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“An animal is classified as feral when it is a former domestic animal living in a wild habitat, without food or shelter provided by humans, and showing some resistance to people”, biolo- gists state. Some of the most common species that turn feral are cats, dogs, horses, and pigs. Once companion species, when the pact established thousands of years ago by codomestica- tion is broken, they have the ability not to go back to being wolves, their wild ancestors in the case of dogs, but to become something else. They become feral. Claude Lévi-Strauss coined the concept of pensée sauvage (not la pensée des sauvages, as we are often reminded), a type of “untamed” thought, kept alive in the modern western world within “natural reserves” of art, as he would say. Dogs are not often considered wildlife; they are mostly a species-with-humans. Messmates. That does not mean they could not experience their own kind of pensée sauvage

– or even a domesticated thought, who knows. But what mode of thought is expressed when these two worlds collapse, pacts are broken, their world is wounded, they become without-hu- mans and thus feral? Is it possible that la pensée férale is one that makes surviving in the Anthropocene feasible?

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Daniel Steegmann Mangranné’s photos were taken in one of the world’s largest urban forests, located in the Tijuca National Park. The area once consisted of coffee and sugar cane planta- tions, which were causing change in rainfall patterns, endangering Rio de Janeiro’s water sup- ply. So, in 1861, following Brazilian Emperor D. Pedro II concerns, a group of enslaved men (lore says six of them, but researchers now state that a credible number would be from 20 to 30) planted 100,000 seeds of mostly native plants. The forest became a National Park in 1961, by an executive order – a natural reserve.

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Feral dogs, those creatures not of nature nor culture, are now considered an ecological danger to the native species living in the National Park. Yet we see their eyes in the tree trunks. Are they becoming one with the trees? Are trees looking through them? – at whom? At us? What are they seeing, what are they thinking, what are they telling? This is a tentacular trans-be- coming-matter, as one of the photos makes clear: an octopus-tree-mutt staring right at us. It is about mattering too: bark, moss, dew, hair, eye, iris, leaf, dirt, humus. Forgotten dogs desecrate the natural reserve and tell us about the importance of commitments, but also tell us about how connectedness is literally a matter of worlding and the possibility of reworlding – and that nature was never a virgin.

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The history of natural reserves is also a history of the expropriation of indigenous peoples. It is linked with the domesticated thought that states culture and nature are separated realms, one polluted and one pure. By the time D. Pedro II felt he could use a forest in the city, there was a long history of colonizers waging war against natives in Rio de Janeiro, decimating their population. Presently, humans are not allowed to live in the reforested park – although, for the dismay of conservationists, favelas surround the forest. But before the plantations, indigenous peoples used to live there, with plants, animals and much more. As new research shows, in- digenous peoples were actually responsible for shaping the Amazon forest. Some of them even raise dogs now. The forest watches.

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Last year, in a newspaper article published in the Washington Post about dogs as “destruc- tive mammals”, the author conducted interviews with residents of Ipanema, a rich neighbor- hood in Rio de Janeiro. None of them believed their pure breed dogs would be capable of causing such damage to the forest. The researchers agreed with them: “The problem [...] isn’t these dogs, who lead the coddled lives of European or American pets. The problem is the dogs in poorer and more rural communities, where the life of the dog is more frequently the life
of hunger. They prowl the streets day and night with neither a collar nor an owner, looking
for food wherever it can be found – in trash heaps, alongside roads, and in forests and fields, where they form packs to hunt and kill.” Poor dogs, as poor people, live a harsh life. They join gangs and kill. Australian researchers, using data available in the IUCN Red List of Threat- ened Species, placed dogs “in the number three spot after cats and rodents as the world’s most damaging invasive mammalian predators.” Last I checked, humans fit the criteria for preda- tors. Nevertheless, the forest, planted by the hands of enslaved men, now surrounded by their descendants who never got a chance in the capitalist, colonialist world, watches. Forests, even young ones – after all, the Tijuca one is only 160 years old –, watch with their sharp dog eyes. They look back.

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When I was a child there was this vinyl collection with stories and songs and little booklets, full of beautiful illustrations. One of them had a song by Chico Buarque, “Passaredo”. Its lyrics haunt me to this day and go something like this: Hey goldfinch/ Hi, common linnet/ black- bird, manakin/ Oh, white-faced whistling duck / Pauraque / Green-headed tanager, small- billed tinamou / Run, picazuro pigeon / Go, plumbeous seedeater / Song thrush, short-tailed nighthawk, blue-winged parrotlet / Shoo, brazilian tanager / Shoo, brazilian tanager / Shoo, nightingale, striped cuckoo / Disappear, double-collared seed-eater / Get out, corn bunting / Hide yourself, hummingbird / Fly, solitary tinamou / Fly, long-tailed tyrant / American kestrel / Keep your beak sealed / Be careful / For man is coming here / for man is coming here. I don’t think there are any questions about who this man is. It’s the Anthropos, the civilized one, the one who wounded the Earth and all of her people. Now that we live on a damaged planet, as Anna Tsing says, we may have to become feral, to transmute into something else. As Eva Hay- ward teaches us, “We are vulnerable to one another; our bodies are open to the planet.” The planet, by its turn, is hurt but not done. Those lonely eyes in an urban forest are witnesses.

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Russell Means used to say that “when the catastrophe is over, we American Indian peoples will still be here to inhabit the hemisphere. I don’t care if it’s only a handful living high in the Andes.” Those of us who are not indigenous, if we want to have a survival chance, might have to turn feral and to forget about that humanity birds and dogs and so many others have learnt to fear or maybe even hate – and become others. That may be the lesson of the dog barks, the eyes in the tree trunks of a forest built together by many, including itself, as every forest is. We propose a feral thinking, a feral worlding, feral forests inhabited by “the future organisms we are becoming”, as Eva Hayward, once again, says. This is not an easy path, but we like to think it resonates with Ursula Le Guin’s Ying’s utopia, the one that “involves acceptance of imper- manence and imperfection, a patience with uncertainty and the makeshift, a friendship with water, darkness, and the earth.” Maybe you can see it too, if you are able to look through those big, brown eyes that watch the Tijuca forest these days.