Animals’ atmospheres

1 Animal subjects

An animal’s atmosphere requires an animal subject. Animals’ atmospheres only exist through the experience of a sensory animal body. They might not be emotional, but they are felt and subjective. This approach requires a posthumanist approach in which conceptions of subjectivity are reworked to respect different forms of nonhuman animal phenomenology and cognition (see Donaldson and Kymlicka, 2011; Lestel et al., 2014). To understand an animal’s atmosphere, we first need to know something about its sensory, embodied existence. To do so we can turn to ethology – the study of animal behaviour – and specifically the writings of the 19th-century animal ethologist Jacob von Uexkull (2010). Von Uexkull’s ethology (and its reworking by Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) has influenced both more-than-representational theory (e.g. Thrift, 2007) and multispecies studies (e.g. Buchanan, 2008; Despret, 2015).

An ethological model places the animal subject in its umwelt (or lifeworld) and does away with the common division between the organism and the environment (Adams, 2016). Starting from the multisensory animal body, it attends to the ‘signs’ through which an animal affects and is affected by its world. Wolves, for example, communicate with each other through body language, voice, and olfactory means – but their umwelt is not limited to these intra-wolf signals. Relevant signs also encompass atmospheric materials and vibrations sensible to canine sight, sound, touch, taste and smell, and the other senses that are absent or poorly articulated in humans. In the canine umwelt, the significance and intensity of the resulting perceptions is markedly different to that for humans in both range and extent. Biosemiotic analysis of umwelten focuses on animals’ perceptual mechanisms, its physiological make-up, and the reciprocal relations it develops with the other organisms that comprise its ecology (e.g. Kohn, 2013). Ethologists develop rhythmic understandings of animal perception attending to the different mobilities, temporalities and entangled lifelines of interacting organisms (Ingold, 2015).

Ethology also offers understandings of animals’ emotional experiences. Animal emotion is a contested subject, for a range of epistemic and political reasons that we detail below. Nonetheless, work on animal emotion in the animal sciences has challenged the mechanistic models of the instinctive, animal automaton that are prevalent in animal behaviour research. Some ethologists present terrestrial mammals as emotional beings, attuned to and affected by their social and ecological circumstances (Bekoff, 2002; Grandin and Johnson, 2006). This work has reinvigorated a long-standing interest in the comparable emotions of humans and animals (Darwin et al., 1999). We now hear of animals that are playful, joyful, sad, and traumatized, amongst other cross-species and culturally-encoded emotional conditions (e.g. Bekoff, 2010; Bradshaw, 2009; Montgomery, 2015). In so doing this work moves away from understanding animals as species types to acknowledge the individuality (or better, ‘individuation’, after Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) of single animals (cf. Bear, 2011) and of groups aggregated below the level of the species (swarms, herds, flocks, etc.). Pet owners can attest to the personalities of their dogs, and ethologists, through years of patient observation, can demonstrate the same is true of wolves and the packs they comprise (Bekoff, 2010).

2 Collective circumstances

A theory of umwelten provides a useful foundation for conceiving animal atmospheres, but the two concepts are not synonymous. Umwelt describes the ‘bubble’ of animal perception, but it struggles to account for the collective dimensions and diffuse catalysts of place-based affective experience. Although they require an animal subject, animal atmospheres are not only individuated or personal. They can be shared, and always emerge in relation to the shifting intensities of ‘background’ (Thrift, 2007) circumstances. Here we draw on the recent, post-phenomenological development of the concept of circumstances by McCormack, who proposes circumstance ‘as a way of naming the extrusion of the impersonal forces excessive of a life into the worldly textures and trajectories of that life’ (2017: 3). Thinking through circumstances helps identify how animals’ atmospheres are shaped by social, ecological, meteorological and chemical forces.

As copious research makes clear, many animals’ atmospheres are social and collective. They emerge in relation to the complex social (or at least interpersonal) dynamics common to many animal groups. Often these sociabilities will include humans: atmospheres of play and friendship amongst people and pets are well known and have received much attention (Goode, 2007; Haraway, 2008), as have the behaviours of feral animals who actively avoid humans (Beck, 1973). But these atmospheres do not necessarily require human participants. As Lopez notes:

Even as adults, wolves play tag with each other or romp with the pups, running about a clearing or on a snow bank with a rocking-horse gait. They scare each other by pouncing on sleeping wolves and by jumping in front of one another from hiding places. They bring things to each other, especially bits of food. They prance and parade about with sticks or bones in their mouths. (2004: 37)

In contrast to these situations of heightened affective intensity, many domestic and zoo animals live lives marked by solitude and the absence or impoverishment of stimuli. ‘Separation anxiety’ is a common explanation of the destructive behaviours of dogs left home alone. There is growing evidence that animals get bored and depressed (Davies, 2010, cf. Anderson, 2004), resulting in psychological problems, including repetitive, stereotypic behaviours, stress, and self-harm (Mason and Rushen, 2008). The changing circumstances that shape animals’ affective atmospheres can be linked to wider political ecological dynamics. For instance, landscapes torn by poaching, mining and deforestation can generate ‘traumatic’ circumstances (Bradshaw, 2009). These fissured ecologies can induce, among other things, alcohol consumption in animals (Barua, 2014), including amongst dogs abandoned and having to cope with precarious urban conditions (Siegel, 2005).

An animal’s trophic relations, or position in the food chain, also configure their affective atmosphere. The atmospheres (or ecologies) of fear (Brown et al., 1999) illustrated in the opening vignette emanate from the situated experience of predator-prey interaction. Many herbivores have evolved ‘affective palettes’ (Thrift, 2007) primed to respond to the visual, aural, or olfactory presence of predators and the kinaesthetic experience of being chased (Berger, 2007). The elk in Yellowstone, for example, graze, breed and move very differently in the absence and the presence of both wolves and of different groups of people and their human infrastructure (Ripple and Beschta, 2004; Dorresteijn et al., 2015).

Animals’ atmospheres are also the outcome of changes in the intensities of the abiotic environment. Animals are sensitive to, and instigate, a wide range of meteorological dynamics not palpable to humans. Many animals sense and make use of parts of the electro-magnetic, acoustic and olfactory spectra that are undetectable to the technological unassisted human body. Most terrestrial mammals live socially through biochemical landscapes, and pheromones are not commonly understood to be significant in ocular-centric accounts of humans’ atmospheres (though see Brennan, 2004; Grammer et al., 2005). Modulations in the background intensities of these spectra are vital catalysts for animal atmospheres. Animals sing, grunt, and roar to mark territory, express anger, fear, love and joy. They mimic, trick and visually disguise themselves. They spray, secrete and roll to modulate their smell. Some animals luminesce or sense and emit infrared radiation. Others attune to electro- or seismic energy for communication within more liquid and solid atmospheric media. Animals are sensitive to changes in their ‘weather worlds’ (Ingold, 2007). Shifts in temperature, wind, light and humidity all cue changes in an animal’s affective atmospheres. This is especially true for migratory and/or temperate animals whose seasonal behaviours are tied to shifts in atmospheric intensities. The service dogs introduced in the opening vignette are just one example of animals acting as sentinels of atmospheric shifts. History, folklore and some modern science offer a wealth of stories of animals as sentinels for disease, weather, natural disasters, pollution and acts of war.

3 Space-time

This analysis identifies significant factors to consider in understanding what comes to configure an animal’s atmosphere. These factors could be encompassed by the concept of an affective assemblage: a material inventory, or abstract diagram, of all the interacting elements in a given situation. Theorists of affect suggest that the concept of an atmosphere takes assemblage thinking further by focusing on the spatial and temporal dimensions of affective experience. They suggest that an atmosphere should be conceived as a specific space-time of an affective assemblage (Anderson, 2014; Shaw, 2014): a collective experience shared in this place, at this time, by some of those present. They stress that an atmosphere is not trans-historical but emerges at particular junctures with distinct relations and concomitant effects (for a canine illustration see Howell’s (2015) detailed, historical account of the circumstances that come to configure the space-times of domestic dogs in Britain).

Work in ethology and in cultural and political geography offers further concepts for examining the space-times (or topologies) of animals’ atmospheres. Here we might start with work on animal territories and the musical understanding of territorial practices offered by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) in their reading of Von Uexkull’s ethology. Many animals mark territories, knowing and claiming space though repeated, routinized spatial practices: the walk, the song, the spray, etc. It is through these practices that an animal’s umwelt comes to take the archetypal spatial form of the bubble or sphere (Anderson, 2014): a volumetric envelope enclosed by the geographies of an animal’s movements (cf. Elden, 2013). Such volumes can be relatively static (in Cartesian space) or hypermobile (as in the case of migratory animals), but they maintain a consistent spherical form. This topological imagination of bounded volumetric territories is intuitive, but it is not sufficient to capture the space-times of the atmospheric materials listed above. The sphere of an animal’s atmosphere is bisected by the circulation of molecules and wave-like vibrations. These vectors are ‘lines of flight’, through which an animal is entrained in a web or meshwork of intermingled territories. Animal territories are formed through counterpoints, reciprocity and intra-action with a heterogeneous entourage of bodies (animate and non-animate) and their concomitant sights, smells, scents and tastes. There are thus complex and under-researched geometries to animals’ atmospheres.

Attempts to capture the spatial heterogeneity of animals’ atmospheres must also acknowledge the multiple and often discordant rhythms through which they are engendered. On the one hand, atmospheres may seem fleeting and contingent: momentary events sparked by a noise, a smell or a gesture. For example, the sudden change in atmosphere in a tranquil living room sparked by a doorbell ring or even a car door slam. The slumbering pet dog is up, hackles raised and barking in an explosion of fur-spreading intensity; but the intensity of alarm is fleeting as it turns out the parcel is for next door. On the other hand, atmospheres can be a sedimented remembrance of past practices and encounters. These are sensed in relation to familiar rhythms, expected durations and habituated intensities. Atmospheres may emanate from the surprising shock of the new, but they also stem from the banal repetition of the same hourly, daily, and seasonal practices (Dewsbury, 2012). In other words, animals’ rhythms get ‘coded’ such that periodic repetition becomes significant. What is at stake here is the interplay between momentary and more protracted durations and the effects of anthropogenic atmospheric disruption or decoding.

Mapping animals’ atmospheres requires an attention to processes of spread. Understanding the passage of animals’ affective atmospheres involves attuning to a range of unfamiliar media and means of communicating across time and space. The attention of atmospheric geographers shifts to the airborne passage of sounds and smells, to seismic rumbles or to fluctuations in pressure, temperate and humidity (Gallagher et al., 2016). We know that some animals’ atmospheres can be as contagious as the spread of fear amongst humans (cf. Bissell, 2010b). Mapping contagion requires an attention to the processes of atmospheric amplification and intensification. We need to know how atmospheric media move, how they congeal, and the nonlinear, sometimes chaotic, processes through which atmospheric phenomena bubble and vortice into being. Not all atmospheres are experienced with the same intensity. While it is possible to follow the contagious howling of wolves or the barking of neighbourhood dogs, not all such amplifications are as easily mapped. Sometimes the signs are less clear – triggers imperceptible to human senses (a smell or distant sound, for example) may be experienced by and communicated between canids in ways that are hard for human observers to read.

To summarize, this section has outlined three important areas of consideration when mapping an animal’s atmosphere. This approach moves from a specification of the animal’s umwelt to situating the animal in its social, ecological and material circumstances. This model works outward from an animal’s body to consider the spatial connections, temporal trajectories and processes of intensification through which an atmosphere comes into being. The italicized terms in the previous section serve as a framework to guide the design of future research on animals’ atmospheres. This is summarized, as mentioned previously, in Table 1.

We anticipate that this framework will enable comparative research that attends to the subjects, circumstances and space-times of atmospheres across difference. As a nomothetic, rather than idiographic endeavour, geographical investigation of atmospheres would explore how a particular situation allows one to ask questions of another. Analysis would attend to how atmospheres come into being, and with what conjunctures, political ecologies and historically situated ‘worldings’ (cf. Haraway, 2016).

1 Attunement

Practical research in this ethological tradition involves a range of methods that allow the researcher to think like a different animal. This work starts by developing an understanding of an animal’s physiology and perceptual mechanisms. It could then involve close (sometimes covert) observation of an animal’s behaviour within the specific social and ecological relations under study (for an introduction see Dawkins, 2007). This would generate an ‘ethogram’, or diagram, of the animal’s umwelt. The atmospheric intensities of the umwelt could then be mapped through the comprehensive detection and monitoring of the electro-magnetic, acoustic and olfactory energies sensible to the animal in question (Manning and Dawkins, 2012). This mapping might be supplemented by tracking and remote sensing technologies, including: GPS tags, weather monitoring equipment, camera traps, and other remotely operated audio-visual devices (for wider discussion see Benson, 2010; Tomkiewicz et al., 2010; Hodgetts and Lorimer, 2015). A more innovative, post-phenomenological take on the ethogram would expand analysis to the broader range of encounters with bodies, materials, and sensations that humans and other animals make meaning from (see Wilson, 2017).

This perspectival approach generates a wealth of data on the abstract animal umwelt. But critics suggest that it is premised on a false sense of objectivity that masks the necessary and shaping presence of the human body in the conduct of ethological research (Despret, 2013). Despret proposes that it is more appropriate to understand ethological research as the pursuit of ‘embodied empathy’ with animals. She argues, in ways that are similar to the arguments of non-representational cultural geographers, that animal research is affective, not just semiotic or perspectival. She presents research as embodied and immersive processes of ‘learning to be affected’ by the world, in which ‘the scientist risks being touched/affected by what matters for the animal he/she observes’ (2013: 57). This approach intersects with a growing body of work by feminist animal scholars (Donovan and Adams, 2007; Geiger and Hovorka, 2015; Gruen, 2015), and has informed a range of methodological experiments, by geographers and others, in attuning to canine life worlds (see Kohn, 2007; Mancini et al., 2012; Brown and Dilley, 2012; Fletcher and Platt, 2016).

This literature has yet to engage with the concept of animals’ atmospheres. Indeed, there is very little methodological guidance in cultural geography on how to research affective atmospheres. Textbook accounts of non-representational methodologies (Vannini, 2015) offer scant practical advice on how to design a piece of atmospheric research. We might begin to address this lacuna by drawing on work in the emerging fields of multispecies (Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010) and ‘more-than-human’ ethnographies (Barua, 2014). These conjoin methods from ethnography and ethology to enable the time-deepened and situated study of animals and their affective relationships (e.g. H Lorimer, 2006; Hodgetts and Lorimer, 2015). To date, multispecies ethnographers have not engaged explicitly with the concept of animal atmospheres, but we can get some glimpses of what this might comprise from existing studies.

For example, recent work has utilized ethological and empathetic approaches not simply to attune to animals, but to attune with them. The aim here is to gain a sense of the animals’ atmospheres so as to better understand particular situations and environments. Working with dogs to trace other forms of wildlife is a case in point. Human handlers can access unseen presences and temporal clues by attending carefully to the postural and vocal communications of tracking dogs, and by attuning to the shared atmospheres such communications contribute to shaping (Hodgetts and Hester, 2017). For a dog (or wolf), the atmosphere of tranquil woodland is probably more lively than for a human given the lingering scent-lines and pheromone traces that permeate the atmosphere, in addition to the visual signs of wildlife presence. As the sniffing of the tracking dog increases in intensity and focus, as movements become faster and more targeted, as the atmosphere of excitement intensifies and is shared with the human handler, both know when the dog has found the scent.

Atmospheres, as we outlined in the previous section, are collective and shared. Such canine multispecies methods rely on the lack of inhibition in dogs when displaying emotions (see Darwin et al., 1999), and the long-noted (if often dismissed) ability of humans to make sense of some of these emotions (Bradshaw, 2011). Indeed, Bradshaw suggests that dogs are (like humans) ‘emotionally transparent’ for a number of social, trophic and evolutionary reasons, which were then selected for in domestication. Dogs are adept at reading human emotional cues, affective intensities, and shared atmospheres. As such, attunement to multi-species atmospheres can and does work in both directions – as reflected in our opening anecdotes about service dogs who alert human companions to imminent seizures, low blood sugar, or other medical conditions. Both humans and dogs can ‘learn to be affected’ in these reciprocal interactions. A comprehensive mapping of animals’ atmospheres involves tracking the circulation of active materials (see, for example, Barua (2014) on the effects of sugar and alcohol on animal behaviours).

In his classic account of sled-dog racing in Alaska the author Gary Paulsen traces his various attempts to learn from his team of sled dogs and their predilections and personalities. His method could be described in terms of immersive attunement. ‘I had to sleep in the kennel’, he explains, ‘I had to be with the dogs all the time, learn from them all the time, know them all the time. More than sleep, I had to live in the kennel. I had in some way to become a dog’ (Paulsen, 1994: 97). The idea of bodily attunement to ‘become canine’ has a long back-story, both in cultural histories of ‘werewolves’ (see Lopez, 2004) and in scientific experiments to make sense of animals’ lives (see Despret, 2013, on the work of the wolf ethologist Farley Mowatt).

In recent years this immersive approach has become something of a trope in literary experiments – examples include Thomas Thwaite’s (2016) Goat Man and Charles Foster’s (2016) Being a Beast. These exemplify a wider set of performative methods involving bodily enhancement and reconfiguration, and novel forms of transportation with the aim of simulating animals’ perceptual lifeworlds and different forms of mobility. These experiments might comprise shedding the basic accoutrements of human life, walking without shoes, swimming and crawling naked and eating raw food. Or they could involve the construction of elaborate prosthetics designed to align the human anatomy with those of animals. Importantly, Paulsen (1994) also writes of the dangers when animals’ atmospheric signs are missed and attunement fails.

Attuning to animals’ atmospheres can be difficult, even with species as ‘accessible’ to humans as dogs and wolves. It is not limited solely by our own ecological affordances as humans, but also by our ideas. Returning to the work of Barry Lopez, in comparing indigenous and western scientific understandings of wolves at the end of the 1970s he wrote: ‘we do not know very much at all about animals. We cannot understand them except in terms of our own needs and experiences. And to approach them solely in terms of the Western imagination is, really, to deny the animal’ (2004: 86). Attunement, even when enacted as an empathetic and bodily practice, remains shaped by cognitive considerations that in turn require reflexive attention. Reflection does not imply a reification of indigenous knowledges that would construct certain peoples as ‘closer to animals’, with all the problematic implications such a framing entails. But it does suggest a critical attention to one’s own situation, while also remaining open to other ways of thinking with the dog or wolf.

2 Evocation

A further epistemic challenge in researching animals’ atmospheres lies in providing compelling representations or ‘lively ethnographies’ (Van Dooren and Rose, 2016). How do we evoke the fleeting, affective experiences of animals that may be witnessed through these methods? The practical and epistemic challenges of recording and replicating atmospheres have been the subject of discussion in non-representational theory (e.g. Anderson and Ash, 2015). Many of the issues raised are relevant here. Indeed these challenges are amplified by a general unfamiliarity with animal experience and the perceptual anthropocentrism of much media: screens, books and recordings struggle to simulate the kinaesthetic and olfactory experience that is so central to animal lifeworlds. A comprehensive review of efforts to evoke animals’ atmospheres is beyond the scope of this paper and a few illustrations must suffice.

One resource is provided by autobiographical accounts of those who live and work with animals, especially in books for a popular audience in which the author adopts a more informal tone that than expected by their professional peers. Examples include works by ethologists, ecologists, zookeepers, vets and animal trainers, as well as those by authors more interested in hunting, eating or eradicating animals (cf. Anthony and Spence, 2009; Bradshaw, 2011; Rebanks, 2015; White, 2012). These works deploy a range of literary techniques, including narrative; personification; and thick, placed-based description. This work bleeds into the related genre of animal fiction: books written from the perspective of an animal. Much of this work is written for children. It is often allegorical and sentimental and heavily moralized in its anthropomorphism (McHugh, 2011; Armstrong, 2008). However, some works stand out either for their fidelity to the alterity of the animal subject or because of their willingness to keep open multiple interpretations of the recounted animal experience (for discussion see Beer, 2005; Daston and Mitman, 2005; Crist, 1999; Cadman, 2016). Canine literature spans this range. Dogs and wolves feature as the central protagonists in accounts from authors as diverse as Jack London, Olaf Stapledon, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, John Berger and Paul Auster (for discussion see Marvin, 2012; McHugh, 2004).

Similar resources can be found in the evocations of animals on film. These range from cartoon and CGI renditions of animal fiction to naturalistic and avant-garde efforts to evoke animal behaviour (Burt, 2002; Bousé, 2000). Big budget blue chip wildlife documentary films increasingly trade off the affective potential of their imagery and offer compelling renditions of intense animals’ atmospheres (J Lorimer, 2010). The BBC series The Hunt, for example, combines a nonlinear montage of carefully choreographed shot sequences with a dramatic musical score to draw out the affective intensities of free-ranging predator–prey dynamics. Anticipation is built through close-ups of prey animals’ eyes, and twitching ears and noses. We see slow, stalking predator bodies. Tension is amplified through a muted, eerie soundtrack. Then aerial shots of fast-running bodies set to drums evoke a mixture of fear and excitement. Death or escape arrives with a full orchestral crescendo.

The power of music to create and evoke atmospheres is well known. Animal sounds have been the subject, or at least motifs within, a wide range of music (Kraft, 2013). The musician and ecologist Bernie Krause (Krause and Payne, 2016) has pioneered the recording of naturalistic soundscapes and has collaborated with a number of composers and musicians. In the Great Animal Orchestra, United Visual Artists develop an immersive, visual and interactive encounter with Krause’s recordings. This aims to simulate and amplify the human acoustic atmospheric experience of remote places – including a compelling orchestration of Alaskan wolves. This experience makes clear the different animal components of the ‘biophony’ and the ways these sounds relate to one another. In so doing it gives a sense of the affective acoustic atmospheres catalysed for animals by the sonic presence, behaviour and dynamics of other animal and geological sounds.