Ice Cream for Crow
Chris at Mixing Memory posted an amazing video of Joshua Klein talking about crows. He isn’t just talking about how clever crows are (they’re really clever) but about how we can find new kinds of relationships between humans and other species which aren’t based on domination or extermination. I think he’s achieved that most difficult of things: a view of the non-human which avoids anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism (interesting that Firefox’s spellchecker recognizes the second of those words but not the first - what does that tell us about dominant ideologies?). This is also another problem for the old anthropocentric view that speech and reason go together and that both define the human. There is overwhelming empirical evidence that crows are very good at thinking, but their communication system is very rudimentary. That suggests that thinking isn’t, or doesn’t have to be, linguistic (although there is also plenty evidence that once language enters the picture it does influence thought, even at the level of perceiving differences between colours). The example of crows also suggests that culture doesn’t depend on language: crows can exhibit learned behaviour which varies between groups. Where’s the animal/human boundary now?
