual grooming and nearest neighbour relationships among foals of Equus caballus”, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, no. 15 (1986): 113–123.
- 65.
Birte Nielsen and McLean, “Sensory Abilities of Horses”.
- 66.
C. Hall et al., “Is there evidence of learned helplessness in horses?”, Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, no. 11 (2008): 249–266.
- 67.
J. Dryden, Plutarch’s lives (New York: Modern Library, 1942).
- 68.
Bill Dorrance and Leslie Desmond, True Horsemanship through Feel (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 1999, 2007) 22; see also K. Brandt, “A Language of Their Own: An Interactionist Approach to Human-Horse Communication”, Society & Animals, no. 12 (2004): 299–316.
- 69.
Vicki Hearne, Adam’s task: Calling animals by name (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986): 110–111.
- 70.
A. Akrami, et al. “Posterior parietal cortex represents sensory history and mediates its effects on behaviour”, Nature, no. 554 (2018): 368–372.
- 71.
Aaltola, Varieties of Empathy, 35.
- 72.
Soring is the practice of using tactile sensitivity as a brutal aid of instruction: imposing targeted pain to a horse’s legs or hooves to encourage them into an exaggerated high-stepping gait. Mustard oil, diesel or kerosene are sometimes smeared on their limbs.
- 73.
This section draws on Sandra Swart, “Kicking over the traces? Freeing the animal from the archive”, in Jennifer Bonnell and Sean Kheraj (eds), Traces of the Animal Past: Methodological Challenges in Animal History (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2022), which proposes the first tentative steps towards the intersection of animal history, sensory history and oral history.
- 74.
Despret uses the term anthropo-zoo-genesis to signify this relationship of human-with-horse and horse-with-human. Vinciane Despret, ‘The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis’, Body & Society, 10, 2004, 111–134.
- 75.
R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946) 215.
- 76.
Katherine Johnson, “Rethinking (re)doing: historical re-enactment and/ as historiography”, Rethinking History, No. 19 (2015): 193–206. Many historians retreat in a Pavlovian fashion from very notion of ‘doing’ history. See Paul Pickering, “’No Witnesses. No Leads. No Problems: The Reenactment of Crime and Rebellion”, in I. McCalman & P. Pickering (eds), Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010): 109–133, 122.
- 77.
Alain Corbin, “Charting the Cultural History of the Senses,” in David Howes (ed.), Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 2005): 128–139. Also see Nigel Rothfels, “Touching Animals: The Search for a Deeper Understanding of Animals”, in Dorothee Brantz (ed.) Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010): 38–58.
- 78.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002): 106–107.
- 79.
Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin (London: Harper and Row, 1978): 20–46.
- 80.
See Natasha Fijn, Living with Herds: Human-animal Co-existence in Mongolia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
- 81.
Andrea Ford, “Sport horse leisure and the phenomenology of interspecies embodiment”, Leisure Studies, no. 38 (2019): 329–340.
- 82.
Charlotte Marchina, “Follow the horse: The complexities of collaboration between the lasso-pole horse (uurgach mor’) and his rider among Mongolian horse herders”, in Dona Davis and Anita Maurstad, eds, The Meaning of Horses: Biosocial Encounters (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016): 102–113; Robin Irvine, “Thinking with horses: troubles with subjects, objects and diverse entities in eastern Mongolia”, Humanimalia: A Journal of Human/Animal Interface Studies, no. 6 (2014): 62–94.
- 83.
Thomas Csordas, Body/Meaning/Healing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002): 7–8.
- 84.
This paragraph draws on Swart, “Kicking over the traces?”
- 85.
See, for example, Lindsay Hamilton and Nik Taylor, Ethnography After Humanism: Power, Politics and Method in Multi-Species Research (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
- 86.
Joshua Specht, “Animal History After Its Triumph: Unexpected Animals, Evolutionary Approaches, and the Animal Lens”, History Compass, no. 14 (2016): 326–336.
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Flack, A., Swart, S. (2024). Sensing Life: Intersections of Animal and Sensory Histories. In: Glover, M.J., Mitchell, L. (eds) Animals as Experiencing Entities. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46456-0_5
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