The Wild Animal

This blog will mostly serve the purpose of refining, articulating and explaining my insane cultural theory.  This first post is not that.

In the course of attempting to articulate and explain my insane cultural theory, I was asked to define wildness of both animals and spaces.  There were two specific examples, one of building a subdivision in a copse of trees while leaving the trees standing (are the trees still wild?) and the other of a bee.  It lives in a hive, but is it wild?

Wildness of spaces or plants is something I am not presently prepared to define, and I will make no attempt to do so here.  This post will address only the definition of a wild animal.

It is my assertion that wildness in animals is defined by perception and by communication.  An animal can be defined as wild with respect to any other animal with which it can not sensibly communicate.  In the case of the bee, it is wild from the context of a human observer, but not in the context of observation by other members of its hive (bees communicate).  To a bee, though, we are wild animals.  We cannot communicate effectively with bees.  Dogs and cats sensibly communicate with humans -- using their tails, ears, eyes, and using touch.  In fact, some humans will even learn these signals well enough to consciously emulate these behaviors to converse with these animals.  Such animals are not wild.

Note that this definition does not require a communicative observer.  There are some people who do not understand how to communicate with cats or dogs.  They do not know that a cat closing its eyes is a demonstration of trust or affection, or that a cat who flicks its tail back and forth is agitated.  This does not mean the cat is wild.  It means the observer is liable to get bit, that's all.

This said, wildness really has nothing to do with my insane cultural theory.