21 February

Our relationship with animals seems to be another one of those binaries - it has to be either ‘wild’ animals, or domesticated. And as this sign says, we also treat the wild animals as either pristine things which shouldn’t be interacted with, or eaten, locked up in national parks, or we ignore them completely and bulldoze their habitat for suburbs. Meanwhile our domestic animals are ridiculously pampered. (Some ecologists say animals actually domesticate us, rather than the other way around.) I like a model where animals are welcome in my yard, and then it’s like a process of negotiation. I might feed them, or not, depending on what happens. I might leave water for them, or plant a tree or shrub that helps them. But it’s an evolving relationship, it can end well or badly. Diplomacy with the ‘wild’. Diplomacy is what I see the world as needing, with people and with the landscape and its animals.