In this live, Sindhoor and I talked about recent events in India. You might remember that we had chosen streeties in India for “Philosophy in the Wild: Finding Hope in Mixed Communities” as another case of mutualism between humans and wild living animals (and streeties are yet another wonderful case to question our preconceived and unduly romantic notions of ‘wild’). While not all humans in India are “dog lovers”, India has a long history of tolerance vis-à-vis other animals. What is more, experiments with lethal control of street dog populations under colonial rule had shown that that were not effective at controlling the risks from rabies and dog bites. Hence, streeties in India came to enjoy some important legal protection both under the general prevention of cruelty to animals and regarding their right to belong to certain neighbourhoods.

Last summer, things took a turn for the worse, with the Supreme Court of India first declaring that all dogs in New Delhi were supposed to be removed. Meanwhile, the goal is to capture 10% of the 60 to 100 million streeties nationwide and put them into shelters. If there already wasn’t enough money to implement previous laws and regulations, this idea is not only unjust and ecologically unsound but also highly unrealistic. Sindhoor calls these “mythical shelters” “a Shangri-La” and walks us through the complicated political and cultural landscape that has formed around this issue. She argues against only seeing suffering as far as street dogs are concerned, and shares vivid accounts of what it really is like to share communities with these “independent thinkers”. And she urges us to keep having conversations about vital matters with our neighbours and communities even when, perhaps particularly when we disagree.

Please keep paying attention to the issue of streeties in India by following Sindhoor’s organisation BHARCS’ work on the matter, also on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Conservation biologist Noreen Mutoro talks with us about her experience working with Action for Cheetahs in Kenya, who have been pioneering the work with dogs in conversation. (Follow them on LinkedIn or Facebook to learn about sharing space with wild living animals or how Apollo, the newest canine on the team, is doing.) We also talk about One Health considerations, working with local communities, the many ways of life for dogs, problems of fortress conservation, and the nature of indigenous knowledge as well as its potential in promoting coexistence between humans and other animals.

Substack had let us down with their app, so this is a Zoom recording — I hope you can still hear okay!

Meeting Noreen has been really inspiring and helped me return to an old hobby, scent detection with dogs. She has also pointed me into the direction of Naturschutzhunde, an Austrian organisation doing important work on protocols and training dogs for these jobs. I am 100% hooked and planning more posts on this ancient mutualism between humans and dogs in service of other animals.

Thanks for listening!

Thank you to everyone who joined Greg and me for a discussion of Mary Midgley’s ‘mixed community. Greg kindly shared with us what it was really like to do philosophy with Midgley: Besides wisdom and biscuits, she could also happen to recite poetry or make you read it out loud. Here is “The Song of Quoodle” Greg mentions — loving it.

If you would like to read up on the mixed community and Greg’s thinking around it, here are three excellent resources:

Chapter 4 “Animals and Why They Matter”, in his: Mary Midgley. An Introduction, Bloomsbury 2020, 65—91 .

“Midgley at the Intersection of Animal and Environmental Ethics”. Les Ateliers de l’Éthique / The Ethics Forum 13(1), 2008, 143—58.

“Midgley’s Animal and Environmental Ethics: Context and Relevance”, forthcoming in Ellie Robson (Ed.): The Moral Philosophy of Mary Midgley (and its Reception).

Feel free to get in touch with Greg directly for any more questions — as you can tell from our chat, he is a super patient and generous person.

We did establish that the ‘mixed community’ really has been underdeveloped by Midgley. It is a “philosopher’s term”, and as much as philosophers are encouraged to engage in the mess of navigating real moral conflicts, it is not their job to just declare, once and for all, how things ought to be.

I feel (and have argued) that she offers a unique type of casuistry with a dash of utopia. In that regard, another chapter of interest to you could be her “Practical Utopianism”, chapter 2 in her Utopias, Dolphins and Computers. Problems of Philosophical Plumbing, in which she, among other things, explains why pluralism does not need to lead to nihilism.

In our conversation, Greg and I kept bringing up more and more of the complexity which mixed communities inevitably display. Dealing with problems of human-animal-relation is messy and it will be even more so the messier human-human-relations become. And yet. Perhaps the final metaphor we land on — the kaleidoscope — is useful to stress that we can still aim for beauty in all that mess.

Midgley herself, in her “Practical Utopianism”, says:

If we try to work with a world-view which shows us only the complexity of existing facts, we lose our bearings and forget where we are going. And of course these supposedly realistic views aren’t truly realistic either. Every account enshrines some particular ideals rather than others and expresses some dream. Our imagination needs, then, to be stimulated, not from one but from a hundred points on this spectrum. It needs to be stirred constantly from different angles by different aspects of the truth, if it is to keep its power of responding to what goes on. (ibid., 25)

Now, with the wonderful, both visionary and messy material that all the teams are sharing for “Philosophy in the Wild: Finding Hope in Mixed Communities” we are slowly but surely getting close to hundred points concerning our mixed communities. My huge and heartfelt thanks to all of them! And I look forward to reporting more on the ideas and developments in the New Year.

Thank you to everyone who listened to Beth and me chatting about the idea of the inner child and working with actual children! Here are the quotes from Midgley’s Animals and Why They Matter that inspired us again in full:

On the Species-Barrier

[…] the species-barrier there, imposing though it may look, is rather like one of those tall wire fences whose impressiveness is confined to their upper reaches. To an adult in formal dress, engaged on his official statesmanly interactions, the fence is an insuperable barrier.

Down below, where it is full of holes, it presents no obstacle at all. The young of Homo sapiens, like those of the other species present, scurry through it all the time. Since all human beings start life as children, this has the quite important consequence that hardly any of us, at heart, sees the social world as an exclusively human one. (Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter, p. 118.)

This is one of Midgley’s many evocative pictures and she uses it to tease out one of the constitutive elements of the mixed community. Membership to such a community is not organised by some sort of old-fashioned philosophical sorting of live beings according to rules of “people here” and “things over there”, using species membership as a proxy. Rather, certain social practices can take place across species, even if intraspecific occurrence is “more natural”. She mentions play, but also adequate responses to infants such as helping and understanding.

On the inner child and her allies

A few pages later, she links these childish-in-a-good-way traits to a “capacity for widely extended sympathy, for social horizons not limited to one’s familiar group” (AaWTM, 120) that seems part of human nature and suggests that we can keep these traits alive as we mature.

What is more, humanity has been treated so kindly by “Fate” that we can even “extend[] our horizon beyond the social into the ecological”, becoming “true citizens of the world” (ibid.).

I think this is a lot for “just kids”, whether actual or inner ones, to shoulder, especially perhaps when things are getting complicated, environmental conditions harsh and humanity is faced with unpopular choices or affairs. But, for Midgley, they are not alone.

When some portion of the biosphere is rather unpopular with the human race — a crocodile, a dandelion, a stoney valley, a snowstorm, an odd-shaped flint — there are three sorts of human being who are particularly likely still to see point in and befriend it. They are poets, scientists and children. Inside each of us, I suggest, representatives of all these groups may be found. (Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter, p. 145.)

With this quote, we have reached the end of said book, in a chapter called “What Can Matter to Us?”. Midgley says that we can answer that question in a “minimalist” fashion, being careful (perhaps even anxious) not to “waste” our concern, care and attention for others, only agreeing to care for others deserving of our care previously left out in the cold if the inconsistency of doing so becomes “unbearably uncomfortable” (ibid.); and perhaps dropping a few other commitments because of that (think: “I can’t be just vis-à-vis all humans because I started to care about animals.”). But why be so ”minimalist” or “parsimonious”, Midgley asks. Why not take a leaf out of the poet’s, the scientist’s and the children’s books? Why not take the advice of the inner child, the inner scientist and the inner poet?

Her very last sentence states that as for the problem of that choice — between minimalism and a state of mind that would set us up to be able to face the unpopular and become true citizens of the world — she “must leave [her] readers to settle it” (ibid.). So, you can imagine that it was really good fun to talk to another avid reader and interpreter of Midgley — and I would love to hear what you think! I hope the recording is okay and below are some additional resources you might find helpful.

Beth has written an entry on Mary Midgley, Persons and The Moral Community, freely available here. In the chat, she mentioned that she found SAPERE (soon to be Thoughtful) very helpful in her work with actual young people. If you take a look at Team Wales’ “Programme” tab here, you can find many resources and inspiration for doing workshops with young people, including Beth’s cool short story for young people.

Finally, Notes from a Biscuit Tin has a number of philosophical worksheets available for young people, and for the German speaking folks, I wanted to share lyriklab, a great pool of resources for young poets.

That’s it. Thanks for reading and listening or watching. I hope you will have time to join me for my next conversation with Greg McElwain, which will be a deep dive into the mixed community, scheduled for the 10th of December at 4:30 pm (UK time).

Thank you to everyone who tuned into our conversation! This time, we got the video right, I feel the audio sounds perhaps a bit canny, but here is the recording. Michelle and I based our discussion about laws and legal concepts that are designed to benefit the rest of nature in the chapter that Dale Jamieson has contributed to the following book, edited by César Rodriguez-Garavíto: An Ecology of Law, Thought and Narrative for Earthly Flourishing. If you want to learn more about the “Philosophy in the Wild”-sites we discussed, please see my interview with Devon and the Vega section of the project website for the eider ducks and the interview with Team Amsterdam for the zoöp-approach. If you want to learn more about the law and the Whanganui River, have a look at this short documentary or go back to our chat on personhood. We did not return to the distinction between social and ecological communities and concomitant claims, but this will no doubt come up in my live with Greg McElwain, next week on Friday, 10th of October, at 4:30 pm (UK time) and 9:30 am (Mountain time) next week. Please join us then!Just the day after my live with Michelle, I had a chance to see the More-Than-Human exhibition at the London Design Museum — which is where I took the picture I am going to use in the thumbnail; the mural is by Elena Landinez, an artist worth checking out as well. (More on that exhibition in one of the Hot Topics to come.) Bye for now, and do feel free to leave a comment.

It’s been quite the dog days of late — in future posts, I will determine whether what you can see in the video above is still poetry, or not, and illustrate my transition from writing about other animals to writing with and for them. For now, enjoy your summer if you have one!

If you are interested in what poetry can do to us and why a spider’s dream can be smelled, please feel free to listen to my first audio-only odour appreciation — and don’t forget to follow Team Wales’s ongoing activities. Thanks so much to Beth. And to you for staying with us. Hope it makes scents. Love, Mara

I will start with a round of apologies:

* This was meant to become a note, not a post - but turns out it is 2:13 too long. But after - what? 21 hours of fretting over a crashed computer and ongoing software issues, I want to get it out in time. (Team Romania’s exhibition opens this weekend.)

* Honestly, the more I hone my sense of smell, the less I seem to be able to speak one language coherently. Perhaps this is proof of David Paxton’s hypotheses and I am just evolving backwards.

* You can’t see multispecies poetry’s finest and chief first reader doing his job. Here’s to scripting videos in the future.

Still, I really wanted to share some of the cool work accomplished by Team Romania (check out the interview with insightful, funny and generous team lead Alina) - as well as a bit on scent work (human, in this case).