Understanding Dogs through Kinesthetic Empathy, Social Construction, and History

The term, come into animal presence, she takes from the title of a Denise Levertov poem. The poem, which reads, in part, What joy when the insouciant armadillo glances at us and doesn\u27t quicken his trotting across the track into the palm bush. What is this joy? This joy is the possibility of our being in the presence of animals for (t)he armadillo has some intention to pursue in the palm forest. This joy, to which I invite you here, consists in dwelling in that presence, in inhabiting that intention, that armored but guileless world of the armadillo. I will attempt to show that it is productive to do so, while recognizing that our dwelling there as in all other presences, whether human-animal, human-human or human-divine, is necessarily imperfect