“There is a wonderful word for this sensory bubble—Umwelt. It was defined and popularized by the Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909. Umwelt comes from the German word for `environment,' but Uexküll didn’t use it simply to refer to an animal’s surroundings. Instead, an Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience—its perceptual world."
This quote is essentially the one that defines the entire premise of this book. It is a deep dive into the Umwelt of an astonishing assortment of an incredible array of different creatures. Some of these creatures are ones that readers will feel very familiar with while others will be completely new and utterly foreign. Some may seem otherworldly. The term "sensory bubble" is an especially resonant one because, of course, the non-human world is not the only one on the planet in which inhabitants insulate themselves within a bubble in which their senses and experiences are defined by the limitations of what they can perceive. Some human readers may be able to learn about their own Umwelt by acquiring information about all the others found across this immense world.
"We humans underestimate our sense of smell, but it's also clear that we simply don't live in the same olfactory world as a dog. And that world is so complicated that it's a wonder we can make sense of it all."
This quote is a reference to the enormous chasm existing between a dog's sense of smell and that of human beings. Even when a direct comparison is not being made, this idea forms the basis of the book. In other words, as one learns more and more about the peculiarities of the Umwelt of individual creatures and the very specialized abilities evolution has designed for them, it is impossible not to wonder what humanity would look like today if humans possessed even a fraction of these abilities. The smallest of living begins on the planet are endowed with such evolutionary developments which if transformed into human terms would be considered nothing more than superpowers. The reality, as the author asserts, is that human begins are actually quite a good distance away from being superheroes. If a human possessed just the olfactory abilities of a dog, for instance, that human could become an almost unstoppable law enforcement specialist.
"Animals eat without pleasure, cry without pain, growing without knowing it: they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing."
Malebranche was a philosopher of the Rationalist school and his overview of the animal world was one shared wholly or in part for much of human history. This entire time is dedicated to revealing just how much the view toward the sentience of the animal world has changed over time. Of course, one could well nitpick that Malebranche was making a logical leap that on its very surface is easily disproven. Any dog owner can attest to the fact that animals most certainly do experience fear and desire. The author includes this quote, however, as an example of the philosophic hubris of human beings. The ability to convey that one is eating with pleasure is an entirely different thing from actually feeling pleasure.
