The Perks of Appreciating Wild Neighbors as Sentient Beings

Source: Brandon Keim

Most humans knowingly or unknowingly live among widely diverse nonhuman animals (animals) and thinking of them as intelligent and sentient neighbors with unique personalities can help us connect with them and foster coexistence. Many people met these amazing beings during a period called the anthropause as COVID-19 ravaged the world.

In Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-than-Human World, acclaimed science journalist Brandon Keim explores what animal personhood—knowing these neighborly animals as thinking, feeling beings—means for our relationships with wild animals and nature. He asks what would it mean to take a knowledge of animals as fellow persons out onto the landscape. Can thinking of nonhumans as our neighbors help chart a course to a kinder, gentler planet? Here's what Brandon had to say about his important book that offers many reasons for rewilding ourselves, taking sentience seriously, and for all of us to routinely take in many breaths of fresh air.

Marc Bekoff: Why did you write Meet the Neighbors?

Brandon Keim: Because I love nature and animals! That’s the short answer. The longer answer is that in the late 2000s and 2010s, I found myself fascinated by research on animal intelligence. That’s the book I first imagined writing: a compendium of findings about empathetic rats, problem-solving crows, optimistic bumblebees, fish who recognize themselves in a mirror, and so on.

Over time, though, I became equally interested in what people do with this knowledge of other animals as thinking, feeling beings. As fellow persons. Much had been written about farmed animals from that perspective, and also companion animals and animals used in research—but not so much about nature and wild animals. And so began Meet the Neighbors.

MB: Who do you hope to reach with this book?

BK: Everyone, of course! Animal-loving people who maybe haven’t thought so much about nature; and nature-loving people who maybe haven’t thought so much about animals, or at least wild animals, this way.

MB: What are some of the major topics you consider?

BK: Although my book isn’t only about the science of animal intelligence, the research is still at its heart. The first section maps the science onto the nonhuman residents of a suburban neighborhood, from rabbits to garter snakes to mockingbirds.

In doing so I wanted to make the research come alive. Rich forms of animal intelligence don’t just exist in studies and news stories, or in a few extra-smart species. The world teems with it.

From there I dive into ideas, beginning with a history of how people—at least in western societies—have thought about the minds of other animals. Our understanding of them isn’t something that has proceeded in a straightforward way; it’s been debated for the last two millennia and shaped by social forces, culminating in the 20th century’s formal scientific understanding of animals as minimally intelligent and in traditions of nature that don’t engage with them as persons. There’s a chapter on the Nonhuman Rights Project, who argue that chimpanzees and elephants ought to be considered legal persons, and another—centered on an extraordinary colony of cormorants in Toronto—about what it means to give animals a political and institutional voice.

Source: W. W. Norton & Company

Then I follow these ideas out onto the landscape, beginning with urban and suburban settings: people pioneering better ways of living with so-called pests, caring for injured animals at a wildlife hospital, chronicling the lives of coyotes in San Francisco and building a culture of coexistence. Meet the Neighbors isn’t narrowly about the animals in our backyards and cities—but there are so many creatures there, and our relationships begin at home rather than wild, faraway places.

Those wild places and their inhabitants are the subject of the final section. I tell the stories of people trying to bring new perspectives to wildlife management; of a young scientist whose regard for wild donkeys led to discoveries about their unappreciated roles in desert ecosystems; of philosophers reckoning with the day-to-day life of wild animals; and of scientists illuminating how the world is shaped not only by animal activity but by their minds.

Meet the Neighbors is not the last word. It’s a guide to seeing nature and wild animals in a new light. It’s a beginning.

MB: How does your book differ from others that are concerned with some of the same general topics?

BK: I like to think that my exploration of the science of animal intelligence is more engrossing, more alive, than the usual recitation of studies. I also take inspiration from the so-called animal turn in the humanities: all those philosophers and anthropologists and historians and theorists looking anew at other species. Just as the science of animal intelligence has bloomed in the last couple decades, so has the scholarship—but what follows from that isn’t some abstract intellectual equation. It’s as real and immediate as a squirrel’s gaze or a sparrow’s song. I’ve tried to portray animal characters as richly as the humans in my stories.

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I don’t talk a lot about two of the most high-profile controversies in this space: killing for the sake of conservation and trophy hunting. Those are very important subjects, and they do come up, but they’re not front-and-center. There is so much more to think about.

Your readers are probably familiar with the idea that we shouldn’t think of humans and nature as separate. There’s so much desire out there, crystallized in the popularity of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s beautiful Braiding Sweetgrass, for new, more intimate relationships with the living world. But what that looks like—what it means to know animals as kin—is often unclear. Meet the Neighbors offers a vision of that.

MB: Are you hopeful that as people learn more about how their nonhuman neighbors they will be willing to coexist peacefully in our shared homes?

BK: I am hopeful. People, to our great credit, are endlessly fascinated with animals. There’s a wellspring of delight and care that’s most evident when we’re children, and though it’s often overgrown by life's concerns and the world's messiness, it’s still there. And to paraphrase William Gibson, a better world is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.

When we talk about a “shared home,” that doesn’t just mean cities and backyards. All of Earth is, in a sense, a shared home now. If animals—if biodiversity, the whole great wild nonhuman kingdom and all who live there—are going to flourish rather than eke out a precarious living at our margins, then we need to protect them. To care for them.

We protect what we love and we love what we know. To relate to all animals as fellow persons—not just dogs and cats and a few lucky individuals—offers a richer, more joyful way of knowing them. Out of that, love will grow.