Animal Internet: Nature and the Digital Revolution by Alexander Pschera & Elisabeth Lauffer

Author:Alexander Pschera & Elisabeth Lauffer [Pschera, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781939931351
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Published: 2016-03-20T23:00:00+00:00

WHY ANIMALS WERE ALWAYS FRIENDS OF HUMANS

A LITTLE STORY OF EMPATHY

Shorty the waldrapp is a Facebook friend of mine. He’s a strange bird. A little unconventional, but not unlikable. He looks much older in his profile picture than he actually is. He’s bald, his skin wrinkly and furrowed. However, he gives off a tough, tenacious, and thoroughly youthful vibe. He wears his thin neck feathers in a crazy plume. He spends winter in the south, in Tuscany, for health reasons.

Shorty doesn’t yet live independently in the wild; rather, he’s part of a reintroduction program. He was raised by humans and is now learning what life in the wild is all about, because Shorty has forgotten what it means to fly over the Alps in search of warmer climes, come autumn. His human foster parents have the arduous task of teaching him how to migrate. They accompany his first migration in an ultralight aircraft, in the hopes that this action will activate a genetic memory in the ancient bird species that will allow him to guide others of his kind over the mountains next autumn. In order not to lose him, he has been tagged with a GPS tracker that sends signals online via satellite. This allows people to see where Shorty is at all times. The rest of the waldrapp flock are also equipped with tracking units. The data are made public on a Facebook page (www.facebook.com/Waldrappteam). Almost every day, visitors can view maps for a detailed account of the waldrapps’ current location, how they are doing, and what they may recently have encountered. The interaction between humans and animals on the Facebook page is intense. Waldrapp friends search for the animals, photograph them, and upload the images. However incomplete, a multifaceted picture of these animals’ everyday lives thus emerges.

There are many other ways in which social media could be used for communication between humans and animals. Taylor Chapple is responsible for tagging great white sharks in the North Pacific. He works at the Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University. Shark Net, the attractive iPhone application he and his team have developed, allows users to follow individual great whites. The animals do not yet have a Facebook page or blog, though. “It’s coming,” Taylor stresses. “It’s in the pipeline.” The goal for the great white, an endangered species, is also to dismantle preconceptions and familiarize people with the sharks’ way of life. Social media can help bring the sharks closer to humans. Until the site has been launched, however, the European Waldrapp Project remains the benchmark for demonstrating how digital communication with animals can work, as well as its natural limitations.

Shorty is my first animal Facebook friend. When he started on his way from the breeding colony in Burghausen, east of Munich, to his Italian wintering grounds last fall, I was eager to see how it would feel: to be in direct contact with a wild animal, to soar over the Alps with this bird, peering over his shoulder like the Swedish fairy tale character Nils Holgersson on the backs of the wild geese.

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