An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

Yong is a very well-regarded popular science writer. The genre of popular science aims to make scientific discourse accessible to readers who are interested in science but do not have a background in it. In An Immense World, Yong communicates a substantial amount of information regarding scientific research on animal sense perception.

In addition, he attempts to communicate this research through the framework of Uexkull’s theory of the umwelt and to make this theory of animal subjectivity accessible to a broad audience. This audience, while interested in animals’ lives, may not be used to approaching animals as full subjects. Uexkull himself wrote in A Foray into the Worlds of Animal and Humans (1934) of his frustration with “machine theorists” who view animals as machines rather than subjects or agents of their own lives and through whom “animals are made thereby into pure objects” (42).

Because Yong writes within a genre that attempts to distill science and make its research easily digestible, many of the practices of science that are in tension with Uexkull’s theory of animal subjectivity—specifically, current animal experimentation—are taken for granted and defended. Yong affirms a range of human identities and pronoun preferences, but his writing subtly refuses the animal subjectivities that he claims to be attempting to reveal—and on which Uexkull insists. For example, throughout the book, he consistently refers to other-than-human animals as “it,” rendering them objects, rather than subjects. Only when animals are presented as subjects by other humans, as in the case of the dog Finn in Chapter 1, who is presented to Yong with the pronouns he/him, does Yong use pronouns that recognize animals’ subjectivity.

It is unclear whether this inconsistency is a conscious choice on Yong’s part or whether he is unaware of it. Either way, the rhetoric reflects Western culture’s traditional refusal of animal subjectivity, against which Uexkull passionately argued.

In his call to end the pollution of sensory environments in the final chapter, Yong asks, “As we push animals away, we get used to their absence […] How do we solve a problem that we don’t realize exists?” (352). His own rhetoric, however, demonstrates how pervasively but subtly animals are rendered absent, even in the midst of conscious attempts to make them present.