Don't Scare the Wolves: Toward response-able human-nonhuman coexistence

Abstract

Human-nonhuman relationships and coexistence are defining features of our everyday lives, though their many layers and scales – from the microbiome to the ecosystem and the planet - are not necessarily a daily conscious consideration. We exist, and are brought into being, through our relationships with other beings – many human, most nonhuman – and the narratives and hegemonies of human ideas and decision-making affect all of us. These myriad, always-ongoing relationships form the backdrop for the exploration presented in this thesis. The foreground of this thesis is an empirical case-study of a very localised set of relationships: those at an educational wolf sanctuary and nature centre deep in the mountains of Colorado, USA. The stories gathered through qualitative interviews with visitors and volunteers at this sanctuary, Mission: Wolf, as well as the participant observations I documented while living and working there, provide a rich data-set which I then set out to contextualise against broader ideas and theories of nonhuman life, moral responsibility, and coexistence. This study highlights the importance of how we understand ourselves, how we understand nonhuman life, how we use stories to explain our relationships with each other, and what stories we tell those stories with. Stories of relationship are material and philosophical, as well as moral. Learning why and how to not scare the wolves is both a practical exercise, and a moral one, with broader implications than merely informing the human-canine interactions and coexistence in my case-study setting. What it means and why it matters that we coexist is a question of the always ongoing negotiation inherent to living and dying well in a multispecies world. With this thesis I offer a construction of coexistence, and a discussion of what might be required to become more skilful at coexisting with each other, and other nonhuman beings. As a means of working towards this skilfulness in human-nonhuman moral relationships, I draw together ideas from across a wide array of literature. Grounding this thesis in historical debates over morality in human-nonhuman relationships contextualises my construction of a concept of coexistence. If coexistence is understood as something more than tolerance, something more like stewardship, implying care, then what does that conception offer as a story about what or who requires or gives care, how those requirements or obligations arise and are understood or responded to, and with what consequences for both human and nonhuman lives? This thesis is thus a story about the ways we interact with and intervene in each other’s lives, how we relate, and the consequences for all those lives of human ideas and actions regarding the current and imagined future arrangements of human and nonhuman beings that are desired. We are always already coexisting, and we can think categorically and/or relationally about that coexistence. In a world and system of relationships we have made meaningful, this thesis examines what it means to ‘coexist’.