Even the most familiar environments can feel newly strange to the senses of other creatures. I walk my dog - Typo, a corgi – three times a day, along the same streets and buildings I’ve seen thousands of times. But although this urban landscape seems dull and stagnant to me, the fragrance landscape constantly fascinates Typo’s nose. He sniffs constantly, his nasal anatomy allows him to constantly aspirate odors, even while exhaling. He sniffs the individual leaves of emerging spring plants with the greatest delicacy. He sniffs up bits of dried urine left by the neighborhood dogs — the equivalent of a human scrolling through a social media feed. With every walk there is at least one moment when Typo comes to a stop and excitedly explores a patch of pavement that looks unremarkable but is clearly bursting with enchanting scents. Watching him makes me feel less used to my own life, more aware of the constantly changing environment around me. Such awareness is a gift that Typo gives me every day.
These sensory worlds can be difficult and sometimes impossible for wildlife documentaries to capture (although some, like Netflix’s “Night on Earth,” make a valiant attempt). There are no special effects that can truly convey the enveloping nature of bird vision to the forward-looking eyes of a human viewer or translate the wide spectrum of colors visible to a bird into the much narrower set our eyes can see. Non-visual senses are even harder to capture for a visual medium. You can play recordings of a whale’s song, but that doesn’t show what it means for whales to hear each other over oceanic distances. You can represent the magnetic field that envelops the planet, but that can’t begin with capturing the experience of a robin using that field to fly over a continent.
In his classic 1974 essay, “What’s It Like to Be a Bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote that the conscious experiences of other animals are inherently subjective and difficult to describe. You might picture yourself with webbing on your arms or bugs in your mouth, but you’d still be creating a mental caricature of you as a bat. “I want to know what it’s like for a bat to be a bat,” wrote Dr. Nail. Most bat species perceive the world through sonar and sense their environment by listening to the echoes of their own ultrasonic calls. “But when I try to imagine this, I am limited to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate for the task,” wrote Dr. Nail.
Our own senses limit us and create a permanent separation between our Umwelt and that of another animal. Technology can help bridge that gap, but there will always be a gap. Crossing it requires what psychologist Alexandra Horowitz calls “an informed imaginative leap.” You can’t show what another Umwelt is like; you have to work on imagining it.
Watching modern wildlife documentaries has become almost too easy, as if I’m passively swept along by the torrent of vivid images – eyes open, jaw open, but brain relaxed. When I think of other Umwelten, on the other hand, I feel my mind cramp and the joy of an impossible task yet attempted. Through these small acts of empathy, I understand other animals more deeply – not as vague, feathered proxies for my life, but as wondrous and unique entities of their own, and as the keys to understanding the true immensity of the world.