Animal Sensuality

A few months ago I visited an ashram named Skanda Vale, near Lampeter in Wales. Our  MA Anthrozoology group went there to talk to the resident Swamis about their relationships with the animals living at Skanda Vale, which covers an entire valley, and is home to indigenous and exotic species, including donkeys, goats, rescued poultry birds, a herd of water buffalo, and an elephant named Valli, gifted to the ashram by Sri Lanka. Although the ashram brands itself as a ‘multi-faith community’, the main precepts that it is run by are Hindu in origin, and consequently it is a place of pilgrimage for Hindus from across the globe. Within Britain, Skanda Vale is most commonly known through the media coverage surrounding the killing of the bull Shambo. In 2007 Shambo was diagnosed with bovine TB, and the Swamis and other human residents of the ashram entered into a long and bitter dispute with Defra regarding Shambo’s fate. Despite Skanda Vale arguing that Shambo was sacred to them, Defra prevailed, and Shambo was destroyed.

We were forewarned that the episode with Shambo was still raw in people’s minds, and the topic wasn’t raised. Instead, the swamis spoke in a more general way about their respect for the animals that they share their lives with, with many of them devoted sole carers for a particular species living at the ashram, spending almost all their waking hours caring for their charges. One swami happened to mention that caring for the resident herd of water buffalo was a good way for him to practice mindfulness.

This mindfulness idea has been popping into my head ever since the ashram visit. The aim of mindfulness is to be able to dwell completely inside the present moment, with no thought of the past or of the future. It’s considered a holy state to be in for many religions. I’ve tried it. It’s really, really hard to sustain for longer than a few moments. But somehow its always easier with animals around. For a couple of years now I’ve been walking Battersea Dogs Home’s canine residents every Sunday, and I think I understand how the swami is aided by his buffalo companions. It’s a tired old cliché that animals live in the moment, but that tired old cliché is true. And you can’t help living there with them.

It’s August. It hasn’t been a summer to write home about, but we’ve had a few idyllic blue sky days, and today was one of them. With sheer, exultant joy, a six stone Husky, (who up until now has been the very picture of aloof poise) launches himself into the cool waters of a paddling pool. The split-your-face grin of a fat little Staffie bitch as she collapses belly-first into a patch of moist green grass and clover, and splays her little legs behind her like a frog, is one of the sweetest things I’ve ever seen. In my capacity as dog walker, I spend all winter wishing it was summer, and all summer dreading winter. When have I ever just engaged with my surroundings the way that these dogs do? They have the mindfulness of a Buddha (if not the calmness), and it takes no effort at all.

In the lushly written The Spell of The Sensuous (1996) ecologist David Abram advocates the deeply mindful use of all our senses in regaining a connection with nature and our surroundings, as a way of reminding ourselves what we have to lose, before it is too late.

Without the oxygenating breath of the forests, without the clutch of gravity and the tumbled magic of river rapids, we have no distance from our technologies, no way of assessing their limitations, no way to keep ourselves from turning into them…Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds and shapes of an animate earth – our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human (Abram, 1996, my italics).

Abram’s frequent use throughout the book of technology as a counterpoint to sensuality can’t help but hark back to Andrew Feenberg’s work on the Philosophy of Technology, and the Determinist viewpoint that technology, rather than being human controlled, is in fact, controlling us. The new awareness that allowing ourselves to experience the ‘spell’ of sensuality can awaken in us, just might be enough to break the ‘spell’ of technology, that we are currently (considered to be) under.

Animals make us mindful, and not just in a vicarious way, but in a deeply sensual way too. As Abram points out, we have evolved to be tuned into them. Think about the sound that crickets make on a summer evening, or of a bee buzzing past your ear. The way that warm dog fur feels on your palm, the way it smells.  The sight of a glossy, red ladybird against a green leaf. The easiest way for us to spread our awareness into our surroundings is for those surroundings to have animals in them. Sure, cars could work too. The sound of engines revving. The taste of smog-air in your mouth. It’s no wonder we’ve retreated into personal space bubbles with sensory stimulation like that on offer. And, as Feenberg points out, man-made things simply reflect us back at ourselves. There is no sensory journey to compare to that of experiencing another being as it experiences us, and engages with its surroundings.

It’s strange to think that we might be able to save the future by thinking simply about the present… if only for a little while.