The Voyages Issue
Lessons From a Lifetime of Animal Voyages
What I’ve learned from a lifetime of voyaging with animals. By Sam Anderson. Photographs by Matthew Pillsbury. I have a ridiculous dog named Walnut. He is as domesticated as a beast can be: a purebred longhaired miniature dachshund with fur so thick it feels rich and creamy, like pudding. His tail is a huge spreading golden fan, a clutch of sunbeams. He looks less like a dog than like a tropical fish. People see him and gasp. Sometimes I tell Walnut right out loud that he is my precious little teddy bear pudding cup sweet boy snuggle-stinker. Read More
In my daily life, Walnut is omnipresent. He shadows me all over the house. When I sit, he gallops up into my lap. When I go to bed, he stretches out his long warm body against my body or he tucks himself under my chin like a soft violin. Walnut is so relentlessly present that sometimes, paradoxically, he disappears. If I am stressed or tired, I can go a whole day without noticing him. I will pet him idly; I will yell at him absent-mindedly for barking at the mailman; I will nuzzle him with my foot. But I will not really see him. He will ask for my attention, but I will have no attention to give. Humans are notorious for this: for our ability to become blind to our surroundings — even a fluffy little jewel of a mammal like Walnut.
John Berger, the brilliant British artist-critic, could have been writing about all this when he lamented, 45 years ago, modern humanity’s impoverished relationship to animals. “In the last two centuries,” he wrote, “animals have gradually disappeared. Today we live without them.”
On its face, this claim is ridiculous. Animals are everywhere in modern life. More of us own pets than at any other time in human history. We can drive to zoos, cat cafes, national parks, wildlife sanctuaries. We can lie in bed and share viral TikToks of buffaloes grunting, puppies howling, parrots taunting hungry cats. We can watch live feeds on our tiny phones of eagles incubating eggs or drone footage of polar bears hunting seals on 50-foot IMAX screens.
But Berger would argue that these things are all just symptoms of our lost intimacy with animals. None of them represent meaningful old-fashioned contact. Since the primordial beginnings of our species, he writes, animals have been integral to human life: “Animals constituted the first circle of what surrounded man. Perhaps that already suggests too great a distance. They were with man at the center of his world.” Animals were not only predators and prey — they were myths, symbols, companions, peers, teachers, guides. The patterns of their movement defined the edges of the human world. Their shapes defined the stars. They made human life possible. A few ostrich eggs could sustain hunter-gatherers for days — first as food, then as water carriers that enabled them to cross vast, parched distances.
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We all know what happened next: capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, the internal combustion engine, suburban sprawl, fast food, chicken nuggets, factory farms. Animals — our sharp, loud, restless, dangerous, inconvenient planetary roommates — were pushed to the margins.
For Berger, this was a profound loss, not only for the subjugated animals but also for the humans who did the subjugating. “The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas, are specifically addressed to man,” he writes. “With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.” Our lost closeness with animals ushered in a sharp existential pain — a state of beastly alienation.
Modern humans can try to rationalize that loss in infinite ways. (Is it such a bad thing that most of us no longer have to worry about wolf packs stealing our leftover caribou meat?) We can concoct all kinds of synthetic replacements: ant farms, sea monkeys, pet rocks, chia pets, Tamagotchis. (Growing up, I fell in love with a battery-powered robot owl named Hootbot.) We can sit at home with our pets in our laps, clicking on animal videos, laughing and crying and forwarding them to our friends. But none of these will fill the creaturely hole at the center of human life. They’re not even close to the same shape. We will continue to feel that loss, to yearn for those “parallel lives,” for the ancient strangeness of animal familiarity.
If necessary, we will search the world for it. And so, sometimes, we head out on an animal voyage. We take ourselves off to a place that is still wild, or where wildness has been carefully curated or simulated or reintroduced. We can visit squirrel monkeys, for instance, at an abandoned penal colony in French Guiana. We can watch strange hairy horses galloping around near Icelandic volcanoes. We can climb up into the lush tree canopies of Ghana to stare at the rosy bee-eaters. Wherever we go, our goal will be roughly the same: to put our own animal bodies near the bodies of the creatures we have pushed away. To effect an existential reunion.
If that sounds mystical — well, it is. It’s hard to put into words exactly what we are looking for when we go out to meet a distant animal. The need, probably, goes deeper than language. On some level, I think we are looking to orient ourselves, to locate ourselves on an accurate map of the universe. Not using the coordinates we’ve been handed by human culture: the self-flattering, narcissistic, anthropocentric fantasies of a world made for us, in our image. Something in us yearns for accuracy, even if it comes at the price of a demotion. It is liberating to be decentered. And animals, always, are happy to perform this service.
An animal voyage is special because it requires us to make many journeys all at once. To really connect with another creature, you have to cross multiple kinds of distance: physical, spiritual, temporal. You have to leave our daily sense of clock time and reach into something like evolutionary time. You have to stare across vast chasms of consciousness. Look into the eye of a bison, a marlin, a parrot, an iguana. What is the gulf between your mind and theirs? That space can’t be measured in miles or light years or any other unit we can name. It will probably never be definitively crossed. What kind of bridge would ever even begin to work? And so an animal voyage is, on some level, always destined to fail. This, too, is part of its appeal.
My favorite record of an animal voyage is a book that’s fluent in failure. Peter Matthiessen’s nonfiction masterpiece, “The Snow Leopard,” chronicles a truly extreme animal quest. In 1973, Matthiessen spent two months trekking into the Himalayas with his biologist friend George Schaller. They were hoping to glimpse one of the world’s most impressive and elusive animals, a powerful cat so rare that Schaller knew of only one Westerner aside from himself who had seen one in the past quarter-century. According to Matthiessen, the snow leopard is a “near-mythic beast” that has the power to watch its watchers while remaining nearly invisible. “One can stare straight at it from yards away,” he writes, “and fail to see it.”
Matthiessen’s journey is brutal, dangerous and disorienting — emotionally and physically exhausting. He hikes along perilous ledges; his guides suffer bouts of snow blindness. Matthiessen weathers freezing temperatures in a tent so small he can’t even sit up. All along, he has much more on his mind than wildlife. Early in the book, we learn that Matthiessen’s wife has recently died of cancer and that he has left his young son at home to make this pilgrimage. He later told an interviewer that he drafted the book by hand, on the trek itself, day by day, as “a Zen practice of close observation.” (Matthiessen and his wife were both serious students of Buddhism.) This gives the writing a strange, elevated, living quality that few books ever approach.
Matthiessen was a devoted environmentalist, prone to raging at human excesses, and his voyage begins in a fallen world — a region already devastated by overpopulation and pollution, where animals that used to be common (elephants, tigers, rhinos, cheetahs) have all been driven away. “We have outsmarted ourselves like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread,” he writes. He climbs higher and higher, away from civilization, toward an ancient Tibetan sacred site known as Crystal Mountain. Along the way, he sits and meditates; he stops at Buddhist shrines; he is overwhelmed by feelings. As the altitude rises, Matthiessen’s style burns itself down to stark poetry: “There is no wisp of cloud — clear, clear, clear, clear.” He begins to merge with the landscape (“I grow into these mountains like a moss”) and to detach from linear time: “Simultaneously, I am myself, the child I was, the old man I will be.” He has visions, hallucinatory epiphanies. “Sometimes when I meditate,” he writes, “the big rocks dance.”
On his voyage, Matthiessen encounters all kinds of animals: yaks, goats, lizards, frogs, roosters, horses. He sees a lone red panda and many clusters of blue sheep and even a pack of wolves. In a tiny village, he is attacked by a dog. He beats it off with a stick.
To return home from an animal voyage is to become, yourself, a new animal living in your old habitat.
But where is the snow leopard? Nowhere and everywhere. Up near Crystal Mountain, as time stretches toward eternity, Matthiessen sees tantalizing traces of the great creature: scat, scratch marks. The blue sheep huddle nervously, suggesting the presence of an apex predator. Matthiessen speaks with a lama who claims to see snow leopards frequently. He finds snow leopard paw prints “fresh as petals on the trail.” He strains his attention so hard that it inflects everything around him: “It is wonderful how the presence of this creature draws the whole landscape to a point, from the glint of light on the old horns of a sheep to the ring of a pebble on the frozen ground.” Toward the end of his trip, Matthiessen finds that “a leopard has made its scrape right in my boot print, as if in sign that I am not to leave.”
And yet he has to leave. Down below, his life waits for him. The great perfect shock of “The Snow Leopard” — and look away if you have to, because here comes a spoiler — is that Matthiessen never actually sees a snow leopard. The animal in the book’s title, the whole reason for the journey, refuses to put itself on display. This failure becomes a powerful lesson in loss, a chance to meditate on the tangled nature of visibility and invisibility. “If the snow leopard should manifest itself, then I am ready to see the snow leopard,” Matthiessen writes. “If not, then somehow (and I don’t understand this instinct, even now) I am not ready to perceive it, in the same way that I am not ready to resolve my koan; and in the not-seeing, I am content. I think I must be disappointed, having come so far, and yet I do not feel that way. I am disappointed, and also, I am not disappointed. That the snow leopard is, that it is here, that its frosty eyes watch us from the mountain — that is enough.”
Even Schaller, the hardened scientist, summons a bit of poetry. “You know something?” he says to Matthiessen. “We’ve seen so much, maybe it’s better if there are some things that we don’t see.”
Today, nearly 50 years later, if you are so inclined, you can go see a snow leopard at the zoo. According to the Snow Leopard Conservancy, approximately 600 of them live at accredited zoos worldwide. Biologically, it is the same animal that Matthiessen was seeking. And yet it’s hard to imagine a more different kind of encounter. Or one that Matthiessen, with his cynical tendencies, might have been less interested in. (“I long to see the snow leopard,” he wrote, “yet to glimpse it by camera flash, at night, crouched on a bait, is not to see it.”) John Berger, too, was dismissive of zoos. They were, for him, the apex of our alienation. (“You are looking at something that has been rendered absolutely marginal; and all the concentration you can muster will never be enough to centralize it.”) Zoo animals, Berger wrote, represented “the living monument to their own disappearance.” And it’s true that there is something uncanny about seeing a snow leopard sprawled behind glass, in an artificial habitat, in full view of families pushing strollers. But in a world where mass extinction is advancing exponentially, where the snow leopard’s natural habitat is being thawed and polluted — in a world like that, where else are these animals supposed to survive? And how else are we supposed to see them? Or should we simply surrender ourselves, forever, to the fate of nonseeing?
I have loved animals since I was a child. My first word was “bird.” I ate dog food out of solidarity with my first pet. I wanted to grow up to be a veterinarian or a zoologist. (Writing derailed me.) As an adult, I have been lucky to be able to take animal voyages all over the world. I have swum with manatees in Florida and sat on an Icelandic cliffside among thousands of puffins. I have watched the famous tree-climbing goats of Morocco — have seen them perched, absurdly, 20 feet above the ground, in the branches, like huge hairy white fruit. I once got to spend a whole week with the last two northern white rhinos on earth.
The best trips, like Peter Matthiessen’s search for the snow leopard, find a way to make themselves permanent. A northern white rhinoceros will not come home with you. But your awe at the rhinoceros, your amazement and respect and appreciation — that is portable. You can apply it to your goldfish, to your children, to the chipmunk that lives under the stairs, to the citizens around you. To return home from an animal voyage is to become, yourself, a new animal living in your old habitat. It is to find yourself voyaging in your own home, waking up to the other creatures that were there all along, inching them from the margins back toward the center of your life, where they belong. It is to remind yourself that being with an animal — any kind of animal, anywhere at all — is its own kind of voyage.
When I come home from a trip, Walnut gets very excited. He prances and hops and barks and sniffs me at the door. And the consciousnesses of all the wild creatures I’ve seen — the puffins, rhinos, manatees, ferrets, the weird hairy wet horses — come to life for me inside of my domestic dog. He is, suddenly, one of these unfamiliar animals. I can pet him with my full attention, with a full union of our two attentions. He is new to me and I am new to him. We are new again together.
Even when he is horrible. The most annoying thing Walnut does, even worse than barking at the mailman, is the ritual of his “evening drink.” Every night, when I am settled in bed, when I am on the brink of sleep, Walnut will suddenly get very thirsty. If I go to bed at 10:30, Walnut will get thirsty at 11. If I go to bed at midnight, he’ll wake me up at 1. I’ve found that the only way I cannot be mad about this is to treat this ritual as its own special kind of voyage — to try to experience it as if for the first time. If I am open to it, my upstairs hallway contains an astonishing amount of life.
The evening drink goes something like this: First, Walnut will stand on the edge of the bed, in a muscular, stout little stance, and he will wave his big ridiculous fan tail in my face, creating enough of a breeze that I can’t ignore it. I will roll over and try to go back to sleep, but he won’t let me: He’ll stamp his hairy front paws and wag harder, then add expressive noises from his snout — half-whine, half-breath, hardly audible except to me. And so I give up. I sit up and pivot and plant my feet on the floor — I am hardly even awake yet — and I make a little basket of my arms, like a running back preparing to take a handoff, and Walnut pops his body right into that pocket, entrusting the long length of his vulnerable spine (a hazard of the dachshund breed) to the stretch of my right arm, and then he hangs his furry front legs over my left. From this point on we function as a unit, a fusion of man and dog. As I lift my weight from the bed Walnut does a little hop, just to help me with gravity, and we set off down the narrow hall. We are Odysseus on the wine-dark sea. (Walnut is Odysseus; I am the ship.)
All of evolution, all of the births and deaths since caveman times, since wolf times, that produced my ancestors and his — all the firelight and sneak attacks and tenderly offered scraps of meat, the cages and houses, the secret stretchy coils of German DNA — it has all come, finally, to this: a fully grown exhausted human man, a tiny panting goofy harmless dog, walking down the hall together. Even in the dark, Walnut will tilt his snout up at me, throw me a deep happy look from his big black eyes — I can feel this happening even when I can’t see it — and he will snuffle the air until I say nice words to him (OK you fuzzy stinker, let’s go get your evening drink), and then, always, I will lower my face and he will lick my nose, and his breath is so bad, his fetid snout-wind, it smells like a scoop of the primordial soup. It is not good in any way. And yet I love it.
Walnut and I move down the hall together, step by bipedal step, one two three four, tired man and thirsty friend, and together we pass the wildlife of the hallway — a moth, a spider on the ceiling, both of which my children will yell at me later to move outside, and of course each of these creatures could be its own voyage, its own portal to millions of years of history, but we can’t stop to study them now; we are passing my son’s room. We can hear him murmuring words to his friends in a voice that sounds disturbingly like my own voice, deep sound waves rumbling over deep mammalian cords — and now we are passing my daughter’s room, my sweet nearly grown-up girl, who was so tiny when we brought Walnut home, as a golden puppy, but now she is moving off to college. In her room she has a hamster she calls Acorn, another consciousness, another portal to millions of years, to ancient ancestors in China, nighttime scampering over deserts.
But we move on. Behind us, in the hallway, comes a sudden galumphing. It is yet another animal: our other dog, Pistachio, he is getting up to see what’s happening; he was sleeping, too, but now he is following us. Pistachio is the opposite of Walnut, a huge mutt we adopted from a shelter, a gangly scraggly garbage muppet, his body welded together out of old mops and sandpaper, with legs like stilts and an enormous block head and a tail so long that when he whips it in joy, constantly, he beats himself in the face. Pistachio unfolds himself from his sleepy curl, stands, trots, huffs and stares after us with big human eyes. Walnut ignores him, because with every step he is sniffing the dark air ahead of us, like a car probing a night road with headlights, and he knows we are approaching his water dish now, he knows I am about to bend my body in half to set his four paws simultaneously down on the floor, he knows that he will slap the cool water with his tongue for 15 seconds before I pick him up again and we journey back down the hall. And I find myself wondering, although of course it doesn’t matter, if Walnut was even thirsty, or if we are just playing out a mutual script. Or maybe, and who could blame him, he just felt like taking a trip.
Drive around Iceland, and you’ll see them everywhere: stout little horses, with beauty-salon hairstyles, dotting one of the most rugged landscapes on Earth. Iceland is a wind-ripped volcanic island in the middle of frigid seas; a typical afternoon can feel like standing in a wind tunnel loaded with seawater. And yet Icelandic horses trot around, calmly, with their poofy bangs and fresh, lush, cotton-candy blowouts, grazing between glaciers and volcanoes.
Some Icelandic children call the horses gobbígobb — a word that is pronounced with hard P’s (“goppy gop”) and meant to sound like striking hooves. This nickname gestures at one of the animals’ great idiosyncrasies: While most horses have three gaits (walk, trot, gallop), Icelandic horses have up to five. One gait, called the tölt, is unusually smooth, even at fast tempos; another, the skeið, comprises lateral strides and is known as “the flying pace” when done at high speeds. Read More
If that all sounds a bit fanciful, well, that’s just the nature of nature in Iceland. To see it all for himself, the photographer Gareth McConnell traveled to Skeiðvellir, in Iceland’s Suðurland region, about 50 miles east of Reykjavík. Skeiðvellir, which is internationally renowned for its breeding and success in competitions, is home to Icelandic Horseworld, a tourist attraction on the premises. McConnell was drawn to the mythic presence of the Icelandic horse in the country’s culture, and he set out to evoke this special connection by documenting what he calls a more “spiritual, expressive sphere.” His images imbue beastly musculature with the magic of psychedelic colors; alternating between portraits and landscape shots, they capture the uncanny beauty of these animals, and of the place that produced them.
— Sam Anderson
Icelandic Horseworld, which is operated by Katrín Ólína Sigurðardóttir and her husband, Davíð Jónsson, is home to around 100 horses and draws thousands of far-flung visitors each year. “Meeting the Icelandic horse is part of our culture,” Sigurðardóttir says. “We are very proud of the horse and see it as one of the most important attractions of the country, like the waterfalls and glaciers.”
An encounter with an animal is both extremely simple (“I am petting a cat”) and also miraculously profound (“I exist”). To witness, and be witnessed by, a consciousness unlike our own — to be seen by eyes unlike our eyes, snuffled by a nose unlike our nose — it refuels something primal. On a planet full of screens and concrete and microplastics and floods and fires, the bodies of other animals speak to us — still — in a way no other language can.
And that’s true even with animals we might not think of as traditional pets. Sphynx cats’ glares may seem icy, but their hairless bodies are warm to the touch. When a raccoon high-fives you, its claws graze your palm. Meerkats will burrow wherever they can — up a pant leg, in each and every pocket — and if you have a broad build, one may decide to climb atop your shoulders and stand sentry. Read More
This summer, the photographer Robin Schwartz traveled to Seoul, South Korea, one of the great centers of the world’s animal cafes. These offer not only the usual domestic creatures but a whole panoply of exotic beasts: snakes, sheep, raccoons, meerkats, prairie dogs, arctic foxes, wallabies, hedgehogs, parrots and many more.
But perhaps not for long. In 2020, legislation making cafes specializing in wild animals illegal was introduced in the National Assembly. “They call it ecological education, but at the end of the day, it’s centered around petting,” says Kim Young-jun, the director of ecological research at South Korea’s National Institute of Ecology, who says wild animals stuck inside will inevitably suffer from insufficient exercise and can develop skin disorders from human contact. If the bill is passed, those cafes will be required to close after a three-year grace period unless they are licensed as zoos.
Schwartz documents them before they are gone: the delight of the customers, the wonder of the creatures, but also their artificially constrained lives.
— Sam Anderson
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Young visitors at Meerkat Friends; a sphynx cat named Jelly at Mao Cafe; a 10-year-old sulcata tortoise named Kkobugi at Marie N Zoo. The cafe’s owner, Park Yu-jin, says she sometimes challenges people to try lifting the tortoise, who is heavier than she looks — about 45 pounds is Park’s guess.
FROM TOP TO BOTTOM: Young visitors at Meerkat Friends; a sphynx cat named Jelly at Mao Cafe; a 10-year-old sulcata tortoise named Kkobugi at Marie N Zoo. The cafe’s owner, Park Yu-jin, says she sometimes challenges people to try lifting the tortoise, who is heavier than she looks — about 45 pounds is Park’s guess.
“I visited the Seoul animal cafes to explore the desire that humans have to be with animals,” Schwartz says. “I see now how they function as intense therapy for people. I saw children become less fearful of animals. I saw more than a few people petting an animal and crying.”
Caimans are, to simplify slightly, alligators with pointier teeth. The largest grow to nearly 20 feet long; their jaws can crack a turtle shell. They can eat creatures that we tend to think eat everything else: piranhas, pythons. Even jaguars avoid them. They tend to be solitary, elusive and nearly impossible to see at night, which is when they hunt.
Squirrel monkeys are tiny, nimble, social and loud. Groups can grow to 500 members, and they communicate by using up to 30 different calls. They spend most of their lives in trees. Read More
The photographs of Antoine d’Agata capture the starkly different ways of life for both reptile and primate in French Guiana. On the marshy mainland, caimans slide alone through the water, staring blankly — an eye looks more like a galaxy of stars than an organ of sight. On Îlet la Mère, a lush speck off the shoulder of South America, squirrel monkeys gather in throngs — they huddle and throw their arms around like players in a theater troupe. For a couple of decades at the close of the 20th century, the island was home to a facility run by the Pasteur Institute, which studies infectious diseases. Its research subjects, the monkeys, were set free to live naturally 21 years ago.
French Guiana has a cruel past: It served as a notorious penal colony, a site of appalling pain, disease, inhumanity. It can be a kind of mercy to see portions of the place returning to a state of nature. In the monkeys, we see ourselves, sort of. In the caimans, we see an inhuman other. But it’s hard to say which comforts us more — or makes us feel more strange.
— Sam Anderson
TOP: Before this voyage, d’Agata had already spent several weeks documenting French Guiana’s postcolonial history. Focusing on animals, he says, was a means to “connect with the physical world in a more profound way.” ABOVE: “There were very few opportunities to photograph the caimans,” d’Agata says. “By day, there is no way you can see them in the swamp. By night, though, you can ‘hunt’ them using a flashlight. Only their eyes are out of the water, but they reflect red, so they are easy to spot.”
TOP: A common potoo perches in the Kaw-Roura Marshland Nature Reserve, which is accessible only by boat. Its owl-like calm and cartoonish appearance are belied by its disarming, mournful cry: “POO, POO, poo, poo.” ABOVE: A squirrel monkey in midjump. “I was very lucky,” d’Agata says. “They travel by group, so, basically, when you see one flying between two trees, you know that one by one they will all quickly move.”
Birding lives at the nexus of a wide array of pastimes: hiking, poetry, accounting, espionage. It’s like a grueling undercover sting operation, but the crime you are trying to solve is whether some very specific fluffball happens to exist, at that exact moment, in your immediate surroundings. You hear a song, take in a rush of color, note the creature’s existence and move on.
At Kakum National Park, 145 square miles of rainforest in Ghana, birders can ascend to — then walk inside — the birds’ world. A fantastical labyrinth of rope bridges and wooden platforms makes for spectacular views: an alien realm of green, punctuated with flashes from across the color spectrum. The names of the bird species that live here are almost vivid enough on their own to picture them: rosy bee-eater, blue-throated roller, shining drongo, copper sunbird, laughing doves and melancholy woodpeckers. Read More
But then we see Lyle Ashton Harris’s photos, made in collaboration with Ryan Rusiecki, and suddenly the birds exist in a fullness that exceeds even the poetry of their names. These images lift our gaze to their level; we behold avian geometries — the sharp beaks, the tinted curves — in their own habitat. A red bird sits framed in a twist of branches, like a pupil in an eye. Birds on the same limb stand sentinel together.
— Sam Anderson
CLOCKWISE FROM RIGHT: A male superb sunbird displays multicolored plumage above a female; the male black-winged bishop relies on its contrasting colors to attract a pale brown-and-yellow mate; female Vieillot’s weavers are olive green, in contrast to the more colorful males.
TOP TO BOTTOM: A male superb sunbird displays multicolored plumage above a potential mate; female Vieillot’s weavers are olive green, in contrast to the more colorful males; the male black-winged bishop relies on its contrasting colors to attract a pale brown-and-yellow female.
The best thing humans could do for animals is probably just leave them alone. Sadly, disastrously, that ship has sailed — and sailed right into a sea of pain and sorrow and exploitation and death: puppy mills, factory farms, industrial-scale fishing, climate change, mass extinction. So what’s the next best thing?
Perhaps beginning to clean up the damage. This is the mission of Senda Verde, a refuge in the tropical Andes in western Bolivia that takes in animals in need. The sanctuary is home to nearly 1,000 creatures, victims of all kinds of mistreatment, from illegal trafficking to habitat loss. Visitors can become volunteers, feeding and cleaning and hauling, getting close to baby monkeys, tapirs, tortoises and more, not only to gawk but also to help nurse the animals back to health and strength. Sanctuaries like this one and others scattered across Latin America offer an alternative to the traditional animal tourism of zoos and cruises and safaris. Think of it as a sort of carbon offset for environmental trauma. Read More
Yael Martínez’s portraits of animals at Senda Verde are powerful precisely for the angles they do not take. In these images, animals exist with urgent dignity — not for human observation but for their own sake. Martínez communicates this through unexpected framing: A jaguar twists away from our vision; a boa constrictor is grasped in extreme close-up; a toucan’s dazzling colors emerge from shadow. Martínez’s photos seem to say: You can look at the animals if you want, but your looking does not define them. His camera is not a cage.
— Sam Anderson
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Senda Verde has six toucans; Kaa 1 is the oldest of three boa constrictors, all named after the snake in “The Jungle Book”; a 6-month-old male margay, Fideito; the sanctuary’s capybara, Capy.
TOP TO BOTTOM: Senda Verde has six toucans; Kaa 1 is the oldest of three boa constrictors, all named after the snake in “The Jungle Book”; the sanctuary’s capybara, Capy; a 6-month-old male margay, Fideito.
Credits
South Korea captions by Victoria Kim. Ghana and Bolivia captions by Bill Vourvoulias. Iceland and French Guiana captions by Amy X. Wang.
Additional design and development by Jacky Myint.
Antoine d’Agata is a French photographer, film director and member of Magnum Photos.
Sam Anderson is a staff writer for the magazine.
Lyle Ashton Harris is an artist working in photography, collage, installation and performance art.
Victoria Kim is a correspondent based at The New York Times’s Asia hub in Seoul.
Yael Martínez is a Magnum photographer whose work is focused on fractured communities in his native Mexico.
Gareth McConnell is an artist and a publisher who was born in Northern Ireland and lives in London.
Matthew Pillsbury is an American photographer known for long exposures.
Ryan Rusiecki is a photographer living in the Hudson Valley.
Robin Schwartz is a photographer and a 2016 Guggenheim fellow in photography.
Bill Vourvoulias is a research editor at the magazine.
Amy X. Wang is the assistant managing editor of the magazine.