Abstract
This essay brings into conversation the remarkable fieldwork of Wyoming ethologist Joe Hutto with Félix Guattari’s critique of established ecological thinking in his 1989 The Three Ecologies, developing a broader and more complex understanding of ethological practice and its implications for our understanding of animal life, sociality, and the ethics of human-animal relations. Working with the three registers also employed by Guattari in his attempt at formulating a ‘generalized ecology’ or ‘ecosophy,’ the essay suggests a concept of ethology that encompasses a social, an environmental, and a mental dimension of ethological practice. These ‘three ethologies’ are developed in conversation with Hutto’s account of his experience of living with a pack of mule deer over a period of seven years, showing that, rather than an analytical framework imposed on Hutto’s experiences, such an expanded conception of ethology emerges from Hutto’s ethological practice itself. The transformative experiences documented in Touching the Wild (2014) not only give fascinating ethological insights into the behaviors and different personalities of the deer Hutto encountered and lived with, they also challenge us to think about forms and practices of living-with beyond the anthropocentric limitations of traditional concepts of society, community, and (inter)subjectivity.
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Notes
- 1.
Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (New Brunswick: Athlone Press, 2000).
- 2.
Readers interested in the etymology and development of the various senses of ἦθος should refer to Charles Scott, The Question of Ethics: Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 143–147.
- 3.
For a brief overview of recent ethological work from a philosophical perspective similar to the one adopted here, see Greg Goodale, The Rhetorical Invention of Man: A History of Distinguishing Humans from Other Animals (Lanham: Lexington, 2015), chap. 7. Broader accounts for non-specialist readers include: Jonathan Balcombe, Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016).
- 4.
Joe Hutto, Touching the Wild: Living with the Mule Deer of Deadman Gulch (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2014). Citations from this book will be given in parentheses in the text. A PBS Nature documentary was made of Hutto’s project: Joe Hutto, Touching the Wild: Living with the Mule Deer of Deadman Gulch, DVD, dir. David Allen (Alexandria, VA: PBS Home Video, 2014). Given the space available to me in this chapter, it will be impossible to examine Hutto’s study in the kind of detail it deserves. I highly recommend that the reader either view the video or read the book account to gain an adequate sense of just how remarkable Hutto’s project is. Despite my obvious admiration for his work, I should state I do not wish to lionize Hutto or his work uncritically. There are genuine dangers with the kinds of projects he has undertaken (both with the mule deer and other animals he has studied and lived with); in a fuller study of his work, such issues would need to be marked and discussed. I pass over many of these problems only in order to focus more closely on the theoretical and practical ethological framework I am developing here.
- 5.
I emphasize the point that only certain human beings have (historically and presently) been granted full consideration under such schemas. Although traditional Western conceptions of human community have often made rhetorical appeals to human universality, they have always been functionally and practically particular.
- 6.
Here I follow in part Gilles Deleuze’s reconception of ethology in his Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), esp. 125–127. Vinciane Despret helpfully glosses Deleuze’s sense of ethology as the ‘practical study of modes of being, that is to say, the practical study of what humans or animals can do; not of what they are, of their essence, but of what they’re capable, of what they’re doing, of the powers that are theirs, of the tests that they undergo’ (Brett Buchanan, Matthew Chrulew, and Jeffrey Bussolini, ‘On Asking the Right Questions: An Interview with Vinciane Despret,’ Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 20 (2015): 165–178, 166). For a more complete study of Deleuze’s ethology, see Brett Buchanan’s superb analysis in Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), chap. 5.
- 7.
My use of the term realist in relation to social ontology is influenced by Manuel DeLanda’s work. See his A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (New York: Continuum, 2006).
- 8.
See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), §355 and §373.
- 9.
Peter Singer examines this kind of extensionist paradigm in The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981).
- 10.
See Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
- 11.
‘[F]or in all natural things there is something wondrous [ἐν πᾶσι γὰρ τοῖς φυσικοῖς ἔνεστί τι θαυμαστόν],’ as Aristotle writes in The Parts of Animals, trans. James G. Lennox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 645a (translation modified). Andrea Wilson Nightingale provides an insightful analysis of the historical and cultural setting of the discourse on θεωρία in her Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context (Cambridge University Press, 2004); she also offers a helpful discussion of Aristotle’s remarks on animals and wonder in her Epilogue.
- 12.
One of the most emotionally difficult aspects of Hutto’s work is his account of the death of Babe at the hands of a hunter (265–267).
- 13.
An excellent collection of recent essays in this field is Eben Kirksey, ed., The Multispecies Salon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
- 14.
The issues of grief and animal extinction are explored with remarkable insight by Thom van Dooren in Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
- 15.
Johan Rockström et al., ‘A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,’ Nature 461 (2009): 472–475.
Works Cited
Balcombe, Jonathan. Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Bekoff, Marc, and Jessica Pierce. Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Buchanan, Brett, Matthew Chrulew, and Jeffrey Bussolini. “On Asking the Right Questions: An Interview with Vinciane Despret,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 20 (2015): 165–178.
———. Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze. Albany: SUNY Press, 2008.
De Waal, Frans. Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? New York: W. W. Norton, 2016.
DeLanda, Manuel. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. New York: Continuum, 2006.
Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights, 1988.
Goodale, Greg. The Rhetorical Invention of Man: A History of Distinguishing Humans from Other Animals. Lanham: Lexington, 2015.
Guattari, Felix. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. New Brunswick: Athlone Press, 2000.
Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Hutto, Joe. Touching the Wild: Living with the Mule Deer of Deadman Gulch. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2014.
———. Touching the Wild: Living with the Mule Deer of Deadman Gulch, DVD, dir. David Allen. Alexandria, VA: PBS Home Video, 2014.
Kirksey, Eben (ed.). The Multispecies Salon. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Nightingale, Andrea Wilson. Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Rockström, Johan et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (2009): 472–475.
Scott, Charles. The Question of Ethics: Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Singer, Peter. The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981.
Van Dooren, Thom. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
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Calarco, M. (2018). The Three Ethologies. In: Ohrem, D., Calarco, M. (eds) Exploring Animal Encounters. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92504-2_2
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