Guest Blogger: Cecily Sophia Culver
“Moscow's resourceful stray
dogs are just one of what are now thousands of recorded examples of wild, feral
and domesticated
animals demonstrating what appears, at least, to be what humans might call
flexible open-ended reasoning and conscious thought” says animal intelligence
writer, Eugene Linden, of the thousands of commuter dogs in Moscow Russia. The
presence and experiences of these dogs has recently achieved noteworthy
attention; just as the wonder about the experiences of beings outside of our
species has persisted on.
Recently this phenomenon of
commuter strays has made news and traveled around the social media circuit.
This is in part because of the affection people have for “man’s best friend”
but additionally because the experience of the animal, that we can try to
imagine, is not that far of a stretch, because it has so much in common with
our own.
This is why, when examples
of colliding environments and disruption due to industrial growth and
development are abundant, this story sticks out. Pigeons, squirrels, rats,
cockroaches, etc have all adapted to our anthropocentric city planning. We
casually, or startlingly, bump into their “soap bubbles,” as Jakob Von Uexküll
might imagine, with our own; however, imagining the existence within their umwelt, like Thomas Nagel, Uexküll and Vilem
Flusser did with the bat, tick and Vampire Squid, is a far stretch from our
human perception.
It is not so far of reach
with the dogs of Moscow, their story is one many people can directly relate to.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s the industrial complexes, that
served as shelters to these animals, were moved to the suburbs. Like people,
they find sustenance, by begging for food in the city centers; thus, they have
decoded a system developed solely for the transportation of people in order to
survive (Marquardt, Blakemore,and Eichenholz.)
Every day the umwelt’s of human passengers collide
with those of the strays. In a system coded with perceptual signals for human
cargo, these dogs have developed ways of perceiving this environment to reach
their own goals. By painting the Umwelten
of a dog in the environment of the subway system, as in the exercise Uexküll
walks through in “Receptor image and effector image” of A Stroll through the Worlds of Animal and Men, we can see that area
of crossover space within the venn-diagram of experience.
Despite what is shared
between the experience a dog and human might have within the same transportation
system, that allows this story to touch the hearts of humans, as Nagel points
out: what it is like to be a commuter stray in Moscow will never be fully
rendered by the human mind or described with human language, “if I try to
imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind and those
resources are inadequate to the task” (Nagel 439.)
The dogs float along in
their bubbles of individual experience, perceiving the world through vision,
through tactile sensation and prominently through smell. Based upon these
perceptions and their goals, they have adjusted and honed their behavior based
on these cues. Linden says, "The take-away is that animals are not just
passive in this…They are figuring out what we're about and how they can game the
system, and work it to their advantage as well." One tactic based upon
smell, is to bark and startle passengers causing them to drop their food.
Another based upon perception of the humans they are surrounded by is to “play
cute” and beg for scraps, frequently from youthful passengers. The strays have
learned to judge the length of time spent on the train in order to get off at
the right stops. They adjust their behavior according to crowding in the
carriages: it seems that they understand that looking threatening in situations
of close encounters with humans will work against their ultimate goals of being
fed and cared for (Marquardt, Blakemore,
and Eichenholz.)These behaviors bring the umwelten of dogs and humans into collision, bumping along together
on the trains through Moscow.
We are attracted to the
Moscow commuter dog story because we feel a kin-ness with the animals and a
commonality with their experience, one that has ultimately been caused by our
human actions over a duration of time. As the trains continue to jostle man and
animal alike into the city centers will the system evolve to account for the
experiences of the resilient species?
Sources
and Links:
Marquardt, Alex, Bill Blakemore, and Ross Eichenholz. "Stray
Dogs Master Complex Moscow Subway System." ABC News. ABC News Network, n.d. Web. 23 Apr. 2013.
<http://abcnews.go.com/International/Technology/stray-dogs-master-complex-moscow-subway-system/story?id=10145833#.UXcH-LWsjTp>.
Nagel, Thomas. "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" The Philosophical Review 83.4 (1974):
435-50. JSTOR. Web. 23 Apr. 2013.
<: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2183914>.
Uexkull, Jakob Von. A Stroll
through the World's of Animals and Men. Ed. Thure Von Uexkull. N.p.:
International Association for Semiotic Studies, 1998. Print.
Cecily Sophia Culver is a graduate student at Arizona State University, studying sculpture and interested in these occurrences of the animal revolution.
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