Projecting human meaning onto wild animals

Projecting human meaning onto wild animals is a recurring process in which animals become symbols shaped by human histories, anxieties, and needs. In Helen Macdonald’s account of training Mabel, the process is shown both in centuries of writing about goshawks and in Macdonald’s own attempt to make a hawk answer her grief. The decisive correction is not to claim that animals have no meaning to people, but to distinguish the meanings people assign from the lives animals lead in their own right.

Historical Images and Social Hierarchies

Macdonald’s earlier preference for falcons had been reinforced by a cultural hierarchy. Falconry with falcons required extensive open land, such as grouse moors and large estates, and was difficult to practise without wealth or connections. Gilbert Blaine described possession of falcons as an aristocratic privilege. Goshawks, by contrast, could be flown in more confined settings. The distinction between the supposedly elevated falcon and the disreputable goshawk therefore reflected not simply differences between birds, but the social conditions and status attached to their human handlers.

Historical descriptions made that hierarchy seem like a judgement on the birds themselves. The solitary goshawk trainer was derided as antisocial and ungainly, and goshawks were represented as difficult, disagreeable, and inferior to falcons. Their reputed temper became a way to explain away their behaviour as a fixed defect in the animal. Such accounts obscured the possibility that a hawk might be responding to how it was treated, or behaving in ways that did not fit a human trainer’s expectations.

The contrast between later and earlier falconry books complicates this inherited portrait. Seventeenth-century writers including Simon Latham described goshawks as wary but sociable, and connected their responses to whether a handler behaved roughly or considerately. Edmund Bert presented the relationship as one of friendship and play. Macdonald does not treat these accounts as proof that earlier attitudes were free of human projection; rather, they offer a different model of attention, in which the hawk’s reactions are not automatically reduced to an irritating temperament. The historical record thus reveals changing human interpretations as much as it describes the birds.

Gendered Interpretations and the Limits of Analogy

Goshawks were repeatedly described in gendered terms. When a man suggested that Macdonald and Mabel got along because both were female, the remark made visible an easy but unwarranted assumption of kinship across species. Macdonald rejects the idea that the hawk’s behaviour could be explained by a bond of sisterhood. She then finds that falconry books had long cast female goshawks as moody, sulky, or difficult, turning their resistance into a supposedly feminine defect.

That language made the bird’s behaviour seem inexplicable while protecting the handler from scrutiny. If a hawk resisted, became nervous, or left, the written stereotype could locate the problem in the bird rather than in the circumstances of its training. Earlier accounts offered a counterpoint: they described a wary, self-willed animal whose response could depend on whether people treated it with patience and consideration. Macdonald’s reading does not erase the gendered language in either period. It shows instead that descriptions of animals carry assumptions about human gender and authority, and that those assumptions can narrow what observers are prepared to notice.

Grief and the Animal as Mirror

The same habit of assigning human meanings becomes personal after Macdonald’s father dies. Macdonald recognizes that she had made a man she barely knew into someone recruited to serve her loss. She sees a related mistake in her approach to Mabel: in trying to escape herself by becoming like a hawk, she had made the hawk into a reflection of her own misery. The projection is not merely a mistaken description. It affects the relationship, because attending to a mirror of grief is not the same as attending to the actual animal.

The account links that impulse to childhood patterns of mourning and to a drawing of a kestrel whose jesses Macdonald repeatedly traced. The drawn lines suggest a wish for safety and secure bonds. In adult grief, the story of a lost hawk offers a similarly charged image: Gos, trained by T. H. White, remains lost rather than confirmed dead in White’s book. Macdonald recognizes that the possibility of return had helped her imagine the lost and dead as recoverable in another world. She had wanted to follow the hawk and bring her father home. The hawk’s symbolic role therefore reveals a real emotional need, but it does not make the hawk or the bird in White’s account interchangeable with the dead person she mourns.

Observation, Interaction, and Correction

Macdonald’s training of Mabel also shows how attention can loosen fixed ideas. Reading minute changes in posture and feathers helps Macdonald anticipate the hawk’s responses, but that intense observation brings its own risk: the watcher can feel so closely aligned with the watched animal that the distinction between them seems to fade. During a pheasant hunt, Macdonald’s attention shifts between the positions of herself, Mabel, and the pheasant. For a time she experiences the encounter as if she were outside her own ordinary point of view. The scene makes interspecies identification vivid, but does not establish that Macdonald has literally become a hawk. It shows how empathy and concentration can unsettle the observer’s sense of self without giving her direct access to the animal’s experience.

Play supplies another kind of correction. Mabel investigates and gently bites a paper toy, follows a magazine tube, and responds to a paper ball tossed toward her. These actions had not appeared in the books Macdonald knew, and they contradict her restricted idea of what goshawks do. The interaction does not make Mabel human; it gives her observable preferences and initiative that the inherited stereotype had failed to include. Later, Macdonald plays catch with Mabel using scrunched paper, even though Stuart doubts that people play with goshawks. The practice becomes part of their relationship, not just an illustration of a human theme.

A change in Mabel’s behaviour eventually forces a more practical reckoning. Macdonald realizes that the hawk has grown heavier with muscle but has been flown at too low a weight; hunger has made her aggressive. Macdonald recognizes that, absorbed in her own misery, she had failed to see Mabel’s condition. Feeding the hawk a whole pigeon accompanies a wider recognition: Macdonald is not the hawk she had tried to become, but the person waiting for the hawk to return. The reversal matters because it restores a difference that projection had blurred. The animal’s needs and behaviour cannot be inferred from the handler’s emotional state.

Meaning Without Reduction

Macdonald’s later reflection on White’s list of human identities for Gos sharpens the distinction between interpretation and reduction. She resolves not to turn Mabel into a historical figure, a hieroglyph, or a villain misremembered through human stories. Rocks, trees, and animals exist in themselves, even as people make them intelligible by giving them meanings that reinforce their own views of the world. Knowing imaginatively what it is like to be other than human can deepen human understanding, but mistaking the wildness people attribute to an animal for the life animating that animal is dangerous.

The book therefore holds two claims together: goshawks can carry powerful meanings in human culture, and their lives are not exhausted by those meanings. Their hunting is not an excuse for human violence, nor is the hawk merely a vehicle for Macdonald’s mourning. By the end, Macdonald describes herself and Mabel as sharing their lives while remaining separate. The distinction does not diminish their attachment; it makes attention to the animal more honest, because Mabel can be encountered as a living being rather than only as a symbol of grief, wildness, gender, or escape.