Posted by The Editors

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Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that ‘the limits of my language are the limits of my world’. Philosophers from Pythagoras to John Stuart Mill have argued over the degrees of sentience experienced by non-human animals. What unites all of these arguments is the fact that they are limited by language. This constraint can be felt in this book, for the writers and poets in these pages are using words and human-made marks to explore experiences that our language and our human bodies simply cannot breach. 

For all the cognitive territories that words have allowed us to explore, it is hard to deny that we have made some deep sensory sacrifice in the adoption of written language. When we look at birds navigating across the world by sense and memory alone, when we see turtles returning to the very same beach they hatched on, we can only guess at what it must be like to feel the world so intensely. To perceive your surroundings with such clarity, to echo-locate, to breathe underwater, to fly, to see flowers in infrared, are all experiences we can only dream of. As if dictated by a desire to appropriate these almost unimaginable animal abilities (who, for instance, has not had dreams of flying?) we minimise their remarkableness by reducing them simply to ‘instinct’ or ‘animal behaviour’. But this habit reveals more about our own limits – and our desires – than it does about the limits of animals. While we may hazard crude guesses at the substance of their experiences, we lack the physiological keys to access the perceptual worlds they inhabit. The breadth of earthly stimulus to which animals’ sensory organs are attuned is nearly impossible to fathom. It’s difficult not to underestimate their experiences; the sensations they are privy to, the intuitions they rely on, the resilience and deftness needed to survive this world in all their forms. This book aims to gather work that has the ability to encourage our imaginations to centre the animals featured in a way that goes beyond our assumptions and underestimations.

Science, often maligned as the cause of the separation between ‘us’ and ‘them’, can at its best break down the divide, if only in intellectual ways. We know now that humans share 98 per cent of their DNA with pigs, 60 per cent with chickens and 60 per cent with fruit flies. On a genetic level we share too much to ignore. Digging into the root of the word ‘animal’ takes us to anima, ‘breath’, whose root is also found in ‘beast’, the wilder, less civilised form of a living being who breathes. Animals, then, are mysterious to us even as we share the same breath of life. They are both strangers and neighbours, aliens and kin.

Shamanic and animist traditions are often capable of bridging this divide. Paleolithic cave paintings are just one example of a rendering of animalness that feels recognisable while also respecting the ‘beingness’ of the animals portrayed. The artworks published in Bestiary are perhaps closer to the prehistoric markings of bison, horses, aurochs, deer, ibex, woolly mammoths, lions, bears and wolves painted by the hands of our ancestors than they are to a comprehensive compendium of the animals currently roaming the earth or clinging on for survival.

We have tried to steer away from accounts of humans doing horrible things to animals – the factory farms, the battery cages, the slaughtering, the industrial milking, the torments, the humiliations, the vivisection, the cruelty – although this clearly comprises much of the human-animal relationship. Five per cent of global mammal ‘biomass’ – a sad measure of life – is wild animals, while 59 per cent is domesticated mammals we use for food. But in this book we did not just want stories of animals being victims. Rather, we wanted stories that celebrate animal agency and acknowledge all those lives that exist independently of our own.

There are few pets in this book, which may seem surprising. This is not a commentary on the remarkable everyday friendships and partnerships between humans and our animal colleagues, but has more to do with our attempt to see animals not as complementary to us but as beings in and of themselves. It is important to note that we often experience animal consciousness vicariously through our pets even if we cannot ‘be’ them. When we witness a dog entranced by a scent we become aware of a web of perception that extends all around us, a realm of markers and smells we are not primed to experience. Being close to domestic pets is the only connection many people, especially in industrialised societies, have with animal otherness.

These relationships are important, but our focus here is on wilder, slipperier beings. In these pages you will find a talking eel; a desert salamander who breathes through its skin; a mysterious time-travelling embroidered bird; a convocation of eagles; a finch carefully observing its human neighbours; the earthy, bloody life of a forest jaguar in Brazil; a turtle swimming through mythic time; feral dogs in the Galapagos; tamed horses, and wild boar, that stray between myth and reality; pigeons, as related to by a man experiencing homelessness; a prodigious cloud of thrips; a letter to a crow; snails; lampreys; the language of whales; the brood-song of a bee colony; bears encountered in dreaming practices and bears that are dangerously close and real; wombats; woodmouse; foxes; spiders; snakes; jellyfish; and five dancing salmon.   

This book takes its inspiration from medieval bestiaries, but unlike these ancient compendiums, our bestiary doesn’t claim to be anything like comprehensive or representative of all the major kingdoms, classes, species and sub-species. In fact, a Linnaean taxonomical approach is something this book strives to avoid. Instead, we present a kaleidoscopic view, like the multiple images seen through an insect’s compound eye, fragmentary pictures that are chaotic and unordered, but which, perhaps, approximate the incorrigible plurality of the world better than any abstract system can.

The animals in these pages, therefore, are not simple moral cyphers. There are no ethical lessons to be learned from them. Their purpose is not to save us. Perhaps for us humans, this is the hardest thing of all: to let animals be themselves, and not what we want them to be. One way to approach this is through attentive observation. Another, perhaps – in an age where our technologies allow us to peer into the burrows of deep-sea fish or the eyries of high-up falcons – is to know when not to look, when to not be curious, when to allow other creatures their privacy. The author and academic Anat Pick refers to this as a ‘zone of concealment that shields animals from unrestrained visibility … the animals’ way of refusing our overtures and resisting the gaze.’ 

We have tried to achieve this impossible task, to navigate the porous boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ with all their wild and unpredictable ways of being in the world – ways we may not understand but can marvel at. We invite you to walk, crawl, slither, swim and fly through the wild deerness of these pages, and to give yourself the gift, in our darkening world, of imagining what it’s like to be anything other than human. 

The Editors
Spring 2026

Do join us for the online launch on Wednesday 22nd April at 8pm BST to hear from some of the artists and writers who have contributed to this book from around the world.

Tickets are free, but you’ll need to book a place on Eventbrite.

A Zoom link will be sent two days before the event.

Hope to see you there!

COVER IMAGE (TOP)

Amy Guidry
Void
Acrylic on canvas
This piece features the silhouette of a bear as a reference to extinction while creating a sentient being and the embodiment of all bears. I felt that a meadow of colourful pastel wildflowers balanced nicely with the black of the bear. The rainbow also uses the same colour family, in a lighter tone, and symbolises harmony. The human eye references our connection to nature and symbolises seeing the world from the animals’ perspective.

BACK COVER IMAGE (BOTTOM)

Amy Guidry
Unknown
Acrylic on canvas
The juxtaposition of the volcano and octopus seems like a disparate pairing when actually both are related to the ocean. The majority of volcanoes are hidden from view, occurring on the ocean floor. I rely on these pairings to reference the connection of all of nature. Even though it would be true to their nature for the octopus to match the volcano, the mauve echoes the warm tones of the volcano while allowing each to stand out.

Amy Guidry is an artist currently residing in Lafayette, Louisiana. She comes from a family of artists including the late painter Eleanor Norcross. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the US. Her paintings are present in public and private collections in the US, Canada, Europe and Asia.

Dark Mountain: Issue 29

Our Spring 2026 anthology is a hardback collection that steps outside the human bubble and puts animals at its heart

Read more

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