There was once an orangutan named Ken Allen at the San Diego Zoo who is notorious for executing elaborate escape plans. He found all the nuts and bolts in his cage and removed them; In his clearing, he throws rocks and feces at visitors. On one occasion, he built a ladder from some fallen branches, carefully checking his weight on the steps. The zoo then raised his enclosure walls and smoothed them to remove the retaining pins.
Hoping to distract Ken, the zoo introduced several female orangutans. But Ken has called them accomplices: While he was distracting the zookeepers, his cellmate Vicki pry open the window. Once, Ken was trapped in waist-deep water in the moat of the enclosure, trying to inched up the sides, despite the fact that orangutans are said to be very hydrophobic. As for the electrical conductors on the enclosure walls, Ken tested them several times, and one day, during a maintenance break, he tried to jump out.
Animal escape attempts often make headlines, but these are not acts of vandalism or mindless curiosity; rather, they are positive forms and know how to resist the conditions man is forced upon them. Animal behavior of resistance in captivity mirror what is human: They ignore commands, slow down, refuse to operate, break equipment, damage chassis, fight and flee. Their action is a struggle against exploitation — as such, they constitute political activism.
Politics, is basically the science and art of making decisions. We often think of politics as the work done by politicians and activists within the framework of local and national government – but it is really the ordinary, day-to-day business of communal organization. Anytime two or more people come to an agreement or come to a decision, politics works. For humans, politics plays out in every way: in parliament, at the ballot box, in our daily decisions about how we want to live. Every choice we make that affects others is political. This obviously includes voting, but it also includes the things we do and design; our relationship with our partners and neighbors; what we consume, act on, share and refuse. Even when we say we want nothing to do with politics, we don’t really have that choice – politics affects almost every aspect of our lives, whether we want to or not. By definition, it is the process by which almost anything is done. In this sense, politics, when organized, is also a type of technology: the communication and processing framework that governs interactions and possibilities that occur on a daily basis.
This political understanding also means that our decision-making must extend beyond our own lives: to non-human animals, to the planet, and into the future. very close to Automatic AI. I call this a ‘more than man’ politics, drawn from ecologist and philosopher David Abram’s concept of a world more than man, a way of thinking that fully acknowledges and embodies bundles with all organisms and ecological systems. A more political system than human can take many forms. Among humans, most political interactions are legislative and judicial, but we have much to learn from the myriad ways animals act politically with each other.
Animals make politics realistically; this is true for individual animals, as was the case with Ken Allen, but it is especially important for animal social groups. Social cohesion is crucial to the survival of the collective, and so all social animals exercise some form of consensus decision-making, especially around migration. and choose a place to feed. As in human society, this can lead to conflicts of interest among group members. (Most of us are familiar with the feeling of horror when a group of people agree to open a restaurant.) The answer to this problem in the animal kingdom is rarely, if ever, autocracy; more often, it is related to the democratic process.
A few notable examples: Red deer, which live in large herds and frequently stop for rest and rumination, will begin to move out of their resting areas after 60% of the adults have stood up; they actually vote with their feet. The same goes for buffalo, though the cues are more subtle: Female members of the herd indicate their preferred direction of movement by standing up, staring in one direction, and lying down again. Birds, too, exhibit complex decision-making behavior. By attaching small GPS loggers to pigeons, scientists have learned that decisions about when and where to fly are shared by all members of the flock.
Perhaps the greatest exponent of animal equality is the honey bee. Honey bees have their own distinct histories, first as caring herders and pacifists — all bees are descendants of a species of wasp that decided to go vegan some time ago. 100 million years — and second, highly organized communities, communicating and building consensus. Their class commitment to social life is captured in the beekeeper’s maxim, which can double as a political slogan: “Una apis, nulla apis“Means “a bee is not a bee”.
Honey bees perform one of the greatest spectacles of democracy in practice, known as the ‘wobble dance’. The swaying dance was first scientifically described by Austrian ethnologist Karl von Frisch in 1944, as a means by which foraging bees shared the location of nearby pollen sources. A few years later, one of Frisch’s graduate students, Martin Lindauer, noticed a swarm of bees hanging from a tree. Their behavior shows that they are looking for a new home. But he also noticed that some of these bees were performing swaying dances, and that, unlike the pollen-covered foraging bees, these bees were covered in soot and brick dust, soil, and dust. flour. These are not foragers, Lindauer realized; they are spies.
