Posthuman animal ramblings about attachment

posthuman attachment

thinking about the relationship between myself and the various feral/ roaming creatures I've made myself familiar to over the years.

Firstly with the pigeons and my consistency/ inconsistency vs. the reality of their emotional lives and my role as offeror of care in the form of food, with the expectation of tolerance or affection in return, and how that dynamic would be odd if applied to human relationships.

but also, not so - pigeons do form long term attachments to each other, and those attachments can and do break down on occasion, and are not solely based on sexual reproduction given gay pigeons exist and are in my courtyard in the instance of patches and friar.

and they are social animals, so will have emotional complexity to the degree needed for that socialisation. And it's clear from observing them that they have disputes and different moods and periods of conflict/ peace with each other. There is a politics to their interactions according to their own social rules and attachments. I interact with this complexity as an Other entity that provides food, as an example of other entities like myself who have, over millennia, intervened and shaped and interacted with entities such as them as offerors of care and shelter and protection in exchange for company or service or ownership or affection. Entities who have shaped them into pets or messengers or competitors or spectacle and now largely through indifference shaped them into feral populations of "sky rats".

And i think about how in the years that I've been leaving the flat less and less the Egyptian geese have lost their ease with me, their familiarity, and now do not treat me as a known offeror of food.

I wonder if humans have the divine because of how we act on the world as its engineers, of if thinking that acting on the world as its engineers is something humans do is because of my western situation. Or if thinking it is so is also a kind of privileging of the western subject - globally cultures and people have acted as engineers, it is the equation of engineering with exploitation that is problematic - beavers engineer the habitat with their dams and their channels to their own ends, but that engineering is not extractive or exploitative but rather enriching and balanced and in harmony with that habitat and everything else that lives there. Is a beaver divine to the fish who swim in the cooler deeper waters they create? Are they more devout during a drought when they need those waters to survive it?

Returning to this - recently I destringed Dora, picking her up and bringing her into the bathroom to wrap her in a cloth and mess with her feet. She very quickly got out of the cloth, and tried to get back out of the window. Some following around on the bathroom floor later she sat in my hand completely freely and let me pull the hair she had tangled around her toes gently off. Because I see her so often, she didn't have long enough with the hair on her toes to do any real damage or require anything more than tweezers and my fingers to remove. She is called Dora because she is completely unafraid of the inside of the flat, and had a habit of getting impatient at the old window and flying down to pick up any fallen seeds on the floor (having been shown the trick by her father, Patches), and as a result got very very used to being picked up and held by me. I did not so much engineer this, as shape the possibility for it by interacting with and caring for the creatures in my world.