Animal Economics

John Martin, The Country of the Iguanodon (1837)  

One should not speak ill of animals.

Animals move within an economy older than speech, fluent as weather. Muscle answers resistance. Tooth meets fiber. Pressure gathers, then loosens, then gathers again, like a tide learning the shoreline by touch. In the park I watch a dog set its jaw to a fallen branch, the pale wood freckled with lichen, the bark smelling faintly of rain and sap. The dog’s eyes hold a clean brightness. The jaw works. The branch yields with a dry sigh. Splinters feather outward. The dog pauses, tongue tasting the air, satisfaction passing through its body as simply as breath. Then the work resumes. The motion carries no inward weather. It belongs entirely to the moment, to the delight of force meeting form.

This understanding lives in bodies before it ever visits minds. It lives in the way a cat presses its flank against a warm radiator, the way a horse leans into the bit and finds a line of balance, the way birds test the firmness of a branch before committing their weight. The world answers pressure with texture. Life learns by leaning. There is a pleasure in this fluency, a trust that sensation will teach what needs teaching.