To Give a Goldfish Agency — The Joys (and Perils) of Writing on Nonhuman Life

Pandora, a female giant Pacific octopus, was a popular zoo resident in Washington, D.C., for two years before dying in 2014. Photo: Smithsonian's National Zoo/Abby Wood via Flickr Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Feature: To Give a Goldfish Agency — The Joys (and Perils) of Writing on Nonhuman Life

By Karen Pinchin

For many environmental journalists, writing about nonhuman lives can represent a major challenge: How can we write accurately and eloquently on that which we can never truly know?

As the author of “Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas” — in which I write, in part, from the perspective of a giant bluefin tuna named Amelia — this topic is one I’ve ruminated on for years. So last spring, in a Sunday morning session at the 2024 SEJ conference, I sat down with a group of other writers and thinkers to explore it more deeply.

On the panel were environmental educator and author Nancy Castaldo, science journalist and essayist Sabrina Imbler and Pennsylvania Lenape Keeper of Culture Barbara "Bluejay” Michalski. Carl Safina, author and professor at Stony Brook University, had to cancel his travel plans last minute, but joined us in substance and spirit, sending along emailed responses to the topics we tackled.

 

Magic, wonder, empathy

We began by sharing our earliest inspirations for centering animals. In one way or another, each of us discovered formative magic, wonder and empathy in the natural world as children.

After giving a land acknowledgment, Michalski shared the Lenape Prophecy of the Fourth Crow, which tells the story of four crows: the first who flew alongside the Creator; the second who tried to clean the world and died; the third who hid; and the fourth who once again flew alongside the Creator.

 

It’s a story of survival and land-keeping

that Michalski learned as a girl,

representing the teaching that

all beings are relations of ours.

 

It’s a story of survival and land-keeping that she learned as a girl, representing the teaching that all beings — from plants to animals — are relations of ours, and whose lives have the same value as human lives.

Castaldo’s foundational influences included literature and movies in which animals were given human characteristics, including “Dr. Doolittle” and “The Jungle Book.” (“For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack,” she quoted from the latter.) She also had an early obsession with salamanders.

For Imbler, an early experience with a goldfish named Quincy (which they write about in “How Far the Light Reaches”) echoed Safina’s childhood encounter with a bird that flew into his family’s Brooklyn apartment, an emissary from another world.

 

Respecting interiority and agency

In environmental writing, anthropomorphism — attributing human characteristics or behaviors to nonhuman lives — is often a thorny issue. The technique can help readers draw closer to animal protagonists, but can also act as a tool of estrangement.

Bluefin tuna in Croatia's Kornati National Park. Photo: Tom Puchner via Flickr Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Imbler gave the example of describing animals as “sex-crazed” or “deceptive” — words with moral weight — to describe an aspect of animal biology that’s detached from human-style morality.

In one essay, Imbler tells the story of a female deep-sea octopus that broods her eggs for more than four years, as a counterpoint to their mother’s own relationship with disordered eating. In it, Imbler recognized it was important to keep the two narratives separate.

“I reminded myself that I had no access to the octopus’s interiority. I could not project my own emotions or imaginings,” they said. “This brooding practice of mother octopuses, seen in another light, extends their life far beyond those of the males. In that way, I was able to further remove the octopus’s experience from my human sense of it.”

As a scientist, Safina says respecting animals’ agency and right to exist is the entirety of his internalized approach to his animal characters.

“No one I know who studies free-living vertebrates says, ‘They have no feelings,’ or ‘We have no way of knowing,’ he wrote. “We have the same hormones and neurotransmitters, that vertebrate nervous system, and similar basic needs. What is not reasonable is to deny animals their nervous systems and the logic of their observable responses.”

 

A deeper dive into anthropomorphism

Castaldo echoed Imbler’s and Safina’s beliefs that anthropomorphism must be used with both strategic thoughtfulness and scientific rigor.

One of Castaldo’s most recent books is about sniffer dogs — dogs trained to find and track objects using their powerful smelling abilities. While writing it, she made sure to approach her canine protagonists as individuals with intrinsic worth rather than tools or machines that exist only to be used by humans.

As someone who has written at length about the commodification of marine creatures within our capitalist food system, and further explored these ideas in “Kings of Their Own Ocean,” I found it exciting and validating to hear these other authors discuss the perils of anthropomorphism with such depth and insight.

While she isn’t a professional writer, Michalski responded by noting that in Lenape culture it’s understood that animals, as human ancestors and relations, often exhibit human characteristics and behaviors, and may even, themselves, have agency over human lives.

She illustrated her point with an example from her personal life. For a time, she said, she frequently and bafflingly encountered vultures everywhere — until, one day, an elder encouraged her to take the carrion-eating birds’ presence as an opportunity to look closely at the “garbage” she needed to deal with in her life. That was when the presence of those birds, and the gift they were giving her by appearing, struck home.

 

Examining our perceptions

While we may use animal lives as a lens through which to view our humanity (or animality), the panelists agreed that caution is required. It is important to recognize that metaphors can be transformative and illuminating, but they can also blind us to the real state of things, they said.

“Many animals and other living things (or nonliving things) can seem exquisitely beautiful, or wonderfully adorable; they can be shocking, or amusing. But those perceptions are not properties of them; they’re our responses to them,” said Safina. “Those metaphors and responses come from us.”

For those who are interested in writing more deeply from the perspective of our animal relations, Imbler recommended the work of Dutch anthropologist Franz de Waal, who coined the term “anthropodenialism” for the practice of rejecting animals’ humanlike traits.

 

‘If I ever find myself writing about an

animal that is strange — perhaps a

terrifying bug or deep-sea creature

— I never use the word “alien”

to describe that strangeness.’

                                                — Sabrina Imbler

 

“If I ever find myself writing about an animal that is strange — perhaps a terrifying bug or deep-sea creature — I never use the word ‘alien’ to describe that strangeness,” Imbler said. “However we may have diverged over the years, we all have a universal common ancestor, and we all know about each other by virtue of inhabiting the same planet.”

Imbler also provided one of my key takeaways from the panel: a desire to act out parasitism, which is the practice of sucking energy, nutrients or sustenance from a larger creature. The idea could be applied, Imbler said, to how writers and activists can try to sap power from large organizations that don’t serve us, siphoning off a modicum of that power for the collective good.

Ultimately, it was inspiring for us all to experience the blend of intelligence, scientific rigor and empathy shown by those who are working to unpick the complexity of reporting on nonhuman life.

It’s a hard thing, to brave the limits of what science knows about plant and animal consciousness, and our panelists’ quests to do so show the limits of what is possible. 

As environmental journalists look to tell stories of complex, interwoven life, I hope we may all discover the fullest tapestry in the most brilliant complexity — plant and animal brethren and all.

[Editor’s Note: Material for this story was drawn from a panel session moderated by Pinchin at the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual conference in Philadelphia in April 2024, whose sponsors are listed here.]

Karen Pinchin is a Kjipuktuk/Halifax-based science journalist specializing in complex, investigation-fueled long-form stories about food systems, the environment, technology and culture. Her first book, “Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas,” was a national bestseller published in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom in July 2023. Starred by Kirkus, it was reviewed by The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal and Civil Eats, was named one of The Globe and Mail’s 100 Best Books of the Year, and has won numerous awards. Pinchin’s journalism has been supported by the Sloan Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts and Access Copyright, and she's a regular contributor to Canadian Geographic and The Globe and Mail.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 9, No. 46. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.