Don't swim with the crocs, and other wisdom I've learned about animal-human relations

Response by Kat Peters to Cynthia Rutz’s 

“Dominion or Stewardship?: Animals and Humans in Genesis & Job”

This is a response I gave to a lecture that was discussed at the meeting of the Sodalitas group at Valparaiso University on October 25, 2024.

Turtles rest on a log at the Highland Heron Rookery in Highland, Indiana.

Thank you, Cindy, for this thought-provoking piece that invites us to re-engage with classic texts from the Jewish and Christian traditions on a topic that many of us may not bring to these texts, that of the relationship between humans and animals.  I greatly appreciate your point that humans have a short-sighted view of animals, and your argument for re-reading the books of Genesis and Job in order to foster a better understanding of the human-animal relationship is important.  

We are reminded in this lecture to closely read the text of Genesis 1 to see that animals were not separated from other elements of creation, the way light was separated from darkness, or land from the sea.  Neither were humans created on their own day.  Some of these details can tend to get lost in our anthropocentric summaries of these foundational texts.  It seems at first blush that perhaps these texts of Genesis and Job simply don’t have the capacity to think of animals the way other traditions think of them, such as the Hindu perspective.  The discussion of vegetarianism in these traditions is informative, and probably quite foreign to many of us in the West, Quakers and Thoreau notwithstanding. 

I am led to wonder, after reading this piece, how we modern, neocolonial humans can foster a deeper understanding of our place in creation alongside animals.  What sort of activities must we engage in, in addition to closer and more critical readings of foundational texts such as Genesis and Job, in order to have anything to say about the behavior of wild animals and to discern the implications of such knowledge on our own lives?

We, like Job, live relatively privileged lives, and may need a crisis or two to put us in contact with the greater mystery of creation and the Creator, whose works are quite outside of the realm of our imagination and understanding, particularly those of us who live in climate-controlled, insulated modern environments.  Also, perhaps like Job, the stakes are quite high for getting into better relationship with the creation around us.

In the lecture, Rutz points out that God reminds Job of animal facts that Job probably already knows, such as the habits of the wild ass, and God implies that there are deeper lessons to be learned.  We modern humans are much less acquainted with facts about animal behaviors and needs, despite the fact that we might now have greater access than ever to them through drones and other camera and outdoor survival technology that allow us to consider octopuses our teachers, or that let us see into ant and termite nests, or follow snow leopards on their hunts like never before (just turn on the National Geographic channel or watch any number of Netflix or Disney specials these days).

And yet, watching animals on television is not the same as experiencing their majesty, and their danger, in real life.  A great frustration of my time in the field with US university students in Costa Rica was when they would see a wild landscape such as a rainforest or wetland and declare, “It’s just like Disney World!”  While this exposure to wild places and iconic animals like tapirs, quetzals, and spider monkeys brought them initial delight, being close to other animals like mosquitos, scorpions, stinging jellyfish and poisonous snakes was a bit more sobering.

I had the great privilege of working closely with an ecologist in Costa Rica who was a founding faculty member of the Master’s of Wildlife Management program at the National University in that same country.  We took US study abroad students out into the field to engage with time-tested scientific practices such as building histograms on the size and health of shellfish populations in the Gulf of Nicoya, to the finer points of binocular use for the purpose of identifying bird species that could reforest pastureland naturally. Through these activities in local communities, I learned that wildlife management is actually about managing human behavior.  

Wildlife managers, I learned, address big cat conservation issues by helping governments designate protected areas in what are typically human conflict zones, and by helping ranchers recover livestock losses due to jaguar predation (rather than taking revenge on the big cats): examples of human management.  

I also learned from rural and coastal people that there are many humans on this planet that have an instinctual-level understanding of many animal species that I do not possess.  People living in forests or savannah’s or coastal areas understand environments and animal behaviors to a much deeper extent than one with my suburban upbringing, and interviewing these residents of wilder lands can deepen my own understanding of the benefits and risks of close contact with wild species.  For example, I learned I shouldn’t swim in estuaries where hungry crocodiles lurk.

When we get into the nitty-gritty, the human-animal relationships we seek to understand are fraught with conflict, complexity and policy implications.  For example, in the United States, where hunting is allowed with permits, duck hunters are the ones credited with saving millions of acres of duck habitat through their purchase of duck stamps, thus increasing duck populations that would otherwise be lost to development.  In Costa Rica, where all hunting is banned, poor fishing communities are prosecuted for hunting sea turtles one at a time and using 100% of the byproducts, while thousands of turtles are caught up in shrimp trawling nets whose owners enjoy blanket immunity from consequences (and the shrimp is sent to grocery stores in the US for consumers like us).  

We find that the ways of interacting with and understanding our animal cousins are many and varied, and treated differently across societies.  There are some places where a scientific way of understanding whale populations is now partnering with indigenous knowledge, as in the case of the bowhead whale population that feeds the Alaska Inuit community.  When the International Whaling Commission banned bowhead whale harvest in 1977, Alaska Inuits faced the end of their traditional way of life, which included a reverential treatment of the foundation of their resource base, the bowhead whale.  When researchers revised their census methodology to incorporate Inuit knowledge and close relationship with the species, bowhead whale populations actually increased, leading to a return to Inuit traditional practices in a sustainable way.  

I cannot help but think of this bowhead whale example when I read about the Leviathon that Rutz references in her treatment of the book of Job.  God tells Job that Job cannot possibly understand the mystery of the Behemoth and Leviathon, which God created and intimately understands.  Even with our various sciences (both Western and Indigenous), our experiences, intuitions, and dependencies, God’s understanding continues to be greater than our own.  I appreciate how Rutz’s quote from Emerson calls us into ever greater wondering about our “neighboring systems of beings.”

As humans, one element of God’s creation, cultivating an understanding and relationship with animals can help to put us in our rightful place, a message I appreciate from Rutz’s lecture. Rutz closes her piece with a quote about defending and protecting animals.  It seems, given the state of the world in the throes of climate change, deforestation, depleted fisheries, and famine, that perhaps a closer relationship with and understanding of animals may indeed end up defending and protecting us all.