“We wield power when we name wild animals”
OPINION
Why do you have to give them names?” Flora was mad. “Why can’t you just allow them to be wild animals?” I had just returned from my first Springwatch and was celebrating this small triumph, but obviously the sentiment was not shared by my friend’s eleven-year-old daughter. She was confronting me about the naming of Freya the golden eagle, whose birth was announced on the show in 2016.
Freya is not the first animal Springwatch has named. We’ve had Spineless Si, the nation’s favourite stickleback; Betty the beloved black-headed gull; and for a species with no common name, Clibanarius erythopus was such a mouthful for the comeback king of hermit crabs (once extinct in Britain and rediscovered in Cornwall), the audience named it St Piran’s crab for its efforts.
Naming animals is a useful tool for storytelling. It can help audiences connect with our ‘animal characters’ and allows us to share experiences on social media. But naming is not just useful for us media luvvies, of course. Pet owners will know that naming is one of the first rituals that marks our bond with our companion animals.
In science, the binomial system of Latin names serves as an anchor point. No matter where scientists are in the world, they know they are talking about the same species.
All this is well and good, but faced with this wonderfully neurodivergent girl with the precious (if a little disconcerting) gift of hearing past all the fluff and expecting direct and honest communication, I knew I needed to come up with a better answer.
As it turns out, Flora is not alone in wanting a deeper interrogation into the naming of animals. Danish researcher Sune Borkfelt is a lecturer in both animal studies and English literature at Aarhus University and, like a Michelin-starred chef might deconstruct and elevate a bog-standard staple, he takes the subject of naming to a whole new paradigm-shifting level.
“Whether what is named is land, people or animals,” writes Borkfelt, “the process of naming reflects the worldview of the one who names, rather than the view of what [or who] is named”. Borkfelt’s important assertion, it seems, is that this makes naming a powerful tool of control.
An attempt to reclaim
