Understanding Animals by Lars Svendsen

Author:Lars Svendsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Joseph Jastrow’s drawing, from Fliegende Blätter, XCVII/2465 (23 October 1892).

Certain parts of reality will always be out of your reach because they are outside the area your senses can take in. Some of these limitations can be overcome by technology: like using a heat-sensitive camera to view infrared radiation, which provides access to a sensory modality found in certain snakes, fish and mosquitoes, but not normally you. However, we can also imagine that there are many other sensory modalities in existence of which we are completely unaware. Animals with different sensory modalities to us will relate to a different reality – or, more precisely, a different fragment of reality – from ours. Most cat owners have wondered how their cat can sit staring at an empty wall, but it’s not certain that it really is staring at an empty wall. Perhaps there is something infinitely fascinating on the wall that is simply not accessible to the owner’s senses. As Montaigne writes:

The first consideration I have upon the subject of the senses is that I make a doubt whether or no man be furnished with all natural senses. I see several animals who live an entire and perfect life, some without sight, others without hearing; who knows whether to us also one, two, three, or many other senses may not be wanting? For if any one be wanting, our examination cannot discover the defect. ’Tis the privilege of the senses to be the utmost limit of our discovery; there is nothing beyond them that can assist us in exploration, not so much as one sense in the discovery of another.2

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