Charles Darwin once noted that natural selection tends to preserve traits that conceal an animal in nature. It can paint camouflage onto their bodies with astonishing quickness: The peppered moth’s wings darkened only a few decades after England’s Industrial Revolution blackened urban tree trunks. Decades later, when pollution let up, their wings lightened again. But evolution has not moved quickly enough to conceal animals from human-surveillance technologies, which are undergoing their own Cambrian explosion. Cameras and microphones are shrinking. They’re spreading all over the globe. Even as we cause animals to dwindle in number, they are finding it harder and harder to hide.
Humans are closing in on a real-time god’s-eye view of this planet. Some subsurface places remain unmonitored. The sun’s light penetrates only a thousand yards down into the ocean. In the “midnight zone,” below that threshold, strange, glowing animals can still live a life of genuine mystery. But on the planet’s surface, humanity’s sensors are everywhere. Even animals in the Himalayas can be seen by the satellites that fly overhead, snapping color pictures. They can spot the hot breath of a single whale geysering out of its blowhole.
Deep in the wilderness, way off the hiking trails, scientists have laid out grids of camera traps. Automated environmental-DNA stations census animals in these places by gathering fragments of their genetic material straight from the air, or from veins in the watershed, be they trickles of snowmelt or full streams. The closer a landscape is to civilization, the more intrusively its animals are watched. Those that live in rural barns, feed lots, or aquaculture ponds are monitored by cameras. Along fence lines, their predators are too. Even herds that roam free on the open range are microchipped and trailed by drones.
Cities are the most potent nodes of this global animal panopticon. CCTV cameras stake out big public spaces, and Ring cameras peer out onto quieter streets. Smartphone-toting humans wander everywhere in between, taking geotagged photos of animals, including those in their home. They upload these images to social networks, hoping that they go viral.
Many animals appear to be entirely unbothered by all of this surveillance. Raccoons may show interest in a camera after it flashes, but then move on quickly. Birds have a mixed response: Black-tailed godwits seem to barely even register the nest cams that hover above their freshly hatched chicks. Other species are more likely to abandon a monitored nest. Some animals react even more strongly. The mighty tigers of the Nepalese jungle try to steer clear of camera traps, and at least one chimpanzee has executed a planned attack on a surveillance drone.
If animals do indeed have feelings about surveillance and privacy, those feelings won’t map cleanly onto ours. I recently had occasion to reflect on this while letting my dog, Forrest, out to relieve himself at night. I tend to watch where he goes in the yard so that when he’s done, I can call him right in and get back to bed. As a consequence, we sometimes make eye contact while he completes the act. It gives me an uneasy feeling, the green shine of his irises hitting mine just as his stream touches the grass. I wonder if my sleepy-eyed stare strikes him as intrusive.
I asked Alexandra Horowitz, who researches dog cognition at Barnard, if Forrest might be experiencing something akin to embarrassment during these moments. Horowitz, who has written multiple books about the mental lives of dogs, was reassuring on this point. (She would later have much more to say about the limited privacy that dogs are afforded.) She explained that dogs understand where people are looking, and that if mine wanted to hide his behavior, he would be unlikely to engage in eye contact. And anyway, in his olfactory social world, urination is a proud public act.
But all of this is speculation, Horowitz emphasized. We can’t ask animals directly whether they have their own notions of privacy, so we have to settle for these behavioral clues and the musings of philosophers. Since at least the 1960s, they have been asking whether animals might have privacy interests, and now that surveillance technology is spreading rapidly, a new generation has revived this question. Angie Pepper, a philosopher at the University of Roehampton, in the United Kingdom, answers in the affirmative. She points to animal behaviors that strongly suggest that some animals have privacy interests, including some that we are currently violating. She argues that coming to see these animals in a morally decent way may entail not seeing them at all.
There are some obvious ways that surveillance can harm animals. Animal-location data may be used for conservation purposes, but it can also be accessed by “cyberpoachers” or even the authorities. In 2014, an Australian government agency noticed that a GPS-tagged great white shark was swimming close to a beach and issued a kill order, even though the agency had no record of it ever approaching a swimmer. The order was withdrawn a week later, but had scientists never tagged the shark’s dorsal fin, it likely wouldn’t have been targeted by this precrime unit.
Just because surveillance might cause an animal harm doesn’t mean that its privacy has been invaded. But disturbing its tranquility might qualify, according to Martin Kaehrle, a Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has written about this subject. Many of our fellow creatures do seem to prefer feeling that some tiny corner of the universe is uniquely theirs, if only for a moment. When animals are packed together and deprived of that feeling, total social breakdown can occur. Pepper points out that pigs on factory farms commit acts of violence that would otherwise be rare in their communities. Some bite their neighbor’s tail without warning. Hens in similar situations will peck out one another’s eyes. In a famous experiment, a colony of mice was forced to live in tight conditions just so scientists could see what would happen. The colony quickly descended into indiscriminate violence, stopped mating, and died out.
Since at least the mid-2000s, birding groups have been passionately debating how best to preserve an animal’s tranquility, Kaehrle told me. He has spent years screenshotting these discussions on social-media sites, wildlife forums, and listservs. People argue about how much space a birder should give to its target, and whether baiting them with food is appropriate. Several communities agreed to implement total bans on location sharing.
In decades past, a birder who spotted a rare bird might notify someone at their local Audubon Society, who might then mark it with a colored pushpin on a map, or add it to a weekly recorded hotline message. Today, sightings flow much more quickly through digital-birding platforms, Discords, WhatsApp groups, and X accounts. One such account in New York City has tens of thousands of followers. A few years ago, the account doxxed a snowy owl, and it quickly became encircled by admirers, plus at least one drone. Snowy owls live in the High Arctic for half the year. By the time one reaches as far as New York, it is tired and hungry. If these endangered birds have to take flight over and over in order to avoid the boldest members of a human crowd, they can weaken further and even fail to mate.
Not all philosophers are willing to count these disturbances of an animal’s serene environment or personal space as an invasion of privacy. Some would argue that there are plenty of other reasons to think that harassing an animal is wrong. But a more straightforward case can be made in instances involving a more intimate kind of exposure. Humans are familiar with these scenarios, because we live in a complex social world, and we navigate it by presenting ourselves differently in different situations. You have a version of yourself who is the thinker of your innermost thoughts, the dancer before your bedroom mirror—but you likely present other versions in your interactions with your partner, kids, close family members, dear friends, doctors, and bosses. That’s why people don’t want their deepest secrets spilled onto the internet: Our ability to switch between selves would be seriously impaired. We would be forced into intimacy with everyone.
Many other animals also present different selves to different members of their communities. Kristin Andrews, a philosopher at York University, told me about gelada monkeys, which live in units consisting of one dominant male and about a dozen females. Gelada social norms dictate that the dominant male has sexual access to all of the females; a few follower males may be in the group but have no such access. When females mate with the dominant male, they do it out in the open and emit loud mating cries. It is a public act. But sometimes, for reasons that are her own, a female will transgress the community’s norms: She will seek to mate with another male, but not in public. The two will likely go for it when the dominant male is away, and they will emit much quieter mating cries.
Animal self-switching can also be detected in their communications. Some of their utterances are just indiscriminate broadcasts, but certain species use quiet tones to target a limited set of listeners, or even an individual. When humans communicate in this way, we reflexively describe it as private. Yet this has not stopped researchers from placing bioacoustic sensors in all kinds of wild habitats—and not only microphones: Seismic arrays of the sort that originally listened for nuclear tests have recently been used to detect the infrasonic rumbling of elephants. Teams of researchers are trying to use AI to decipher these rumbles.
Eavesdropping on elephants may not be technically possible, in the end. Either way, people probably won’t get too worked up about it, unless researchers use the information that they glean from an elephant wiretap to hurt the animals. But there is a class of animals whose privacy concerns are already acute: those that we keep in zoos or our homes. These animals are monitored by humans in ways that they likely would not choose. In zoos, many primates clearly prefer enclosures that give them the ability to retreat out of view. Not all of them get to make that choice. Neither do some of our most beloved pets.
“Dogs are given almost no privacy,” Horowitz told me. “I don’t know if they yearn for it, but in a typical home, they are expected to always be available. We even decide where they sleep.” Dogs don’t have a lot of opportunities for self-determination, Pepper told me when I asked her about pet privacy. “They always have to be accessible, not just in terms of sight but also touch.” Hearing this gave me a little jolt of shame. My Forrest is affectionate, but he is not a constant cuddler, like some of my previous dogs were. I probably force more hugs on him than I should.
We are not great respecters of boundaries, human beings. Dogs may not have known this about us when they first edged up to our campfires, more than 10,000 years ago. They could not have anticipated the degree to which we would dictate the most intimate parts of their lives, up to and including their sexual partners. Even after these dramatic interventions, which we have used to cultivate in dogs a preference for captivity, we still have to exercise a lot of coercion in order to get them to play along. We have to remove them from their mother while they are still young. We have to keep them behind locked doors and gates, and on leashes.
“It’s not obvious to me that the natural end point for dogs is this thick relationship where we dictate all aspects of their life,” Pepper said. “There are free-living dogs that have much thinner relationships with humans. They might stop by to get something to eat or to find somewhere to sleep, but they aren’t under this constant human control. Even the dogs that we have thoroughly socialized to live with us prefer varying levels of intimacy. Not all of them want to be with us all the time. They might seem like it when we come home at night, but in some cases, that’s because they didn’t have much company during the daytime.”
We can’t say what dogs’ preferences might be under different circumstances. But we do know that they have not chosen all of the intimacies that we impose upon them. They don’t get to decide the amount of distance that exists between them and us. They are expected to come right away when called. Rarely are they allowed to refuse our physical attention. There are moments when they may prefer to be untouched or unseen. Even when we are out of town, many of us watch them on cameras. We do all of these things because we love them, but this love is one that we thoroughly control. To them, at times, it may feel like something else.
The post Do You Owe Your Dog Privacy? appeared first on The Atlantic.
