by Mike O’Brien
I was going to write about a recent study [1] on raccoons, where the adaptable little critters were given puzzle boxes to solve in order to access food rewards. On each box there were three small doors with their own distinct mechanisms, each requiring a different kind of manipulation to open. What made this study notable was that, unlike previous experiments where solved puzzles were locked out or removed to focus on new puzzles, the experimenters left the previously solved puzzles accessible to the raccoons in subsequent challenges. The raccoons were able to manipulate mechanisms that they had previously figured out, in addition to the new challenges, although they received no additional food rewards for their extra work. The upshot of the results is that the raccoons displayed an intrinsic motivation to mess around with latches, locks and doors, even when no obvious extrinsic reward was to be had. This will surprise nobody who has tried to prevent raccoons from getting into their property. There is a straightforward adaptationist explanation for this: if the animals find it psychologically rewarding to muck about with things for the fun of it, they are more likely to acquire new information and behaviours that could be useful later. Much like how the intrinsically rewarding experience of sex makes reproduction more likely.
That’s about all I have to say about the study itself, besides a slight expression of surprise that nobody had tried this before, but that’s quite common in experimental science. It’s all too easy for bystanders like me to claim that something should have been obvious, after the fact. Still, a promising avenue for future experiments to probe the exploratory and recreational side of animal problem-solving. As someone who watches a lot of mechanical engineering nerdery, much of which is more squarely in the category of “play” than necessity, it is intriguing to think that this drive to idly faff about with the physical environment is shared across the wider animal kingdom. The hedonic value of repeating known solutions is interesting, too. The re-playing of solved challenges constitutes many human games, and can even take a maladaptive turn into stereotyped behavioural loops, like replaying the same game over and over (take the example of simple and easily won “comfort games” in the digital space). This hedonic reward probably serves an adaptive function, contributing to the iterative development of craft expertise as practitioners (human or otherwise) build skill by chasing the dopamine hit of repeating once-novel successes. The repetition of solutions also makes it more likely that “naive” members of a group will witness the “expert” performance and learn the solution themselves. There is a bigger thought stirring in my head about all of this, along the lines of environmental engineering being primal biological drive, with neuronal antecedents stretching back into evolutionary history, but that’s for another time.
Then I was also going to write about a new book I read recently by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, entitled “Animals and the Rights to Politics”. Donaldson and Kymlicka’s 2011 book “Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights” has had an enormous impact on the “political turn” in animal moral theory, as has their stewardship of the Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (APPLE) unit at Queen’s University in Ontario. Unfortunately, I have too many fundamental disagreements with the premises and approaches in the book to argue with it productively here, or to review it in a manner that is useful to the reader and fair to the authors. It’s a shame, because Donaldson and Kymlicka are very candid and friendly interlocutors who are quite easy to debate face-to-face (I’ve been lucky to participate in a number of online events hosted by APPLE), but I just can’t find a way to get on board with this particular work. I still think that, like “Zoopolis”, it is a useful contribution to the field and worth engaging with, perhaps especially for people who disagree with them.
My own personal sticking point is the use of “ameliorative definition”, i.e. redefining words and concepts to realize some external normative goal other than descriptive accuracy. It is a rhetorical move that may have its place in public moral and political discourse, but when it creeps into academic work I start to get visions of Babel. In the case of this book, the external goal is to undo the (unjustified, in the authors’ view) exclusion of non-human animals from the category of political agents, by redefining “political” and “agency”. Of course, they could argue that the definitions quo ante of “political” and “agency” were already descriptively deficient, distorted by the hegemonic cultural influence of human supremacist ideology, to serve the external goal of justifying and reinforcing that ideology. Were I to grant that point (I don’t), this becomes a two-sided debate where both sides think the other is defending an overly normative definition that fails to capture the salient facts of the matter. But I actually think they stretch credulity too far (is that a fault in philosophy? I am truly unsure) in employing normative arguments (e.g. “these definitions have the effect of excluding beings that are already unjustly victimized”) for descriptive changes (e.g. “we should adopt new definitions that remediate this victimization by including animals in a protected category of beings”). I doubt the likelihood of these new definitions and conceptualizations being adopted, and the likelihood of them being efficacious in solving the moral problems they seek to address, in addition to being fairly certain that the proposed re-definitions are descriptively false. So, as I said, I just can’t get on board with the project, and don’t want to publicly flog it without getting a better understanding directly from the authors first. I will say, as with most books that I have strongly disagreed with, I am grateful for the extensive notes and bibliography; I would not disagree with the book so strongly if I did not already think and care about these issues a great deal, and so these sources are of great value and interest to me (and to anyone with a stake in these matters, regardless of what position they take).
So, two pitches and two strikes (or whatever the appropriate soccer metaphor is). Luckily, I’ve been doing more than just reading lately. I spent most of June at the Montreal Fringe Festival, as I’ve been doing since 2013, helping out with various operational tasks and seeing some great shows. From explorations of masculinist culture through tango, to an electronic beat-making musical about an Amish outcast navigating queer identity, to a dystopian dramatic comedy about post-climate-apocalypse political reckonings, the programming afforded a nice break from my usual ruminative rut. Even when the existential terror gripping most thinking people in 2026 managed to peek out from behind the curtain, it was at least comforting to be terrified together. And to let someone else take the narrative wheel for a change.
Towards the end of the festival, I realized that a large portion of the shows I chose to see, significantly more than in previous years, were non-verbal. Or at least their core expressive tools were non-verbal. Music, dance, even live sand-drawing (quite an unexpected treat), some poignant, others simply beautiful. I had been seeking out non-language experiences, partly because I wanted a variety of aesthetic experience, partly because some of my favourite language-arts performers (like Jem Rolls and Jon Bennett) weren’t at the festival this year, and partly, maybe mostly, because I have been increasingly aware that I’m getting burned out on language. One more facet of a general burnout that hit around 2019 and became entrenched by all the demoralizing awfulness that has followed, but not just that; the experience of writing regularly, and of reading more purposively with an eye to writing in response, has bred a certain contempt that comes with familiarity. It’s harder to enjoy creative uses of language as a descriptive or expressive medium, because the seams are too apparent. Things seem conspicuously “worked”, as I’m sure happens with musicians listening critically to music. Maybe I’m just externalizing and generalizing my own frustrations at trying to get language to do interesting things, or my own self-effacing tendency to think that anything I can do well must not be very important or impressive.
Whatever the case, I’ve found that some of my friends around the festival were similarly drawn towards anything-but-words. The path to (non-verbal) art-as-therapy is one pursued, deliberately or otherwise, by quite a few Fringe performers, even and perhaps especially by those who also use language creatively and/or professionally with great success. You do what you can with language, often as a first reflex, but there is always a remainder that language can’t get hold of. So you dance about it, or make music about it, or cover yourself in fake blood and scream about it, lest that remainder sit undigested forever. I’m not at the doing-something-effective-about-it stage yet, but at least I’m trying to move past the throwing-language-at-it-hoping-this-time-it-will-work stage (ignoring the present text).
(As I listen to my usual assortment of jazz vinyl bootlegs on YouTube while typing this, the algorithm has served up a compilation of Bill Evans performances entitled “Sounds Instead Of Words”. Disconcertingly apt. I don’t know if I’m more worried about being micro-targeted or being an example of a common type.)
When I try to fight against language, I do it with language, and the game is already lost. Maybe the problem is just a propensity for reflection over action; language is quite effective when employed to suitable ends, after all. I’ve spent my whole life in the mental frame of “figuring out”, from precocious reading to science studies to philosophy, as opposed to “making happen”. Trying to appreciate dance performances has helped a little; there is (ideally, in my opinion) no propositional content being communicated, which could be translated into words, no “getting it”. The movement and form and sound just are, manifesting themselves, and the ingrained habit of looking for a message to read interferes with the simple witnessing of that manifestation. I’ve had similar ideas when reading about psychedelic and spiritual experiences. The main problem is that the content of these experiences, at least the salience of that content, is not communicable, cannot be made public in the way that propositional content or descriptions that refer to a shared environment are communicable. The privacy of aesthetic experience does not lend itself to validation on these terms. (I do wish that art schools would take this to heart, and stop insisting that students write weighty descriptions of their work, like “by glueing these shells and teeth to some fabric and covering it with paint, the artist unsettles received notions of gender fixity and opens a space for re-interrogating the performative conventions of co-citizenship”. You don’t need to give artists formal instruction in being pretentious. They’ll figure it out.)
Language is not the only self-generating noise that monopolizes my private head-space. I also suffer from tinnitus, and have for about fifteen years. That’s fifteen years without silence, which is a pretty good analogy for my relationship with language. Instead of silence, I hear a constant high-pitched whine, very close to the sound of a CRT television screen (this reference is of diminishing usefulness for describing the sound to young people, to whom “CRT television screen” is as evocative as “lacquer cylinder recording”). Tinnitus seems to be a more well-known phenomenon in North America now than in previous generations, perhaps because headphones have made it more common, or perhaps because reductions in occupational exposure have made it visible because it is less ubiquitous (a “fish don’t know they’re in water” kind of thing). Whatever the reason, tinnitus (and hearing damage generally) in its acute and chronic forms has become a cultural trope. There is a running gag in the animated series “Archer” where the titular character suffers realistic consequences from nearby gunfire, a satirical poke at how action heroes typically shrug off deafening sounds as easily as they dodge inept henchmen’s bullets. Hearing impairment is also increasingly incorporated as a functional mechanic in video games, adding a challenge by depriving the player of situational awareness and accentuating stress. In films and television series, a crescendo of deafening mosquito-like tone has now become a common way to communicate to audiences that “the character is very stressed right now”. I am not sure it is any better or worse, creatively speaking, than employing melodramatically unsettling music to the same effect.
I am sure, however, that this trick affects tinnitus sufferers differently than blissful silence-hearers. In non-“eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee”-hearing people, the tinnitus sound effect comes and goes, indicating the arrival and departure of a certain emotional state. There is some kind of tension and resolution communicated, and sympathetically experienced. But not with me. When I hear that familiar whine employed for dramatic effect, it does two things: first, it communicates the intended information about the characters in the scene, and second, it reminds me that I constantly hear that sound and had successfully stopped paying attention to it, until now. The characters on the screen or stage get their resolution, while I spend the rest of the performance acutely aware of how my own tension is unresolved.
One of the Fringe plays I saw used this effect, and, because it had no dialogue to attend to, my own CRT whine lingered on rather conspicuously in the aftermath. In an era of content and sensory warnings, I wondered if shows using this trick ought to warn patrons about it. There are warnings about flashing lights, because of the serious dangers of epileptic seizures. And there are warning about difficult subject matter, because of the considerable psychological distress it could inflict on some people, particularly if it evokes some traumatic experience that they themselves have suffered. I’m not sure where my problem ranks. It is very annoying, but it is triggered by a million different things: alcohol, caffeine, stress, fatigue, exercise, and also by seemingly nothing at all. It would be like someone who is allergic to everything requesting that allergen warnings be placed on everything. I suppose there are other people for whom the discomfort, and possible knock-on symptoms, of aggravated tinnitus merits such a warning. I still would have chosen to see the show even if had known about the use of the sound effect, and I’m still glad I saw the show despite the annoyance it caused. But I would like to see a decline in the overuse of this effect, much as I would like to see the end of overbearing musical cues in so many films and television shows (Netflix original series seem to be the worst offenders, using an opening-credits blitz of music as a cheap shortcut to establishing tone and relatability). It is somewhat invasive because of how intimately it engages the stress response of the audience, verging on a third sensory modality like vibrating seats or Smell-O-Vision, and in that sense it seems foreign to the creative work of affecting the audience through the words and actions on the screen or stage. I suppose I could level the same charge at dialogue, being a too-easy shortcut to emotive impacts that ought to be achieved more honestly by mime.
Words, man. Can’t live with them, can’t write an essay without them.
***
[1] Griebling, Johnson & Benson-Amram, 2026. “Raccoons optimally forage for information: exploration–exploitation trade-offs in innovation”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000334722600028X
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