This is gonna be a long one as I have so many thoughts. Emma Marris' Wild Souls is an important exploration of our relationships with the more than human world. I have been looking for a book with this approach for some time. I often find myself divided between texts that examine hierarchy and control of other animals but are often limited more to domestic species or that do not tackle certain ecosystem conflicts in enough detail and other texts of science or journalism where in wild animals are treated as homogeneous categories, disposable when necessary, that humans know best how to control. Marris' decision to focus on ecology and non domesticated species for the most part while also examining anthropocentric control and framing of the natural world puts this book into a niche category that blends various points of reference and analysis.
I found most of this book to be honest and inquisitive about all of the gray areas that go into our relationships with other animals. The sources that Marris draws from are ones that I recognize from all sorts of fields including philosophy, ethics, biology, ecology, and so forth. She spends time speaking with various people and groups including visiting remote indigenous tribes and discussing their relationships with nature and other animals.
One of Marris' central questions is about the value of "nature" and what actually is "natural." It is often taken as fact that what is labeled as natural is best in terms of how humans should interfere in the lives of other animals. Yet, the definition of "natural" is often changed to suit whoever is making the decisions. What is wildness when we've altered things so much that even wild animals depend on or are destroyed by us more than anything else? How fuzzy is the binary between domestication and wildness? When should we intervene in a species adaptation to a threat we caused?
I appreciated her examination of zoos and other entertainment industries in far more honest ways than most folks writing about conservation do. Zoos are businesses with some of the best PR on the planet. I have seen people who are normally caring and cautious be duped by dishonesty and misdirection. Marris discusses how many "conservation" programs began as rebranding of an abusive industry and currently exist to increase captive populations for the purposes of profit making entertainment. Zoos encourage animal ownership as ornaments or forced companions while letting people think such exploitation is helping animals. She acknowledges what some research has shown- that the "education" zoos provide is not most visitors reason for attending nor is it effective enough to outweigh the harmful indoctrination that wild animals belong in zoos and as possessions. If children required zoos to learn and care about a species, dinosaurs would not be so prevalent in their upbringing.
Actual conservationists (some of whom will utilize the resources from zoos) support preserving wild populations while zoos breed them for domestic life and entertainment. The AZA- who many zoo defenders claim is the gold standard for "good" zoos- even used to revoke accreditation to zoos that would send elephants to sanctuary when they were old. They regularly have opposed sanctuaries as they believe they take away breeding populations for zoo attractions. Is it really conservation if it's done to deliberately deprive the individuals of freedom?
Expanding upon this, Marris explores ecology and general environmental concerns about preservation of threatened species. Is the genetic "purity" of a species more important than the survival of individuals who may benefit from hybridizing as an adaptation to human encroachment into their areas? Hybridization is sometimes characterized as a net negative for species "fitness" but this is not always the case. For instance, polar bear and grizzly bears hybridizing may provide an advantage to shifting climate and habitat. Is the treatment of introduced species- often with extreme violence and deplorable suffering for an existence that humans force them into- helpful in the long run? How does that affect humans relationships with other animals and how they see them? When is it defensible to kill one animal to save another? Is it okay to breed and feed rodents to birds of prey and a sanctuary? Is it defensible to kill cats to save native birds? How often are we choosing the easy way out only to find that it is ineffective or less effective than something that takes longer?
Marris does mostly well and discussing some of the ways that oppression ingrained in humanity affect our relationships with other species. For instance anthropocentrism, toxic masculinity, appeal to nature, speciesism (which she does not name but describes,) etc. However there are times where she does contradict herself in the text in frustrating ways. This would have been a five-star book hands down if it weren't for the weird rant she goes on in the middle about hunting, vegans, and animal farming all of which she selectively ignores information about- including in her own book- to shallowly analyze her family. It was as if all of her beliefs and assessments went out the window in order to mimic what the hunters and fishers in her family told her.
It starts off good. She discusses how remote indigenous tribes such as the Matsigenka seek to exist within an ecosystem and how this affects their hunting and views other animals. Indigenous ecosystem management is also an important topic she explores. Colonial "ownership" of land is much easier to corrupt if it isn't corrupt and ineffective from the start and less hierarchical forms of management by those who live within a space are often going to be more effective and respectful. Moving forward to indigenous people who are more integrated into cities and such, she does sometimes fall into tropes that uses the beliefs of some specific indigenous people or tribes to excuse overall anthropocentrism. I assume her intention was to show respect and not push colonial thought, but it's also colonialist to frame all indigenous people as magical Disney princesses that animals consent to lay down their lives for.
This is not to make value judgments about sustainable, and especially subsistence, indigenous hunting. This is again a massively diverse practice that has had a variety of effects and has also changed over time. The introduction of guns among other things has imbalanced ecosystems across the board and accelerated decline of many species hunted by anyone with motor vehicles and weapons. Indigenous people hunting was and is not the same across the tribes nor continents and some tribes have used cruel and wasteful methods. Some practices still today are not considered in line with ecosystem respect nor cultural tradition by other indigenous people. Some indigenous people in climates and habitats that allow for it have chosen more plant based styles of eating, even if their ancestors had not, due to the modern state of farming of other animals and reduced habitat of hunted species. Some indigenous groups, especially in the arctic, must hunt to survive whether one wants to or not. Modern day indigenous folks living in the author's neighborhood and hunting with guns are very different than the Matsigenka people residing in forests who farm crops and do not use guns nor arctic indigenous folks whose closest store charges $50 for a pound of rotting produce. Extinctions have also followed humans pretty much everywhere they migrated to when they first left Africa. People were just trying to survive much of the time with the limited information that they had. We don't need to rewrite that impossibly difficult struggle for it to be real and culture to be important. Some of these things are discussed near the end of the book which is another reason this weird section doesn't fit. Most importantly, all of these groups are very different from the author and her family and that's where this diversion gets most frustrating.
Marris portrays herself and her family's hunting as in opposition to the horrors of animal agriculture- as if she and those who hunt are all vegan outside of hunting, something I've only encountered in one single primitivist in decades of taking to people and reading hunters' words. More annoyingly, Marris then goes into the ways that she respects vegans soooooooo much for various reasons, but then details extremely ignorant taking points on the speciesism bingo card as if they counteract the positives: Vegans also kill things! Crop deaths! Forced veganism! All of course wrapped up in a ribbon of indigenous tokenization.
She does not mention that said hunting caused countless extinctions and loss of biodiversity, including leaving only 200 white tail deer left at one point. Only with extreme taxing and regulation were SOME of the many species destroyed by hunting brought back. Deer are now imbalanced in the other direction by urbanization, habitat loss, feeding/baiting, and HUNTING of their predators as well as humans choosing to kill the biggest trophies of their species leading to evolution in reverse. She does not talk about how most of the agriculture of plants, and thus crop deaths, exist to feed farmed animals to be slaughtered for meat eaters. She does not talk about how animal agribusiness is one of the top things that pushes indigenous people off of their land, disrupts their hunting practices, and turns many into climate refugees. She does not talk about how settlers bringing over farmed animals to the Americas was one of the biggest causes of disease that wiped out massive amounts of indigenous people. All of the previous discussion about lead ammo wiping out vultures doesn't make a single appearance in discussion of her family's hunting and eating of animals. She of course did not mention that if everyone stopped consuming farmed meat today and hunted instead that the entire wild world would cease to exist in about a day or two if it even lasted that long. She portrayed her husband and the rest of her family as making balanced pacts with nature.
Refusing to properly confront many humans' reliance on excessive amounts of animal killing and consumption was a major flaw that really let me down. It made it hard for me to focus on the rest of the book because up until this point she had broken with the party line of a simplistic way of looking at a relationship to other animals based entirely on extraction and anthropocentrism. THAT SAID, to be fair, the amount of text I have spent ranting about this was a choice I made in part to include information and links I wish had been in the book. The actual section is a rather small part of the entire text. If you are like me and find yourself angry with this section, I do encourage you to move forward and read the rest. She returns to the grounded explorations of our interactions with the greater than human world eventually.
I appreciated her discussions about island ecosystems and the slaughter of introduced species. In terms of dealing with species conflicts, Marris covers many practices that were familiar to me but others that were enlightening. She offers a heinous account of rat poisoning acknowledging the severe suffering as well as how many other animals, including threatened and endangered ones, are poisoned by it. On the other side of the coin, it was exciting to read about long-term plans to train native species to adapt to introduced species that were threats to them. The idea of helping to create a set of knowledge that they then pass on to future generations is one I can definitely get behind. However long-term results are very hard for people to accept, especially if success may not be seen until after we die and the next generation takes over. I really liked the way she juxtaposed the problematic culling, including celebratory killing contests and blame campaigns, of human-introduced species with other perspectives and effective ways of solving problems. Rather than attempting to return nature to a previous state- something completely impossible- there are efforts to help nature adapt, some more invasive than others and none perfect. I learned a lot here that I had not heard about before.
Marris does well to use these sections to tie things back into discussion of hybridization as being an adaptation that may be important for survival and how adherence to false ideas of genetic purity should not be seen as correct by default. She also does finally discuss extinctions of species caused by the arrival of indigenous humans and then exponentially worsened by colonialism that lead to a cascade of extinctions and irreparable ecosystem destruction- finally combating the one sided way she discussed hunting and fishing previously.
Marris does not claim to have all of the answers and I appreciate that, as much as I wish that we had them. She and I can agree on the one bit if advice she does choose to give: "Make room for other species and fight for climate justice."
Despite the nonsensical hunting vs veganism rant, out of place and in conflict with the rest of the book, I count this book as one of my favorites examining humans' intervention in the lives of other species. I enjoyed the complex discussions and the reality that there are no perfect answers much of the time- Just less harmful ones.
This was also posted to my goodreads and storygraph.
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