Coming up: Just Animals Among Other Animals
And next conversation with Noreen Mutoro
Hello in 2026! I don’t know about you, but my new year has started with a complete change of almost everything, now that I reside for three months in the South of Spain. Surprises abound, large and small:
And new things to write about present themselves every day, but then: I do not have the time. Which means: You are in luck! You will be spared an Andalusian diary featuring dogs, dogs, and more dogs, as well as toads, sparrows, wag tails, pretty Spanish snails, goats who eat oranges, sheep who do that as well, more but differently pretty snails, ravens, my darling starlings, cats, blackbirds, falcons, doves, tits of all sorts, hoopoes, herons and the occasional horse. Not to mention my dog’s and my musings on the symbiosis between olive trees, clover and lucky rodents.
Instead, I make good on my promise to launch “Just Animals Among Other Animals” — a podcast with interviews and stories to explore whether humans are just one species of animals among others and how, if it all, we can become more just animals in our dealings with all other animals. This is the logo. I hope you like it. (Future episodes will help explain.)
Substack has kindly turned previous conversations (with Michelle Strauss, Beth Mackintosh and Greg McElwain) into episodes of “Just Animals Among Other Animals” and they are now available here, under Podcast, Spotify, and, once YouTube has verified that I am a human and how old I am (do we really have to do this?), it will be available there as well.
Next up is a very special conversation!
Spots of A Cheetah. On the 22nd of January 2026, I will speak with Noreen Mutoro — a bright young conservation biologist I got to know at the Symbiosis-conference in Salzburg. Here’s to chance: After the reception at the Haus der Natur, someone had forgotten Noreen’s book on the toilet. It is a book for young people on conservation dogs working to locate cheetah scat in Kenya. I found it, together with a name tag, and while trying to return the book to that person, I was eager to flick through it. This was so down my alley! I managed to locate the person who had forgotten the book but Noreen herself had already left. The next day, when the whole conference travelled to Innsbruck to visit the Kunst- und Wunderkammer at Schloss Ambras, I found her and we spoke the whole way: about conservation dogs and canine nose work, her work on cheetahs in Kenya, most of whom actually live outside of protected areas, about some of the problems in conservation work — from ‘fortress conservation’ and ‘parks versus people’ to individuals versus species, not to mention funding and power issues —, the role of indigenous knowledge in managing relations between humans and wild living cheetahs, as well as the role of story telling for various audiences. I can’t stress how thrilled I am to have found Noreen and thought I should invite her to come and chat to all of us here, to share my lucky find. Please join us on the day at 7 pm CET and if you have any questions in advance, feel free to drop them in the comments below.
