Volunteers experience life as wild animals for pioneering nature conservation project

A group of volunteers experienced life as if they were wild animals for an innovative nature conservation project co-led by UWE Bristol.

Eighteen volunteers ‘lived’ as red deer, otters, earthworms, kestrels and salmon around the River Tone in Somerset to identify the risks to wildlife in human-dominated landscapes.

Over the course of the six-month research study Risks Beyond Human Eyes, they took on the roles of animals for a few hours at a time to understand the unique threats they face in their bid for survival.

Participants were given a detailed briefing in advance about the animals they chose to embody, particularly how they sense the world around them, before going into the wild along the river near Taunton to experience life as their selected species.

They fed back their testimonies to project organisers, with the perceived risks to food availability, shelter and safety being mapped out on a digital visualisation tool of the river catchment.

Risks reported by volunteers included the impact of dogs being walked in the area and entering the river with flea treatment, the impact of train noise on wildlife, the difficulty of crossing roads for otters, and an absence of long grassland in which kestrels could hunt for food.

UWE Bristol project lead Miguel Prado Casanova, a senior lecturer in philosophy, said: “Embodying these animals was something that challenged certain psychological assumptions. We tried to make clear to the participants that while things like light pollution and noise pollution are not a big deal for humans, they could be massive for an animal whose sensory capacities get easily overwhelmed.

“It was a case of realigning the way in which they experience the world. This is a very complicated thing because there is no way for us as humans to get close to experiencing the way in which an animal smells or sees, for example.

“All the participants handled it in different ways. There were some cases, for instance the participant who was embodying an Atlantic salmon - which faces extinction - where they became very emotional when they were giving their testimony about what they had experienced.

“Overall, we wanted to produce a methodology that could be used by the community to gain knowledge about other sensory worlds and navigate this space by taking into account things that otherwise would be overlooked.”

UWE Bristol was joint lead investigator on the study alongside Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment (ASRA), with funding coming from the Ecological Citizen(s) Network. The project was delivered with the support of Friends of Longrun Meadow and Somerset Wildlife Trust.

As part of the project, Miguel worked with ASRA to produce an Animal Collaboration Guide - pairing hands-on practices with data on the five species selected for the study - which participants read before taking to life as their chosen animal.

The study stemmed from Miguel’s earlier work on the More-Than-Human Lens Toolkit, which he created with anthropologist and design researcher Patricia Fraga and was supported through Higher Education Innovation Funding and Impact Accelerator Accounts funding.

Miguel explained the study also considered the types of mitigations that could be introduced to address the risks that had been identified by the participants.

He said: “For example, looking more broadly at places like Ashton Court where they regularly hold music festivals. It’s a sanctuary for deer - they have been living there for centuries - and they are massively affected by the music when the festivals are held and feel threatened by the noise.

“And in heatwaves in the UK, people enjoy wild swimming but have sun cream on their skin when they enter the water. This is bad for the animals and the ecosystem. Many fish have electrochemical receptors and they perceive the cream as a toxic agent. There are many situations where, if we could think in terms of the sensory apparatus of animals, we would do things differently.”

Looking ahead, Miguel, programme leader on the BA(Hons) Philosophy course at UWE Bristol, added: “The volunteers involved in this study who live near the River Tone will continue working with this methodology. They have a plan for responding to the risks that they’ve identified.

“They have a lot of agency, with the tools and with the data from this study, to make changes. They’ve become more robust as a community of wildlife volunteers.

“They are very invested in mitigating those risks and to will now start thinking about the risks for other animals that were not included in this study.

“In the future, we would like to hold more workshops with different communities to see if we could employ these same methodologies in different settings and contexts. This study has demonstrated that they work very well.”

The findings from the study will later this year be submitted for publication in an academic journal. Researchers will also present their work at the Digital Design Weekend at the V&A South Kensington in September.