Portions for foxes

Daisy Alioto on the urge to anthropomorphize. 

Recently, it’s been a good run for those of us with an inclination toward anthropomorphism. There is new scientific (and philosophical) consensus that, “insects, octopuses, crustaceans, fish and other overlooked animals experience consciousness.” An orangutan in Indonesia was observed treating his own face wound. And a captive bear in Seattle snacked on some ducklings in front of a child’s birthday party—the attendees of which were surprisingly stoic. 

In a 2022 op-ed about human and animal emotions, a group of animal welfare and behavior academics write, “In humans, the concept of emotion is largely derived linguistically; language gives us a rich, albeit indirect (and not infallible), insight into people’s conscious emotional experiences,” which obviously cannot be extended to animals, who do not participate in the “self-reported emotional feelings” that constitute, “the gold-standard measure of emotional states,” they say. 

Humans self-report their emotions online in an increasingly visual milieu that often relies on animal imagery as the basis of this memetic expression: smoking crabs, doleful sun bears, and pretty much any image of a shiba inu. The less “natural” these images seem, the more likely they are to be co-opted into the dadaist drone of the timeline. 

But the internet is also a place to openly eavesdrop on animal behaviors that seem “natural” or at least “unobserved.” Nearly a million people sign on to see whether Pépito the cat has returned home through his cat door. Trail Cams, a popular account of dubious politics, curates still imagery from wildlife cameras which exist somewhere between the photograph and video: only whirring to life at the detection of motion and/or heat. 

Which brings me to my next point: the selectiveness of the way we portray animals online—and the way it mirrors the selectiveness with which we portray ourselves. A decade ago, multidisciplinary artist Raghava KK argued in TechCrunch, “It’s time for the emergence of a visual Internet,” citing 4.7 trillion photos that could potentially enrich our lives if they were accessible online. In 2024, some would say we are living under the tyranny of images.

“Put simply, the photograph is seen as a representation of nature itself, as an unmediated copy of the real world. The medium itself is considered transparent. The propositions carried through the medium are unbiased and therefore true,” wrote Allan Sekula in his 1975 Artforum essay, On the Invention of Photographic Meaning. He goes on to explain why this is false. 

“Any meaningful encounter with a photograph must necessarily occur at the level of connotation,” he says. What could it then connote that linguistic insight into emotional experience separates us from animals, but we increasingly signal our emotions visually—in the same arena we then project those feelings back onto our animal brethren. The photograph just seems to lend itself so well to invoking the human in an animal and the animal in us. 

I have been thinking about this a lot recently as I follow the ongoings of the family of foxes that lives in my in-laws’ backyard. The fathers hunts, the mother breastfeeds, the cubs flaunt their black-stockinged legs and appear to tell each other secrets. They look up from their baby rabbit meals with what looks like, but can’t possibly be, guilt. 

In order for me to enjoy these images they must first pass through the motion triggers of the wildlife camera to the image card, from which my mother-in-law curates and edits them into legible scenes and then sends them through the family group chat where we caption them together. The compression these pixels experience in order to travel to us mimics the compression in the environment that makes them possible. 

As The New York Times reported in 2023, wildlife cameras in Wisconsin have revealed the increase of interspecies encounters in developed areas like the suburbs: “Over a three-month period, the researchers estimated, highly antagonistic pairs—that is, duos in which one species was likely to kill the other, such as bobcats and rabbits or foxes and squirrels—would encounter each other seven additional times in the most highly disturbed landscapes compared with the least disturbed ones.” 

We are invested in the lives of the foxes because of their literal proximity to us, but we also feel an emotional proximity, which is reinforced by the sheer volume of imagery in our lives. We are equally under surveillance, but unlike the foxes, we are constantly aware of this observation which makes it harder for us to authentically self-report how it feels to be both a subject and an object of our own world. “Every photographic image is a sign, above all, of someone’s investment in the sending of a message,” says Sekula. 

A couple of weeks ago, I uploaded a photo of the baby fox eating a baby rabbit to Twitter. It’s night time so the image is black-and-white. When I see the baby cubs alone on-screen my instinct is to protect them. But here, violence has been inflicted on something even smaller—even more vulnerable. There is no subjectivity without pain, this is the reality. 

I hovered over my keyboard, unsure whether to mark it as sensitive content. Finally, I settled for a content warning and the caption, “how it feels to tell yourself a story in order to live.” — Daisy Alioto

All images courtesy of Lisa Firke.