Hannah Mumby - The Secret Lives of Elephants

I am a human. I am an elephant. The study of life has separated humans from other animals with no particular scientific justification for this exceptionalism, other than that as humans we might be both most familiar with and most intrigued by our own species. Many beautiful and reasoned arguments have been made against human exceptionalism (I refer you to anything by ethologist Frans de Waal), and there are wonderful accounts of individual animals exhibiting behaviours that we might once have thought exclusive to humans, eliciting responses and understanding concepts, from honey bees to scrub jays. What doesn’t seem to have changed much is the way we do science. When we study humans, we are ethnographers: we place ourselves within the context that we are interested in and participate with informants trying to understand what they are doing and why. When we study other animals, we try to make ourselves invisible and remove ourselves from the context, just as I had planned and monumentally failed to do in the writing of this book. Why? Is it because we think we are a distraction, that we will alter the behaviour of the animals? Perhaps, in part. But there is a huge wealth of material on reflexivity, positionality and the role of the researcher in social science that natural scientists could tap into. Acknowledging the presence of the researcher, and all of the complication that comes with that, actually makes the studies richer. I think part of the problem is our deeply ingrained sense of difference from other animals and it is holding us back as scientists. If we were more free, if we were willing to rumble right back to Bulumko, what world of understanding could it open to us?

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