ANIMALIPEDIA

The Journal of Post-Human Studies

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Animal uprisings

A social conflict today is that there is too many animals you are not allowed to be shoot or killed and because of that there is too many of them uprising.

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Unwittingly prophetic comments from the 21st century will always have a home on Animalipedia.

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Animalipedia will be taking a short hiatus. Expect us back Monday, October 6.

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Formerly domesticated species often have intense emotional reactions to the Fence Museum. Seen here: Abilene, a descendant of domesticated pigs.

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Unsimilar, the only known named antelope, migrates south from the School of Philosophy to rejoin his herd for mating season.

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Post-Human Studies

[This article is frequently conflated with "posthumanism", a term from human philosophy. For the best sense of "posthumanism", we suggest looking at Old Wikipedia.]

Post-Human Studies is the exploration of culture through the lens of animal culture's prior subjugation by, and departure from, a human-centric philosophy. In this sense, it could be seen as resembling human terms like "postcolonialism", although it is difficult to compare human influence on other humans to the global depersonification of nonhumans over the course of history, or the relative lack of influence some species experienced in relation to humans, or the philosophies that developed alongside but separated from humanity due to a lack of cultural diffusion. For example, the music of the Shark Luddites contains no traces of human interference, and even Dolphincore contains minimal human influence.

Post-Human Studies is foremost dedicated to the study of animals, and references to humans in-discipline almost always take the form of discussion relating to animals. This is facilitated at least in part by all humans being extinct.

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An explorer finds the remains of a human settlement, preserved in a snowdrift above the permafrost line.

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Indian Elephants preparing for the annual Independence Day ceremonies.

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From the Journal of J.B.H., Dropout -- 2nd Entry of Summer

(A month after our dedicated Cat History posts, we received this strange dispatch from the American continent. It may be fiction; it appears to be written by one or more animals. We are grateful, and are running it as part of our ongoing dedication to new animal voices.)

By J.B.H.

____ hates Dog, but not as much as humans said he should. ____ has his own reasons. ____ has his own reasons for a lot of things, all of them contrary. ____ had a name (given by humans), but he refused it; ____ had a kind (named by humans), but he refused that too; ____ had a domain of his very own (left behind by humans), but he left that behind as well.  

____ also takes things of his own volition, things that others would mind greatly if they knew he took them. He takes baubles and jewels and money and clothes. He takes keepsakes and letters and postcards and mementos. He takes joy and comfort and ideas and hope. He took the first molting of an old anaconda down at the Memphis Zoo-yard and wore it as a stole for weeks until it fell apart. He took two of the three children of a mothering sparrow and disposed of them as his urges told him to. He took the title of Prince-Of-The-World-In-Wandering to spite his old humans. ____ was a transgressor, and that was his meaning in life. 

Dog is simpler — simpler and more pathetic, ____ thought. Dog doesn’t talk much, and when he does ask some sideways question like “Where are we going?” or “Why are they so angry at us?” ____ will answer with something snide and cryptic and Dog will accept it as the truth. Dog is good company that way: he seldom disagrees, even if odd thoughts and questions build up in his simple mind and come out at odd times. Dog is also good muscle, which is very helpful for none-too-imposing ____, although that often takes convincing to use properly to his own ends. ____ still hates him, though. Not for his cloying, dumb sweetness — ____ likes playing off of that. It is mainly because I am better at swaying Dog to my side of things, I think: and ____ hates me much more.

We have been walking along the overgrown Old Johnson Road for two days now, not that anyone cares. About the name, that is, not that we’ve been walking it: ____ complains endlessly, and Dog is getting tired from carrying on his back all the food we pilfered from the prior’s house at Alder Grove. They care about that. But Dog never understood human names — he had that tamed out of him in his youth — and ____ finds it generally offensive to be calling things by “the names of our judged oppressors”. I am bored; Dog is tired; and ____ has been boasting about his daring act of thievery, and then gets quiet for a while and starts looking around paranoiacally and tells us to pick up the pace. I can’t say as I blame him: Alder Grove is far from the worst place around to be dealing with, but it is still a bad idea to take advantage of their hospitality. I told him as much, but I’m still eating the sunflower seeds.

This afternoon we made very little progress, and ____ was ready to kill Dog. When we came around a bend, there was an old, rusted-out car teetering off the roadside. It had been the first we had seen in quite a while, since ____ preferred to travel country pathways and backroads, and to avoid the big sprawls (“for his own reasons”, he said, which I had yet to quite figure out). ____ didn’t say a word, but Dog stopped silently and stared. He sat down, and I and the packs slid off his back onto the ground. It took ____ a while to notice.

He walked over. “Where’s Dog?” he asked incredulously. By then Dog was already sitting in the backseat, head leaning out the missing window. He regarded ____’s presence and attention with a little motion of the eye; mostly he just stayed glassy-eyed where he sat, expectant but not knowing what to expect. He glanced at ____ every time he shouted something, or threatened Dog, or spewed vitriol to urge them to get moving. But Dog didn’t move, didn’t even say a word in return.

I found it amusing for a long while — it broke the tedium remarkably well. Eventually I got tired of ____ foaming and stepped in on Dog’s behalf. “Shut up and stay out of this, you useless little cunt!” were ____’s exact words. I shat in his dinner later on when he wasn’t looking: I do not appreciate that kind of language.

Dog still wouldn’t budge, and ____ got pissed and went off stalking into the woods, though I would occasionally hear him creeping around nearby, so he never went far. I stared at Dog from then until evening, watching his determined stillness. I never spoke at him, and he never regarded me once. ____ returned, and I prepared the food, and we camped the night right there by the car. Dog never ate; he eventually just drooped his head onto the window frame as the evening wore on. ____ slept beneath the tire of the car — he refused to be party to Dog’s behavior, and refused to speak with him. At some point, Dog disappeared from the window, and curled up in the backseat to sleep. I chose a clump of receipts on the dashboard as my bed.

When I woke up, Dog was sitting outside, ____ very determinedly not talking to him. We are shortly to be moving on, and I am saddened to think that little more interesting awaits us on this long and drowsy road.

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Yaks. Click photo for credits.

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Erou ("Odd Guy"), former Ostracized, now with herd. Following the return of the ice caps, white reindeer are increasingly more likely to be accepted into group living. Click photo for credits.

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publication day

(editor's note: this article, like all articles written about chacma baboons who adhere to anticapitalist doctrine, will refrain from the use of capital letters.)

demory tried to burn the manuscript. it seemed like the right thing to do, now that he had at least vented it. but he would have had to start a fire (against the laws of new capetown), so instead he thought about eating it. he chewed through part of the title page and then spat it out in disgust. finally, he put it away in a corner of an abandoned building and left it there, hoping rain would melt it while he wasn't thinking about it.

he tried to return to his job, stamping immigration papers for the new capetown government. he found himself thinking of more lies, but now that he knew how hard it was to get rid of them, he was hesitant to write down any more. this back-and-forth in his mind went on for six months, until one day, a citizen entered new capetown with a book under his arm.

"what's that?" demory asked. the title looked vaguely familiar...the big yawn. oh dear. 

"i got it at the human archive," the citizen, a lesser baboon, said. "it's a detective book. very exciting."

"you can't bring that in here," demory said. "written lies are--"

"oh, that's the best part!" the lesser said, opening up the book to the first page. in all lowercase letters, it read, 'written by d., a chacma'--and under that, 'nonfiction.'

"see?" the lesser said, shutting the book with a little grunt of satisfaction. "it was written by one of us. it must be true."

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demory, from the dust jacket of his first book, the big yawn. note: all posts on chacma baboons on animalipedia will be written without capital letters, as a gesture of respect to anticapitalist thinkers.

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the crime novel

For Sean Demory

(redirected from List of Non-Ape Scholars)

the chacma baboons of new capetown have strict laws against the kinds of things demory does, at night, after he has finished work. it is one of the first laws of the greater chacmas (the largest and most organized species) that stories are lies, and that any lie recorded is a great evil.

demory lies anyway. he lies quietly, to himself, on an antique manual typewriter he found in the bombed-out basement of a building near his job as a city clerk. he lies in a hunt-and-peck fashion, one sentence at a time, with no capital letters, because the chacmas believe that capitalizing is making some letters better than others. it is bad enough, this obsession with lying, even if there's no harm in it. 

moreover, demory writes bad things into existence: crimes, monsters, disasters. he can't help it. he wants to see how they cope, the brave chacmas (and other baboons, and the occasional chimpanzee detective). it hurts him to write them into corners, have them beaten by organized criminals or sunk in the ocean to battle squid, but he's left no choice. the stories unfold in front of him, whether he wants them to or not. sometimes it feels like all he can do is peck out the keys, raising his hackles and gritting his sharp incisors in sympathy at everything that his characters struggle with.

finally, he has a book finished, and he sits and looks at it, and wonders what he is supposed to do with it. the thing itself compelled him while he worked on it, he supposed he'd get it out of his system and then throw it away. but now it sits on his desk and looks at him. it's awfully heavy, for a stack of paper. and he suddenly understands the ban on written lies: now that it's been written, he wants someone to read it.

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Schh, an ocelot, shown here demonstrating safe sleeping habits for small predators--a teaser from his new article on survival strategies. 

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Albatross completing Land Ritual before returning to the ocean.

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Messenger macaque with neck-mounted message tube. Macaques often relay messages across long distances for other species, facilitated by their unified language and strong feelings of inter-troop Team Morale.

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Bonobos at the Human Archive Building in the South Congo. Foreground: Hibiscus Baobab. Background: Professors Hibiscus Leaf and Fallen Tree.