1st Edition
Blogging Wildlife The Perception of Animals by Hikers on the Appalachian Trail
This volume reports on the encounters between hikers and wildlife on the Appalachian Trail. Based on narratives provided by trail hikers, it explores the ways in which humans relate to the animals with whom they temporarily share a home. With attention to the themes of pilgrimage, the changing perception of the animals encountered and reactions to them, risk, auditory experience, and a sense of wildness, the author considers the meaning constituted by nonhuman animals in the context of the walkers’ narrative journeys. A phenomenologically informed study of the ways in which people perceive wild animals when in an unmediated wilderness setting, how they navigate interactions with them, and how they experience living among them, Blogging Wildlife will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in anthrozoology and human–animal relations.
Introduction
1. Hiking as Pilgrimage, and Wild Animals on the Trail
2. 'Real' Wilderness Needs a 'Real' Predator: Hikers and Black Bears
3. Cuteness on the Trail
4. Ugly, Scary, and Disgusting: Uncomfortably Close Encounters with Mice, Snakes, Insects, and Other ‘Critters’ on the Trail
5. Chirps, Quacks, Croaks, Howls, and 'What Was That?': Animal Sounds on the Trail
Conclusion
Biography
Kate Marx was a postdoctoral research associate in the research group Exeter Anthrozoology as Symbiotic Ethics (EASE) at the University of Exeter, UK. She is currently Social Research Manager at Waterwise, a not-for-profit organisation which advocates for water conservation in the UK.
