Blogging Wildlife: The Perception of Animals by Hikers on the Appalachian Trail (Multispecies Encounters)

By: Kate Marx

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Synopsis: 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 shared 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.