Animals and The Sixth Sense

Bandit

 In Spell of the Sensuous, Abram writes: “In indigenous, oral cultures, nature itself is articulate; it speaks. The human voice in an oral culture is always to some extent participant with the voices of wolves, wind, and waves— participant, that is, with the encompassing discourse of an animate earth. There is no element of the landscape that is definitively void of expressive resonance and power.” (75) Being around animals for a long period of time really taught me the truth of this idea. Animals develop their own language (and I don’t use that term lightly). They are capable of lying or misleading you, which suggests that they can tell when someone knows them well. They can recognize people as members of their flock just as readily as other sheep or goats. The line between humans and other animals is much more permeable than we might imagine. 

Lady

At twelve, I began volunteering at a farm. It was situated on two hundred acres of forests and pastures. I worked in the barnyard, feeding and cleaning up after around two hundred-fifty different animals – though about sixty of those were some variety of chicken or duck. The second year, my manager got a pair of llamas, Lady and Bandit, who I would walk every day I volunteered. 

With an employee taking whichever llama I wasn’t, we would make our way through a trail in the woods, noting the areas that made the llamas uncomfortable, where they sped up or slowed down, where they stopped to pick at the trees, and what kinds of weather they preferred. We learned that Bandit preferred to be the leader, that he was afraid of the pigs, and that he loved eating the needles off of evergreen trees. Lady preferred the ferns, and seemed unbothered by the pigs, though she didn’t like the horses very much. Ideal walking weather for the both of them was partly cloudy and between sixty and seventy degrees. Any warmer would draw out too many bugs, any colder would make them irritable. 

From them – and the other animals, of course – I gained the ability to really listen. To see what certain noises and actions meant. A lot of popular ideas about animal behaviors are actually myths. Cows don’t actually lie down before a storm, for instance. However, you could still start to pick up on when a storm was rolling in, because the animals did have responses, but it was rarely a species-wide response. You need to learn the responses on an individual basis.

Some animals will become more affectionate if they are in pain, others will attempt to hide; some will tend to lie down more, while others will become more active, though limping all the while, as if they’re trying to walk it off. Realistically, there are instinct-based explanations for each of these actions, but it’s interesting that not every animal responds in the same way to the same stimuli. It implies that there’s more factors than just instinct that trigger these responses.