Why not look at animals?

Abstract

There’re fifteen remote-sensing cameras in my home range, plus infrared counters and barbed-wire snags to collect my hair. I suppose it’s like most of the surveillance that goes on today – it’s partly there to protect you, and partly to protect everybody else from you. – Bear 71

They’d be able to tell something called your ‘pattern of life’. – Edward Snowden[1]

First, there is the ambiguity of the title that promises reasons for why we should avoid looking at animals, while at the same time suggests, nonchalantly, that there is really no harm in looking – so why not look? Like John Berger’s essay ‘Why Look at Animals?’ (1980), of which this is a revisiting of sorts, I offer no panacea for the perils of looking. In the case of animals, there is never the threat of a pillar of salt, but there is, under new legislation that prohibits the taking of unauthorised images, the threat of ‘domestic terrorism’.[2]