Introduction
Once upon a time, I owned a farm with a lofty, 80-year-old barn. When visitors came to the farm store located inside the huge barn to purchase farm goods, they almost always stayed longer than planned. Some would just stand beside the store door, listening to a pleasant and increasingly rare type of not-quite-silence, that of an old barn in the country. Except for the sounds of very occasional motor traffic passing by, the most prevalent sound was the chirping of house sparrows.
To this farmer, the house sparrow, a non-native imported from Britain early in America’s history, is a pest. They are insanely prolific and their droppings are an endless source of mess, requiring scraping and cleaning on already too-busy days. I sometimes forget, however, that others may have a different perspective. I therefore found it intriguing when folks seemed compelled to stop, look, and listen; obviously captivated by the antics of birds which I still consider to be a serious nuisance.
Sometimes a visitor’s silent regard was broken by an occasional, ‘Ahhh,’ or a finger pointing to a nest for the purpose of drawing another’s attention to it. For me, such moments are elicited by the flight of something as magnificent as a bald eagle, nevertheless, I often silently shared the visitor’s moments without comment, trying to reframe this everyday scene through their eyes.
These visitors were experiencing a moment of ‘biophilia.’ This term originated with, and was frequently used by, early 20th century social psychologist Erich Fromm as a description of a particular psychological orientation. Fromm writes "I believe that the man choosing progress can find a new unity through the development of all his human forces, which are produced in three orientations. These can be presented separately or together: biophilia, love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom."
This term enjoyed contemporary popularization by biologist E. O. Wilson in his seminal works Biophilia and further in The Biophilia Hypothesis. Wilson’s focus with the use of this term was primarily on love of nature. As an avid entomologist whose life passion was ants, Wilson traveled the world, and while doing so witnessed countless examples of humans gravitating toward an enormous variety of plants and animals without necessarily utilizing them for survival. A human love of nature seemed apparent to him in so many instances he felt compelled to expand upon Fromm’s earlier discourse. I will take this theme one step further.
In biology, scholars who are involved in the classification of plants and animals (called taxonomy) are often informally categorized by their decision-making strategies. Some are called ‘lumpers’, others labeled as ‘splitters.’ Folks likely to favor assignment of subspecies status to a bird population because they exhibit a slightly different call than their fellows 200 miles away would be considered splitters. Other researchers might consider the qualities of the song to be an irrelevant dialect, just an interesting colloquial rendition of the old tune. They would insist that no warrant for division exists. These folks would, of course, be the lumpers. When considering my own tendency in the writing of this book, I have determined myself to be a splitter. Rather than humans sharing an innate tendency to be attracted to all nature in general, to all animals in general, I wish to divide this tendency into separate parts. I believe that there is much support for this splitting and that humans have a predisposition to orient themselves visually, physically, cognitively, and psychologically toward certain types of natural environments and certain types of animals.
In the ancestral past, to do otherwise would often have proven to be a low-fitness move. A healthy avoidance of venomous creatures and a healthy curiosity and attraction to useful, non-harmful ones would have certainly aided our ancestors in passing on their genes. The attraction to the useful animals (useful for mental, physical, and emotional survival) will be focus of this book. I have chosen to call human feelings and cognitions about such animals ‘zoodulcis.’
I believe that the farm visitors mentioned earlier were feeling this zoodulcis. Zoodulcis is a combination of two words, one for the subject matter and one for cognitions about that subject matter. Zoo is defined as ‘indicating animals.’ Dulcis is defined in many dictionaries as ‘agreeable, delightful, pleasant, soft, sweet, friendly, charming, kind’ and can be experienced as either a cognition (the meaning inherent in this work) or as a sensory experience (such as the dulcis experienced when indulging in a delightful dessert.)
The farm visitors mentioned may have come from city or suburban environments deficient in moments of spontaneous interaction with (even if only in observation) ‘sweet, charming, delightful’, wild birds. Urban environments are especially impoverished in such sights and sounds. And, although annoying to me as a farmer, house sparrows do count as watchable wildlife. The chirping of house sparrows going about their activities does not fall harshly upon the ear. They are not so elusive as to require specialized equipment to identify and observe them. It is in their very nature to ignore humans or to use them for handouts (causing many outdoor dining establishments to display tabletop signs stating ‘please do not feed the birds’.) They performed their behaviors before visitors as if nothing in the world existed but they themselves. Humans watching very closely (in both proximity and visual focus intensity) didn’t cause them to alter their behaviors a whit. They were there for the easy viewing. For this reason, many of our farm visitors were easily caught in a moment of fascination with animals that had fully captured their attention. The original purpose in stopping to visit our little farm store was, for the moment, superseded by something more immediate.
This gripping of attention has been termed fascination by psychologists and others who study human attentional focus. And, as I observed in the body language and dialogue changes in visitors viewing those naughty sparrows, with a change in attentional focus comes changes in mood and physical tension as well. Now, I will freely admit that the kind of person that stops at a farm stand is not generally a ‘Type A’ personality with looming deadlines to meet on career-making projects. But entrance to an unknown venue for the first time, even for the more relaxed among us, can still be a little stressful, hence the need for slightly heightened physical preparedness. While watching the sparrows, this heightened vigilance seemed to wash away for most first-time visitors.
An eagerness to share the experience of what they witnessed elicited information offering (‘did you know there was a nest up there? I just saw little baby birds peek out’) or reminiscence of such an experience in the past, often forgotten until just then (‘my grandfather had a barn very like this, and I remember it was full of sparrows too’.) In these moments, the original purpose of the stop was placed on the back burner, cognitively speaking.
Of course, at some point, everyone recollected their purpose and asked what the store offerings were for that day. The interaction assumed a different character and the moment of animal fascination concluded. However, I noticed that despite the moment ending, most people who watched the birds for a bit left with a more leisurely step and a friendlier parting protocol than visitors who came on a dark or windy day that kept the birds close to their chosen harbors and not visually accessible. People who could see them left just a little changed for the better, for at least a little while.
This fascination with animals, this zoodulcis, is the subject of this book. The phenomenon itself and implications for human and animal well-being that attend such moments of fascination will be explored from the perspective of several disciplines.
Chapter 1
Zoodulcis and Zoodium
On the cover of a book that I have enjoyed many times by Hal Herzog are three animal figures in silhouette: a puppy, a rat, and a pig. These animals are symbolic of the creatures that we love, hate, and eat, in order of appearance. These icons of human/animal relations would make a great deal of sense to most readers. However, using a silhouette of a rat labeled, ‘some we hate,’ would not resonate well with my dearest friend.
This friend has, for many years, been deeply involved in pet rat rescue for a group of small mammal lovers in Southern California. She is dedicated to the cause, even in the face of potential bodily harm. For instance, at the time of this writing, she was fostering an intact male rat that was awaiting adoption. She was fond of this rat and had handled him frequently, barehanded. One day, this same previously well-behaved fellow, upon being picked up out of his cage for a little quality time with his caregiver, suddenly bit her nearly to the bone on one hand, then immediately went for the other hand! Upon being (quite understandably) dropped, he assailed her sandaled foot and bit her big toe. When carefully, with a towel, he was returned to his cage, he immediately went search and destroy on his own tail. The reasons for all of this startling change of behavior are still unclear.
While this might be an interesting segue to justify, ‘some we hate’, it is not, in fact, the moral of this story. The moral rests in my friend’s response to this unwarranted attack. Did she want someone else to foster him while waiting for adoption? No. Did she want to euthanize him? No. What she did do was go on a course of antibiotics for herself, had him neutered, continued on as his foster mom, and in fact kept him until the day he died. Not a course of action most people would take, however, in the southern California group, there are many who would.
Now, at approximately the same time, I had been thrown and mildly injured by an Arabian mare in my care, also a rescue, which suddenly bolted for reasons still unclear to me. After healing sufficiently, I was back in the saddle at about the same time my friend shared with me her own animal trauma. We commiserated together and pondered our reactions. She decided to keep fostering her bad boy Lucio, now fondly renamed Lucifer. A week or two after the incident they were sipping red wine together again (yes, she and Lucifer, who loved an adult beverage now and then.) While she and I sipped wine together long distance via telephone and pondered our unlikely, and somewhat unwise, proclivities, we had to acknowledge that we two animal lovers are constantly enacting behaviors which are puzzling (verily even alarming) to our friends and family. Our dedication to interacting with, ‘some we love,’ in whatever physical form they inhabit, is fairly unwavering. In our discussion of why neither of us blink at such risky behaviors undertaken by women in their early sixties, she stated simply “we have a passion.” I have to agree, because shear common sense would indicate otherwise.
There are indeed, some we love, when all information to the contrary indicates that we should feel or think otherwise. In that spirit, I find it gratifying and amusing that Herzog, a snake behaviorist by training, did not put a silhouette of a snake on the cover of his book for, ‘some we hate.’ Perhaps he has a tender spot for his fascinating ophidian associates that prevented him from using them as an exemplar of the ‘hate’ category.
One potential explanation for our positive responses, our zoodulcis, toward certain animals, and one that I have pondered for many years, is their ability to capture our attention. This response can apparently accrue to any form of animal life. For instance, I had an undergraduate student who was a premier chef at a very young age. But his true passion was crayfish (breeding, not cooking). After graduation, he contemplated further culinary certification, but found that the stress of restaurant life greatly outweighed any satisfaction he felt he would derive and ended up applying for (and being accepted at) a program in crustacean studies at a prestigious university. He freely admitted that at the end of the day, crayfish (watching them, breeding them, buying and selling them), captured his attention, and resulted in the fulfillment of a personal passion that the restaurant trade did not permit. He even admitted that he found them to be somewhat sweet (in the zoodulcis sense of the word). Yes, the fast pace of a high-end dining establishment completely absorbed his attention, and yes, it was truly exciting. But he felt that for him, this way of living was not sustainable. The way that crayfish had captured his attention since he was a small child was a mode of fascination that he felt would not result in burn-out and would lead ultimately to a much more satisfying life-long endeavor. And yes, he could cook up a mean mess of crawdad jambalaya, but it was not his preferred modus operandi with crayfish.
This said, some animals are fascinating in a way that transfixes attention, but not in a good way. The fly currently attempting to foil my attempts at maintaining focus on writing this chapter would not be labeled by me with any of the words used to describe zoodulcis. Flies, mosquitoes, wasps, spiders capture my attention indeed. But there is nothing ‘dulcis’ about this attention capture. There is nothing useful about these creatures, to me. Cognitions of needing to eliminate these creatures from my personal space are predominant in my interactions with these animals. Feelings of irritation, extreme dislike, and occasionally hate, are the emotions that certain forms of animal life can elicit from me.
These critters bug most humans, as do snakes. However, like Hal Herzog, I happen to love snakes. Harmless snakes are preferred but I even have a certain affectionate regard for poisonous ones. I handled many rattlesnakes as a kid in southern California. I found that up close they were so darned intriguing (my parents did not share this sentiment.) My friend, the rat rescuer, also loves tarantulas, so an experience of what I will call ‘zoodium’ may be applied generally to humans, with many exceptions to the rule being possible.
This word is a combination of ‘zoo’ and ‘odium.’ Odium is defined as feelings and perceptions of ‘disgust, revulsion, loathing, detestation, hatred, dislike, disfavor, enmity, hostility, contempt,’ and similar descriptors. You get the point. There is a significant body of research that explores the idea of ‘zoo-odium’ or as it will be called in this writing, ‘zoodium.’ Although it will be the primary focus of this book to explore zoodulcis, it would be imprudent to ignore the obvious flip side of fascination with animals.
Introduction
Once upon a time, I owned a farm with a lofty, 80-year-old barn. When visitors came to the farm store located inside the huge barn to purchase farm goods, they almost always stayed longer than planned. Some would just stand beside the store door, listening to a pleasant and increasingly rare type of not-quite-silence, that of an old barn in the country. Except for the sounds of very occasional motor traffic passing by, the most prevalent sound was the chirping of house sparrows.
To this farmer, the house sparrow, a non-native imported from Britain early in America’s history, is a pest. They are insanely prolific and their droppings are an endless source of mess, requiring scraping and cleaning on already too-busy days. I sometimes forget, however, that others may have a different perspective. I therefore found it intriguing when folks seemed compelled to stop, look, and listen; obviously captivated by the antics of birds which I still consider to be a serious nuisance.
Sometimes a visitor’s silent regard was broken by an occasional, ‘Ahhh,’ or a finger pointing to a nest for the purpose of drawing another’s attention to it. For me, such moments are elicited by the flight of something as magnificent as a bald eagle, nevertheless, I often silently shared the visitor’s moments without comment, trying to reframe this everyday scene through their eyes.
These visitors were experiencing a moment of ‘biophilia.’ This term originated with, and was frequently used by, early 20th century social psychologist Erich Fromm as a description of a particular psychological orientation. Fromm writes "I believe that the man choosing progress can find a new unity through the development of all his human forces, which are produced in three orientations. These can be presented separately or together: biophilia, love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom."
This term enjoyed contemporary popularization by biologist E. O. Wilson in his seminal works Biophilia and further in The Biophilia Hypothesis. Wilson’s focus with the use of this term was primarily on love of nature. As an avid entomologist whose life passion was ants, Wilson traveled the world, and while doing so witnessed countless examples of humans gravitating toward an enormous variety of plants and animals without necessarily utilizing them for survival. A human love of nature seemed apparent to him in so many instances he felt compelled to expand upon Fromm’s earlier discourse. I will take this theme one step further.
In biology, scholars who are involved in the classification of plants and animals (called taxonomy) are often informally categorized by their decision-making strategies. Some are called ‘lumpers’, others labeled as ‘splitters.’ Folks likely to favor assignment of subspecies status to a bird population because they exhibit a slightly different call than their fellows 200 miles away would be considered splitters. Other researchers might consider the qualities of the song to be an irrelevant dialect, just an interesting colloquial rendition of the old tune. They would insist that no warrant for division exists. These folks would, of course, be the lumpers. When considering my own tendency in the writing of this book, I have determined myself to be a splitter. Rather than humans sharing an innate tendency to be attracted to all nature in general, to all animals in general, I wish to divide this tendency into separate parts. I believe that there is much support for this splitting and that humans have a predisposition to orient themselves visually, physically, cognitively, and psychologically toward certain types of natural environments and certain types of animals.
In the ancestral past, to do otherwise would often have proven to be a low-fitness move. A healthy avoidance of venomous creatures and a healthy curiosity and attraction to useful, non-harmful ones would have certainly aided our ancestors in passing on their genes. The attraction to the useful animals (useful for mental, physical, and emotional survival) will be focus of this book. I have chosen to call human feelings and cognitions about such animals ‘zoodulcis.’
I believe that the farm visitors mentioned earlier were feeling this zoodulcis. Zoodulcis is a combination of two words, one for the subject matter and one for cognitions about that subject matter. Zoo is defined as ‘indicating animals.’ Dulcis is defined in many dictionaries as ‘agreeable, delightful, pleasant, soft, sweet, friendly, charming, kind’ and can be experienced as either a cognition (the meaning inherent in this work) or as a sensory experience (such as the dulcis experienced when indulging in a delightful dessert.)
The farm visitors mentioned may have come from city or suburban environments deficient in moments of spontaneous interaction with (even if only in observation) ‘sweet, charming, delightful’, wild birds. Urban environments are especially impoverished in such sights and sounds. And, although annoying to me as a farmer, house sparrows do count as watchable wildlife. The chirping of house sparrows going about their activities does not fall harshly upon the ear. They are not so elusive as to require specialized equipment to identify and observe them. It is in their very nature to ignore humans or to use them for handouts (causing many outdoor dining establishments to display tabletop signs stating ‘please do not feed the birds’.) They performed their behaviors before visitors as if nothing in the world existed but they themselves. Humans watching very closely (in both proximity and visual focus intensity) didn’t cause them to alter their behaviors a whit. They were there for the easy viewing. For this reason, many of our farm visitors were easily caught in a moment of fascination with animals that had fully captured their attention. The original purpose in stopping to visit our little farm store was, for the moment, superseded by something more immediate.
This gripping of attention has been termed fascination by psychologists and others who study human attentional focus. And, as I observed in the body language and dialogue changes in visitors viewing those naughty sparrows, with a change in attentional focus comes changes in mood and physical tension as well. Now, I will freely admit that the kind of person that stops at a farm stand is not generally a ‘Type A’ personality with looming deadlines to meet on career-making projects. But entrance to an unknown venue for the first time, even for the more relaxed among us, can still be a little stressful, hence the need for slightly heightened physical preparedness. While watching the sparrows, this heightened vigilance seemed to wash away for most first-time visitors.
An eagerness to share the experience of what they witnessed elicited information offering (‘did you know there was a nest up there? I just saw little baby birds peek out’) or reminiscence of such an experience in the past, often forgotten until just then (‘my grandfather had a barn very like this, and I remember it was full of sparrows too’.) In these moments, the original purpose of the stop was placed on the back burner, cognitively speaking.
Of course, at some point, everyone recollected their purpose and asked what the store offerings were for that day. The interaction assumed a different character and the moment of animal fascination concluded. However, I noticed that despite the moment ending, most people who watched the birds for a bit left with a more leisurely step and a friendlier parting protocol than visitors who came on a dark or windy day that kept the birds close to their chosen harbors and not visually accessible. People who could see them left just a little changed for the better, for at least a little while.
This fascination with animals, this zoodulcis, is the subject of this book. The phenomenon itself and implications for human and animal well-being that attend such moments of fascination will be explored from the perspective of several disciplines.
Chapter 1
Zoodulcis and Zoodium
On the cover of a book that I have enjoyed many times by Hal Herzog are three animal figures in silhouette: a puppy, a rat, and a pig. These animals are symbolic of the creatures that we love, hate, and eat, in order of appearance. These icons of human/animal relations would make a great deal of sense to most readers. However, using a silhouette of a rat labeled, ‘some we hate,’ would not resonate well with my dearest friend.
This friend has, for many years, been deeply involved in pet rat rescue for a group of small mammal lovers in Southern California. She is dedicated to the cause, even in the face of potential bodily harm. For instance, at the time of this writing, she was fostering an intact male rat that was awaiting adoption. She was fond of this rat and had handled him frequently, barehanded. One day, this same previously well-behaved fellow, upon being picked up out of his cage for a little quality time with his caregiver, suddenly bit her nearly to the bone on one hand, then immediately went for the other hand! Upon being (quite understandably) dropped, he assailed her sandaled foot and bit her big toe. When carefully, with a towel, he was returned to his cage, he immediately went search and destroy on his own tail. The reasons for all of this startling change of behavior are still unclear.
While this might be an interesting segue to justify, ‘some we hate’, it is not, in fact, the moral of this story. The moral rests in my friend’s response to this unwarranted attack. Did she want someone else to foster him while waiting for adoption? No. Did she want to euthanize him? No. What she did do was go on a course of antibiotics for herself, had him neutered, continued on as his foster mom, and in fact kept him until the day he died. Not a course of action most people would take, however, in the southern California group, there are many who would.
Now, at approximately the same time, I had been thrown and mildly injured by an Arabian mare in my care, also a rescue, which suddenly bolted for reasons still unclear to me. After healing sufficiently, I was back in the saddle at about the same time my friend shared with me her own animal trauma. We commiserated together and pondered our reactions. She decided to keep fostering her bad boy Lucio, now fondly renamed Lucifer. A week or two after the incident they were sipping red wine together again (yes, she and Lucifer, who loved an adult beverage now and then.) While she and I sipped wine together long distance via telephone and pondered our unlikely, and somewhat unwise, proclivities, we had to acknowledge that we two animal lovers are constantly enacting behaviors which are puzzling (verily even alarming) to our friends and family. Our dedication to interacting with, ‘some we love,’ in whatever physical form they inhabit, is fairly unwavering. In our discussion of why neither of us blink at such risky behaviors undertaken by women in their early sixties, she stated simply “we have a passion.” I have to agree, because shear common sense would indicate otherwise.
There are indeed, some we love, when all information to the contrary indicates that we should feel or think otherwise. In that spirit, I find it gratifying and amusing that Herzog, a snake behaviorist by training, did not put a silhouette of a snake on the cover of his book for, ‘some we hate.’ Perhaps he has a tender spot for his fascinating ophidian associates that prevented him from using them as an exemplar of the ‘hate’ category.
One potential explanation for our positive responses, our zoodulcis, toward certain animals, and one that I have pondered for many years, is their ability to capture our attention. This response can apparently accrue to any form of animal life. For instance, I had an undergraduate student who was a premier chef at a very young age. But his true passion was crayfish (breeding, not cooking). After graduation, he contemplated further culinary certification, but found that the stress of restaurant life greatly outweighed any satisfaction he felt he would derive and ended up applying for (and being accepted at) a program in crustacean studies at a prestigious university. He freely admitted that at the end of the day, crayfish (watching them, breeding them, buying and selling them), captured his attention, and resulted in the fulfillment of a personal passion that the restaurant trade did not permit. He even admitted that he found them to be somewhat sweet (in the zoodulcis sense of the word). Yes, the fast pace of a high-end dining establishment completely absorbed his attention, and yes, it was truly exciting. But he felt that for him, this way of living was not sustainable. The way that crayfish had captured his attention since he was a small child was a mode of fascination that he felt would not result in burn-out and would lead ultimately to a much more satisfying life-long endeavor. And yes, he could cook up a mean mess of crawdad jambalaya, but it was not his preferred modus operandi with crayfish.
This said, some animals are fascinating in a way that transfixes attention, but not in a good way. The fly currently attempting to foil my attempts at maintaining focus on writing this chapter would not be labeled by me with any of the words used to describe zoodulcis. Flies, mosquitoes, wasps, spiders capture my attention indeed. But there is nothing ‘dulcis’ about this attention capture. There is nothing useful about these creatures, to me. Cognitions of needing to eliminate these creatures from my personal space are predominant in my interactions with these animals. Feelings of irritation, extreme dislike, and occasionally hate, are the emotions that certain forms of animal life can elicit from me.
These critters bug most humans, as do snakes. However, like Hal Herzog, I happen to love snakes. Harmless snakes are preferred but I even have a certain affectionate regard for poisonous ones. I handled many rattlesnakes as a kid in southern California. I found that up close they were so darned intriguing (my parents did not share this sentiment.) My friend, the rat rescuer, also loves tarantulas, so an experience of what I will call ‘zoodium’ may be applied generally to humans, with many exceptions to the rule being possible.
This word is a combination of ‘zoo’ and ‘odium.’ Odium is defined as feelings and perceptions of ‘disgust, revulsion, loathing, detestation, hatred, dislike, disfavor, enmity, hostility, contempt,’ and similar descriptors. You get the point. There is a significant body of research that explores the idea of ‘zoo-odium’ or as it will be called in this writing, ‘zoodium.’ Although it will be the primary focus of this book to explore zoodulcis, it would be imprudent to ignore the obvious flip side of fascination with animals.
