Investigating animal art

May 06, 2025

Canine researcher Kurt Kotrschal recently said that your own dog will come to think little of you if you are unkind towards other humans. Right! Now that motivates me to pull my socks up. I want to be more generous and constructive in speaking about art and other animals than when I gave a not so kind feedback on a cutting edge soundscape performance “about animals”.

That said, I am only an animal myself. Having sat through a jumble of AI-distorted human and other animal voices, in a dark, stuffy room, for well over an hour, with a sick partner by my side, I just said: “Call the RSPCA.” And yet I still think there is something to the maxim “Do not do onto humans what you would not do onto other animals!” for artists moved by animal ethics, looking to use their work to “raise awareness”.

The kind friends who had suggested this outing seemed rather disappointed that I hadn’t enjoyed the show and, what is more, that I couldn’t see the intellectual and artistic kinship between the musician and myself - after all, this was also “about animals”. As far as sinking in the esteem of my canine companions is concerned, I was lucky - I don’t drag my dogs into such settings. Yet they likely picked up on my raised stress levels and general grumpiness the next morning. So, let me try to get this right.

No lesser than Mary Midgley herself once said, in her wonderful paper “Philosophical Plumbing”, that great philosophers:

"need a combination of gifts that is rare. They must be lawyers as well as poets. They must have both the new vision that points the way we are to go and the logical doggedness that sorts out just what is, and what is not, involved in getting there.”

This is the reason why (multispecies) poetry features prominently in Philosophy in the Wild: Finding Hope in Mixed Communities, which, after all, tries to help articulating visions of improved relations between humans and wild living animals. Note that Midgley had a wide understanding of what poetry is, so I assume that what she hopes for poetry to import into philosophy is vision and creativity, which is prevalent in the other arts as well, and is perhaps less concerned with metre or rhyme.

It is heartening to see people increasingly taking an interest in the more-than-human. Nature writing as a genre booms. It feels like there must be more poems written about other animals each day than species go extinct. Animals and their parts do not necessarily feature in musical performances as strings and keys as a matter of course anymore, nor are they turned into objects to be thrown onto the wall in some kind of performance any longer. Getting somewhere!

It is, however, also a little disheartening if the myriad takes and perspectives, techniques and creative methods that you can develop through conversing with this dog, or these pigs, through working in light of details of vision in cats or of motherhood in bats, if all of this is lumped together as being somewhat “about animals” - worse perhaps, as simply “nature writing”. As a genre description, that’s just as informative as if you were to say that Pippi Longstocking, Finnegans Wake and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer are all works “about humans”.

Humans use the arts and creativity for any number of reasons. Other animals do, too. The ethics of co-creating artworks with other animals are anything but straightforward. And though it “bugs” me if the snacks after a great show of compassion and supposed non-anthropocentrism contradict the message, my point here is not about ethics. When I published my first book of poetry that was exclusively about other animals, I nobly determined that I should donate all the royalties and honorariums that I would receive for it to animal activist causes. You don’t have to be an effective altruist to know that that’s not the best “earning to give”-strategy. So, what other functions can art have? And which are perhaps more important than others?

To mind come: illustration, adoration, celebration, veneration, decoration, representation (I thought long about this one, perhaps another time), instruction - and investigation. I am not an art historian, I am surely missing something. For me, the last one is at the heart of co-creating artworks with other animals. I have developed an approach to multispecies poetry that allows humans to learn (about) other animals’ ways to read the environment, to experiment with language in ways that do not depend on linearity, nor on human syntax. Humans are reminded that meanings can change depending on tone and position of that what carries the meaning, and that meaning itself is not necessarily semantic. All collaborations with other animals are investigative and truly playful (hence freely entered, allowing for role changes etc.). I encourage humans to experiment with visual elements and also with scent. For one, poetry and scent share a number of features: they both are somewhat condensed information, they can evoke memories or associations and, of course, emotions. It is also good fun to help humans rediscover a sense they often neglect and perhaps even consider a bit “too animal” - after all, who sniffs audibly in polite society? Wine and whiskey enthusiasts! Of course, but I can attest that readings of multispecies poetry, where humans sniff alongside other animals, are a lot less pretentious. Of course, scent is not central to all other animals, but that is just an invitation to become even more creative in making human language permeable for more than human meaning - instead of representing all animal matters in our own terms.

On the contrary: The soundscape I couldn’t get behind featured calls from mother cows to their calves and calves calling for their mothers on a dairy farm. I don’t know much about these cows specifically but found hearing the calls distressing. I also already know enough about cows in general and the importance of the mother-child bond in mammals to find the relation morally significant. Here, a critical anthropomorphism already does a lot of work. Midgley has a nice passage in her book Animals and Why They Matter where she responds to the general charge of anthropomorphism:

This attack assumes that human language is invented in the first place not only by humans, but exclusively about humans - to describe them and them alone. Any use of it to describe any other being would then be an ‘extension’ - a leap out into the unknown. But if language has, from the start, arisen in a mixed human-animal community and has been adapted to describe all beings whose moods etc. might be of general importance and interest, then that is the proper use of the concepts from the start, and no leap is needed. (p. 124)

So, I don’t understand why one would present something that is, philosophically speaking, already clear as an artistic puzzle. Is there a need for operas that stage the drama of cow-calf-separation to make us “wonder whether perhaps” these cries have any meaning, meaning (?!), perhaps, low and behold, to the effect that it is not so cool for a mammalian mother and child to be separated? Perhaps some visually appealing images and imaginative slogans that educate the public are needed. Perhaps these exist already.

I like to think: Give a straightforward argument if you have one. Let things play out poetically if things are more complicated - when it might actually be important to try and hold rivalling propositions and perspectives in your mind.