Cooperation with Animals

Another avenue of research for developing the Peaceable Kingdom is seeing how far animals can go in making cooperative arrangements with human beings that allow them to exist in human dominated environments. I have done some experiments myself along these lines and found that one can make "deals" with many wild species, even insect species, so that the two of you can co-exist without fear or vast inconvenience. In my limited experiments I've successfully made deals with ants, spiders, (including black widows), and raccoons.

Once, long ago in communal days, members of our commune, which was situated on an old mining site where there were overgrown mining "tailings", piles of stones that made excellent rattlesnake dens, made a "deal" with the rattlesnakes. There were literally too many of them to get rid of and so we simply told them that we wouldn't bother them if they didn't bother us, which they seemed to have agreed to as they stopped coming near our communal mainhouse which before the pact they often went near scaring us often as well. No one ever got bit by rattlesnakes there and there are few places in California were there are higher concentrations of rattlesnakes than on this particular farm in the foothills of the Sierras..

A muddauber wasp was the creature that actually taught me how to strike deals with animals. The wasp taught me to open our cabin door for it to go out using common wasp language: it would buzz close to my head to get my attention, buzz around until I was up and moving trying to get away from it as it circled me until I neared the cabin door and opened it up for it to zoom out. It came back through some unseen passage in the walls but always wanted me to open the door for it to go out. Same routine of buzzing me until I opened the door for it.

One Fall season my kitchen was invaded by ants who made an ant city in a large Coleus plant pot I had on the kitchen counter near the sink. I noticed that the Coleus plant had greatly grown in size after the ants moved in and discovered that they were fertilizing the potting soil as well as breaking it it up into smaller and more nutrient-available form for the Coleus plant. Obviously, the plant and ants had a cooperative symbiotic relationship going on. Why not with human too? So, the deal I made with them was simple: When they were out on the kitchen counter in their thousands eating up tiny pieces of food they found there and I wanted to use the counter, I told them I would knock three times on the counter which would be their signal to go back into the pot. They picked up on it right away and within 2 or 3 minutes all the ants on the counter would disappear after I knocked three times.

Another deal I made was with raccoons. I was living in a tiny rural trailer park I guess you could call it. I had a small kitten and raccoons came around regularly at night to check out the garbage cans. I knew that raccoons sometimes killed cats and because I had a kitty-door that was easily accessible to the raccoons as well as my cat I decided to make a deal with them. I told them one night that I would feed them my table scraps if they would not come into my trailer and steal food or hurt my kitten. I started feeding them at night with scraps on a plate that I would reach up and put on top of the trailer roof so the neighbor dogs wouldn't eat it. The raccoons would waddle up the nearby tree and jump to the roof and eat. They never came into my trailer and never bothered my cat. My next door neighbor who hadn't made any such deal was frightened several times by these same raccoons when she tried to shoo them away from her garbage cans. I never had any conflicts with the raccoons who honored our agreement.

In the future I can imagine there will be people who are good at communicating with animals who will have jobs arranging cooperative coexistence systems between people and animals. I found that one doesn't have to have any magic animal language to talk to animals; just talking plain English to them seems to work fine, explaining what I want about two or three times when they are within listening distance and paying attention. I can see new symbiotic relationships forming between humans and animals, i.e., with animals doing clean-up work in exchange for food as my ants performed.

Species forms may change with human community interaction, e.g. the foxes into dogs example. But we human beings must develop ways that allow our wild friends to continue to co-evolve with us as we progress further with human society. In the Climax Civilization pages you will find that our universal social aim is to develop a universal human society that can coexist with the natural communities of life and that is also the aim of developing the Peaceable Kingdom.

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