What if Animals Are Actually Political Rebels?

Have you ever noticed that our modern cities look more and more like fortresses designed entirely by and for humans? I get the feeling that we have extended our walls so far that we have ended up cutting ourselves off from our roots, almost forgetting that there was a time when we, too, were simple inhabitants of the forest. By constantly viewing the human being as a peerless builder operating above nature, we quickly come to imagine that we live completely outside of it.

With industrialization and the explosion of our megacities, our connection to animals, to animality, has radically changed. Today, for me, this relationship often boils down to two things: either it is the little domestic companion sleeping on the couch, or it is a distant documentary image. “Wild” animals seem to have their place in the zoo or the jungle, and farm animals remain quietly confined to their pastures, far from our streets.

Sometimes, I have the feeling that nature has become a postcard.

Besides, if animals were to invite themselves back into our urban daily lives, many of us would experience it as a genuine invasion! And there are examples of this in recent history; I am thinking of the famous “Emu War” in early 20th-century Australia. Farmers who had cut off the migration routes of these giant birds suddenly found themselves confronted with their pillaging, to the point of taking up arms. This historical anecdote reminds us of one essential thing: fantasizing about nature as a pure, distant, and docile space might mean forgetting that it is very much alive and sometimes has what it takes to unsettle us.

But then, what if the animal were ultimately one of the best examples of rebellion against our desire to dominate everything? In this article, I suggest we look at animals from a different angle and explore how, on their own scale, they wage a kind of daily struggle, which I will approach under two aspects: the first, solidarity, and the second, which we might call “feralization”.

Solidarity, at the Heart of the Struggle

It would perhaps be a shame to think that animals cannot, too, express a certain discontent. Another story that I found quite fascinating is what we call: the pig riots in the 1820s in the United States. At that time, pigs moved freely in the streets of downtown New York, engaging in everything that can be expected from these animals: feeding on leftovers, garbage, defecating in public squares, etc. These dissident activities, in the eyes of city legislation, caused a moral and political concern for the authorities. In view of the numerous complaints and letters they received, journalists spoke of a “porcine multitude.” Movements of New York knights, former military men, and men of good fortune allied to make life hard for these escapees from the New York countryside.

I find it interesting to point out that these historical reactions to which we have access come exclusively from populations in power or upper classes who hold negative and dirty representations of these animals. None are expressed by people on the streets and the poorest classes of the city center, who have only limited access to political speech. And this seems hardly surprising to me insofar as these pigs were subjected to the same eviction policies as these discriminated populations. As a result of these legislations aimed at banning their presence, riots took place, and power struggles between the authorities and crowds of men and animals were formed. This does not mean a de facto equality or relationship, but a certain clarity in the meaning given to their struggle. In other words, a common opposition to the coercive and dominating forces of their environment. This cohabitation occurred to the extent that both marginalized people and animals found themselves ostracized to the margins of the center. For the philosopher Fahim Amir in Animal Revolts, we can speak of a: “continuum of forms of resistance.”

Of course, this does not mean that men and animals had sat down to sign a pact of alliance! But we can see in it a certain form of cohabitation, solidarity, or common opposition against dominating authorities.

Feralization

If the story of the pigs illustrates an astonishing circumstantial harmony between humans and animals, there is another feathered city dweller that, in my opinion, perfectly embodies this everyday resistance: the pigeon.

Even though it has formidably adapted to urban life, it was, for a long time, the horrible political metaphor for a pest. In his research, the sociologist Colin Jerolmack delved into the archives of the New York Times from 1851 to 2006 to try to grasp the traces of the demonization of pigeons as an invasive species. These results brought to light several forms of opposition between a representation of the sanitized, ordered city with a nature under control, and the presence of the dirty, uncontrollable, and dissident bird. And it is the last term in the enumeration that catches my attention: dissidence. Why is this bird so much so in over a century of one of the most famous newspapers in the world?

To answer this question I had, I looked into a bit of history. Despite being one of the most anciently domesticated animals, over 5,000 years ago, in our cities, it has returned to being, or above all mostly, wild. Look at a pigeon: it resists and adapts to the urban environment, blithely defecating on buildings, fornicating in broad daylight in the public square, and finding its food as an opportunist of the modern consumption system, etc. Despite the species name we see the most: “the domestic pigeon”, this invisibilization of its behavioral in-betweenness, even in its zoological name, seems to me masked in favor of its potential controllability. This bastard population, between dog and wolf, seems to pose a problem for public policies. By dint of watching them, in Paris, in Marseille, the pigeon now appears to me as the very metaphor of this elusive nature, which overflows from everywhere, mocking the militarization of facades with spikes and these attempts at domination similar to those installed on benches for homeless people.

To quote again the philosopher of Animal Revolts, Fahim Amir: “Whoever feeds the pigeons, feeds the resistance”. From a Marxist perspective, I would like to add that if the city belongs to those who live in it and produce it, the city also belongs to the pigeons.