"One story, she said, dictates that it's our job to watch the universe, even when the watching changes things or brings harm. Put a collar on a wolf and people's philosophical perceptions of the animal shift"
really good read!
https://www.engadget.com/2018-05-21-inside-the-animal-internet.html
(i dug this up to be an asshole to my sister who was suggesting i get some kind of camera-enabled squirrel nesting box and let her watch the stream)
(why am i like this)
There is even facial recognition for wildlife now 🙈
https://www.fastcompany.com/91470657/bears-facial-recognition-tool
#STS #AnimalStudies #surveillance #nature #conservation #animals
Oct 10, 2026, 7:20 AM(Thinking outside normativity is a heavy burden.)
to her credit she took it very well. she thought that i could think of it as "having a pet" (not allowed the traditional kinds per landlord) and exchange squirrel voyeurism for squirrel shelter (which, as mutual domestications go, i don't think is the worst, tho i'm also not into this idea)
she is now divorced but for her wedding present, friends and i made a bat box, which AFAIK is still on the land at her now ex-husband's family's cabin. i.e. history of putting up shelter w no expectation of voyeurism in return
@inquiline @beadsland hmm good discussion. Founding principles really matter. I think of my parents who xeriscaped their backyard with native plants for the purpose of using less water (read living in better relationship with the land). It's now a lush and thriving habitat. The fact that they get to look at all manner of wildlife in the middle of the concrete suburbs is just a secondary benefit of the relationship.
i actually love looking at critters! i just feel like putting cameras inside their nests is not a choice i want to make. (that said i even sometimes do enjoy various animal cams, but ambivalently)
your parents' yard sounds awesome. i get really, really overwhelmed here by how much the plantings are not "from here"; something i can't tune out. if i had a yard of my own i'd want to do native plants and hope for birds and insects to find them
@inquiline @kzodasnowman @beadsland I once had some balcony flower boxes that I was too lazy to take care of. They turned into little pieces of meadow all by themselves and I got visiting birds digging for grubs and an orbweaver colony as a reward for my laziness 😁
i actually tried rogue-planting marigolds in some bare earth in "my" yard but they didn't take. i will try again. i also got some california poppy seeds! the succulents i've rogue-planted do a little better but they're not native species, i was just trying to keep the soil in place
@gunchleoc @inquiline @beadsland helll yeah
Oct 10, 2026, 9:28 PMThe difference with a typical animal cam is that animals understand seclusion. They create spaces for themselves that are defensibly their own.
That comprehension, on the part of the animal, does not require that they further comprehend that remote viewing is a thing, let alone a thing that they might be subject to. It is enough that we recognize in them their intent to be separate and apart from the rest of their world.
Sure, set up a wildlife cam to see how critters interact with the trampoline in the back yard. Any species that has evolved over generations to navigate around human habitations is aware enough to know the rules change when they go near our constructs. That's relationship, fraught as it is, nonetheless is one they have adapted to.
But a camera in a nest isn't about what they've adapted to. It's about what we deem acceptable trespass. That's not human territory. To claim it as our right is about us.
yeah. i'm thinking about it and a cam on the doorway-bough that captured comings and goings would bother me much less than inside the nest box, but i'm also not at all motivated to do that. (even that still reminds me of those ring cameras, which creep me out every time i take a walk here, speaking of consent!) (i might be persuadable that there is *some* reason to accept nest cams for certain circumscribed reasons--but only care-fully)
Oct 10, 2026, 9:58 PMAnd this is ultimately the test. Goose. Gander. What, exactly, is our motivation? Just why are we entitled to access?
Because the question is most certainly about us, not those we might observe. Nor even, especially, any relationship we might claim, even if only imaginary, to have with them.
speaking of, i really like this essay by Hugo Reinert, who used to be here, but has withdrawn:
https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/3/1/1/8103/The-Care-of-Migrants-Telemetry-and-the-Fragile
Oct 10, 2026, 10:09 PM"Outlining the shape and parameters of this withdrawn presence, the essay locates “the wild” at a complex, awkward juncture in contemporary human-nonhuman relations: simultaneously an object of control and withdrawal, absence and intimacy, wildness and impurity; a site of complex and intractable controversies..."
This being a pretty on point summation of my discomfort with "wild" as a substitute for more directly saneist adjectives, when characterizing the unsettling. (Which we've previously discussed, a long while back.)
To say something is wild is to speak of just such a control (or will to control) and withdrawal (here, will to mark ourselves as separate, if only rhetorically), speaking the other as impure in a way that only a colonialist echo of relation to that deemed non-human... quite touches upon.
yeah as i think i've said, i'm a little surprised there is not more opprobrium over "wild" for its association with, e.g. "savage". i don't love it but i do use it; that said if i had a better habit of speech/of typing ready to hand i'd use it and maybe it's on me to try to dig something up/retrain myself
@kzodasnowman (wasn't sure if you were wishing you'd been tagged out by now, sorry if so)
Oct 10, 2026, 11:40 PMMy general rule of thumb is to ask if the word we are inclined to use would describe the other, as object, or if it instead names our relationship to the other and our feelings about same.
The latter is, IMHO, always preferable. Wild, unfortunately, straddles that divide in itself unsettling ways, which themselves deserve introspection.
Happy to edit to tag you out, @kzodasnowman , should this thread now be more than you bargained for. Then again, knowing us both, wading into this space presumably wasn't done from a place of ignorance as to where it might lead?
i think that's a good way to think about it, well put
and i'm mainly only concerned w @kzodasnowman 's mentions being bombarded w a wall of text 😂
Oct 11, 2026, 12:06 AMWe've been good thus far about using paragraph breaks, have we not?
@inquiline @beadsland ooo I like using unsettling or unexpected for naming the reaction
@inquiline @beadsland and not a bombard at all.
Jacques Cousteau said "we protect what we love". I think thats generally true. How can you love what is not visible to you? Sharing space with our wild brethren is the first step.
Oct 11, 2026, 2:03 AMNonetheless, our non-human brethren, insofar as they are capable to demarcate where space is not to be shared, challenge the notion that imposing oneself in another's space is necessarily a precursor to love.
Oct 11, 2026, 2:01 AMMore often than not, my feeling is that unsettling, on its own, lacks the viscerality that is intended by saneist metaphor. Disquieting, perhaps, comes closer.
Though even then we still don't get to the consequentialist implications conveyed by saniest slurs, or even an invocation of wildness. To wit, that our feelings about the thing so characterized have something to do with our sense of implications for systems or society at large, rather than just that we, personally, are spooked.
Oct 10, 2026, 9:18 PMOnly what was suggested was not for you to have a pet, but for her to have access to a critter in your circle.
For comparison, myself have discussed with a friend the notion of mutual pet cams, where floor-level virtual mirrors might allow, say, indoor cats in two households to check in on one another.
Imagine how off-putting that would be if those portals were erected in each such felines' respective hide-away spots.
We generally recognize and allow for domestic partners, human or otherwise, to have space for themselves. That the animal in question isn't actually cohabitating with a human seems all the more reason to leave them to their own privacy.
As for thinking this in terms of exchange, the question of consent, on the part of the squirrel, immediately arises.
@inquiline i suspect it may not work (i suspect you are familiar)
might rephrase as, "works" in a different register (i suspect you are familiar)
@inquiline oh absolutely i think there is sufficient evidence to conclude it has worked and will continue to serve its assigned purpose
@inquiline Thanks for sharing this--great read, takes its time to look around, so to speak.
i really thought so too--was thinking about the process for the author and editor--really deeply researched
@inquiline v good, but a fav quote "Some years ago, Eisenberg did a direct comparison between two million dollars' worth of state-of-the-art radio collars and a traditional, noninvasive method for tracking elk in Alberta, Canada and Montana. The latter involved pulling a tape across the ground and counting elk feces on both sides, moving the tape the way an animal travels through the landscape. Conducting these so-called transects costs about $15,000, Eisenberg estimated."
i really liked that part too. the choice to do invasive research is a choice
@inquiline especially when 10% of elk die in the collaring, I would have never guessed that, that detail shocked me
i learned that from Etienne Benson's first book (he's also quoted in the article); and i too was shocked by it
@inquiline what a fascinating, deeply thoughtful read. What the author is talking about has only intensified since this was published... Thanks so much for sharing!
@inquiline Wow, the end:
"...Loading animals with more sensors will yield discoveries at ever finer & more precise scales. Yet the end of the day, we already know the big problems. We know we are carving the world into ever-smaller fragments, destroying the connectivity life needs to thrive. We know we are gobbling up the world's resources and injecting pollutants into the air & water at unsustainable rates. We know we are greedy.
"We know more than enough...to know what we need to do."
Oct 11, 2026, 8:24 PM@inquiline thanks for sharing this! I need to start a STS bibliography.