Almost six months later, I still can’t bring myself to look at most of the images in detail. In the moment, when it all went down, the photojournalist in me took over, sequestering my heart and shutting down my limbic system. Much like a movie scene in the hands of a skilled director, the details of each and every action and reaction played out in slow motion, shining a spotlight on what was at stake. But it wasn’t until it was over that the dots were connected.

Grazer, a 20-something brown bear and the queen of Brooks Falls, in Katmai National Park, is holding court at the top of the falls, teaching her two spring cubs how to fish. The salmon run has been plentiful this week, seeming to launch themselves out of the falls and into her mouth. The bounty is so abundant, she’s taking only a bite or two for herself, before allowing her cubs to take their share before they fling the remnants toward the hoards of gulls.

The cubs haven’t mastered their mother’s graceful confidence on the slippery rocks at the top of the falls. Suddenly, and without any warning, the two cubs spill over the lip of the waterfall and plunge into the rushing water below. The next few seconds change everything for Grazer and her family.

One cub, like a child splashing into the pool after a waterslide ride, uses the current to usher himself to safety on the shore. The other, however, is caught in the current and she is heading straight toward a colossal sized boar named Chunk.

I often remark that one of the best parts of my job as a wildlife photographer is that I have the privilege of watching wildlife documentaries unfold before my eyes in real-time, missing only the voice of David Attenborough narrating the scenes. At this moment, watching the flailing cub tumble toward one of the most legendary boars in Katmai National Park, I want that soothing voice in my ear more than I ever have before—something to calm the feelings I know will soon come.

I am no stranger to witnessing conflict in the natural world. As a professional wildlife photographer, it’s part of the job. Just a month prior, I was in the northern part of Brazil’s Pantanal region, one of the most biodiverse places in the world. During the dry season, the animals that call these 42 million acres home congregate around the ever-dwindling network of rivers, creating a predator paradise. For the jaguar sitting at the top of the food chain, the Pantanal is nothing short of an all-you-can-eat-buffet.

Cool mornings quickly yield to the sun, and the rising temperatures bring impossible numbers of caiman to the surface of the Cuiabá River. They are so thick and abundant, one can practically hopscotch across their heads to get to the other side of the river.

Our boat sidled up to a floating mat of hyacinths and the captain cut the engine. A jaguar across from us was lying in wait under an archway of dried vines and leaves. She wanted a caiman, one of the jaguars’ preferred meals, and she was biding her time waiting for the object of her desire to let down his guard and forget she was there.

In a flash of muscled grace, the jaguar sprang upward and outward before landing squarely on the caiman and his armored flesh. But the crocodilian, built for survival in this aquatic battlefield, wasted no time dragging his assailant into the depths of the river. What followed was an unseen battle of primal determination, hinted at by only the whip of tails and subtle swirls occasionally breaking the river’s surface. The jaguar emerged with barely a breath left, retreating into the shadows. The caiman remained bloody, but unbowed.

Grazer’s cub is not equipped to mount a caiman-sized defense. She is but 30 pounds of inexperience about to cross paths with a 1000-pound behemoth bear with a lifetime of dominating this river and sporting the scars to prove it.  In what I categorize as an instinctual prey response, Chunk wastes no time snatching the small cub from the water and into his mouth.

Grazer is in Chunk’s face within seconds, but he is unrelenting. The cub’s brown fur rippled with every violent swing, her tiny limbs limp as the boar’s jaws clamped tightly around the scruff of the cub’s neck. She didn’t cry out—she couldn’t—but her mouth hung open in a silent wail, a final plea swallowed by the deafening roar of the water.

Grazer explodes into action, a blur of muscle and maternal fury, forcing Chunk to drop the cub. The people with me on the platform exhaled a collective sigh of relief in seeing the cub move downstream from Chunk, still alive and safe for now. But the situation is far from over.

Chunk, now energized by the fight, comes back at Grazer, and the two formidable opponents engage in what can only be described as an all-out assault against one another. For a moment, it seems Grazer has the upper hand, but then another boar wades into the fray, adding his bulk to the fight. Together, the two boars have managed to subdue the angry sow, while her injured cub stands bellowing in the water only fifteen feet away.

Outnumbered and neck-deep in water, Grazer is working with every disadvantage. Every movement a fight against the weight of the water, she strikes Chunk with a powerful swipe that sends him reeling. While he recovers, Grazer turns to the other boar and attacks him with the full force of a mother scorned until he concedes and backs off. He casts a glance at the unattended cub, considering his options, before looking back at Grazer and making the wiser decision to return to fishing.

Grazer makes her way back to her cub with Chunk hot on her tail. She nudges her cub into the current, sending her down river and out of the boar’s reach. Then she turns back to Chunk with a final warning. The message is clear—he’s done messing with her cubs.

My camera now at my side, I start to take in the reality of what I witnessed. My heart, sitting in my stomach, ached for Grazer and her cub. I shuddered to think of the pain that cub must be feeling and what she would go through in the coming days as she inched her way toward her inevitable death.

My brain reconnected my heart and my limbic system, helped by the onlookers peppering a nearby National Park Service volunteer with questions in their own attempts to process what just happened.

He patiently addressed each question, but the monotony of tone and matter-of-fact dryness of his responses created glazed-over eyes and killed any potential opportunity for further discussion and education. In his interpretation, nature is nature and that means sometimes “nature is brutal.”

Like the others in the vicinity, the nonchalance of the volunteer’s emotionless answers only begged more questions from my group, too. The way we talk about animals shapes how we see them—and, more importantly, how we choose to value them. A brown bear with a prey response is no more “brutal” than a bee collecting pollen—it’s simply the machinery of existence at work.

“Will the cub survive?”

“How will the park service intervene?”

“They won’t even take her to a rehab?!”

“Why would he do that to her cub?”

“Is this just so he can mate with Grazer?”

When scenes like this or the jaguar hunting the caiman unfold in front of us, an undeniable amount of emotion grips us—fear, excitement, sorrow, triumph. Whether instinct or intuition, we respond in ways that feel deeply human.

When a mother bear throws herself into battle for her cub or a jaguar launches herself into a battle she cannot afford to lose—it is almost impossible not to reach for familiar narratives. We drape their actions in the language of intention. We ascribe emotions, motivations, even morality. We don’t just observe—we relate, because deep down we recognize something of ourselves in them.

But there’s a paradox. When Grazer’s cub dangled helplessly from the jaws of the boar, I felt an overwhelming weight of grief, a visceral sorrow for her suffering. But when I watched the jaguar wrestle a caiman, my sympathy bent in the opposite direction. I didn’t mourn for the unsuspecting and battered caiman; I felt for the jaguar, the predator who had expended so much energy only to walk away hungry. Was it because I related less to a reptile? Because the caiman, armored and ancient, felt less like something I could understand?

The way we feel about these moments is shaped by something deeper than just observation—it’s shaped by our own biases, our own perceptions of what it means to struggle, to fight, to survive. The question becomes: does acknowledging that connection diminish our understanding of these animals or does it deepen it?

For centuries, scientists have cautioned against anthropomorphizing animals, arguing that ascribing human emotions, human morals, intentions, or personalities to non-human species is misleading and unscientific.  The dominant belief in biology has been that animals operate under evolutionary pressure and learned behaviors rather than complex emotional states akin to human experience. While this perspective has value in scientific study, it also risks reinforcing the artificial boundary between humans and the rest of the natural world—an idea that is neither ecologically sound nor culturally universal.

From early childhood, we are steeped in anthropomorphism, often as a tool for teaching human values. Fables and fairy tales shape our perceptions—The Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood turn wolves into deceitful villains. In school, we learn to appreciate species deemed useful to humans while others are framed as threats to crops, property, or health. As adults, we praise the ecological importance of bees, yet unthinkingly welcome exterminators to spray for mosquitoes—another pollinator, just one we find inconvenient.

Rats, pigeons, coyotes, bears, snakes, and insects are labeled as pests or dangers, not because of their biology, but because they disrupt human priorities. The way we talk about animals—who we celebrate, who we fear, and who we dismiss—reflects not nature’s order but our own biases, shaped by social structures, economic interests, and cultural narratives. Some species are tolerated, even admired; others are demonized, often for reasons as arbitrary as where they happen to live or how well they fit into our world. It’s worth noting that we bring these same biases into our perception of other humans, too.

Despite official resistance from the science community, anthropomorphism has long crept into the language of biologists, ethologists, and ecologists. Jane Goodall’s pioneering work with chimpanzees was initially dismissed by scientists because she described chimps as having “personalities” and “emotions,” rather than referring to them in purely mechanistic terms. Today, zoologists freely use terms like “grief,” “playfulness,” and “cooperation” to describe behaviors across species, from elephants to crows.

In marine biology, researchers studying orca pods regularly describe family bonds, decision-making, and mourning behaviors when a mother orca carries her dead calf for weeks. Studies of wolves, such as those by David Mech, often speak of “packs” as family units with cooperative hunting strategies, emotional bonds, and even individual preferences in play behavior. Frans de Waal’s extensive research on primates has demonstrated that concepts like fairness, empathy, and even reconciliation are not unique to humans but shared among many species.

Even the most data-driven scientific disciplines rely on familiar language to explain the unfamiliar. Biologists speak of “cheating” cleaner fish who steal mucus instead of parasites, “deceptive” corvids that feign food caches to mislead would-be thieves, and “altruistic” meerkats standing guard for their kin.

These words aren’t accidental; they reflect an innate need to translate raw behavior into something graspable. Even in the realm of strict empiricism, human language leaks in, revealing a deeper truth—our tendency to see patterns, relationships, and meaning in the lives of other creatures. Scientists may caution against anthropomorphism, but in practice, they cannot avoid it.

If these terms help researchers frame the complexities of animal behavior, why should they be off-limits to the rest of us? Language is a bridge, not a distortion. And in the fight to make people care about the natural world, it is connection—not cold detachment—that determines whether a species is remembered or forgotten.

As photographers, we don’t just observe and document the natural world—we interpret it. Whether through data or narrative, science and art both attempt to make sense of what we see. A behavioral ecologist watching a wolf pack describes dominance structures and cooperative hunting strategies. A photographer capturing that same scene frames the tension, the bond, the weight of survival in the wolves’ eyes.

One deals in hypotheses and data points, the other in light and emotion—but both tell stories. Both shape how we understand nature. And yet, for centuries, science has been elevated as the ultimate intellectual pursuit, while art—the very thing that makes knowledge felt—has been seen as its softer, less rigorous counterpart. This isn’t just a distinction; it’s a hierarchy. One that says numbers matter more than narratives—that facts hold more weight than feeling.

But that’s a mistake.

Science and art are not competing worldviews; they are complementary ways of making sense of existence. Science excels at telling us what is—how ecosystems function, how species evolve, how climate systems shift over time. But raw knowledge, no matter how precise, is not the same as meaning. A scientist might be able to sequence the entire genome of a jaguar, but that tells us nothing about what it feels like to gaze into the eyes of that wild cat and sense the living history in her eyes.

That’s where art comes in.

The elevation of science as more “intellectual” than art is largely a byproduct of the Enlightenment, an era that championed reason above all else, often at the expense of intuition, creativity, and storytelling—the very things that humans have used for millennia to make sense of their place in the world.

And yet, modern intellectual culture often treats storytelling as secondary to data, as if emotion is a contaminant rather than an essential part of how humans process reality. But the irony is that science itself is driven by a deep creative impulse. The best scientists—Alexander von Humboldt, Darwin, Einstein, Rachel Carson—were not just meticulous researchers; they were imaginative thinkers, people who saw patterns where others saw noise, who translated raw data into compelling stories about how life works.

So, is science more intellectual than art?

Only if you define intelligence in the narrowest possible way. Only if you ignore the fact that the deepest, most enduring truths about the world aren’t found in data points alone but in the way those data points are woven into something we can feel. The best photography, writing, and storytelling don’t just mirror science; they expand it, give it depth, and give it urgency.

If science is the map, art is the reason we care about the places it leads to. It reminds us that knowledge alone isn’t enough—we must feel connected to what we seek to better understand. This is especially true in how we perceive the natural world. We crave nature when we need solitude, when we seek refuge from the pace of modern life. We go “out there” to hike, to camp, to watch wildlife, framing it as an escape from civilization. Yet, in the same breath, we draw a firm line between ourselves and the wild, treating it as something separate from us—their home, not ours—as if humans are visitors rather than active participants in ecological systems.

Yet, our love for nature seems to have strict conditions. We cherish the idea of untouched wilderness—so long as it remains a backdrop, a place we can visit when we need an escape from the noise of our own creation. We revel in the solitude of a quiet forest or the vastness of an open plain, but only when it’s on our terms. The moment nature stands in the way of expansion, industry, or convenience, it is no longer sacred—it is something to be tamed, carved up, and repurposed. We bulldoze ancient forests for subdivisions, drain wetlands for shopping centers, and fracture migration corridors with highways, all while mourning the loss of the very wildness we systematically erase.

We talk about wildlife as if it has a place—a neatly defined somewhere else where it belongs. We label pockets of land as “preserves” and “refuges,” setting boundaries that make us feel as though we’ve done enough. But a bear crossing a road is not trespassing—she is following a path that existed long before pavement and property lines. A wolf slipping through the edges of a village is not an invader—he is an animal navigating a shrinking world, adapting to human sprawl that does not adapt in return. The wild is not disappearing because animals are vanishing into some distant unknown; it is disappearing because we are methodically taking it apart, piece by piece, until there is nothing left but the memory of what once was.

This false divide is one of the deepest flaws in Western thinking: the belief that humans exist outside of nature rather than within it. At its core, this is a colonial construct, shaping not just how we describe wilderness, but how we justify our dominance over it. This mindset still drives conservation and environmental policy, reinforcing the myth that nature’s value lies in control or isolation rather than in relationships of reciprocity.

While Western science has only recently begun to acknowledge complex cognition in animals, many Indigenous cultures have long recognized a kinship between humans and animals, not as metaphor, but as lived understanding. Among the Lakota, bears are healers, holders of medicinal knowledge. In Haida traditions, ravens are not just birds but beings of intelligence and wit. To the Anishinaabe, wolves are brothers, traveling alongside humans in both legend and landscape. These perspectives do not diminish the animals they describe; they acknowledge them as complex, sentient, and worthy of respect.

This way of knowing is not just poetic—it is practical. Indigenous ecological knowledge, shaped over thousands of years, has guided sustainable hunting, land management practices, and conservation long before Western science arrived to document the same patterns. Yet, the Western framework has often dismissed these insights, reducing animals to biological machines, their behaviors explained only through evolutionary pressure and mechanistic survival strategies.

But the boundary between “us” and “them” is a construct, not a truth. Recent studies in ethology, primatology, and cognitive ecology increasingly affirm what Indigenous traditions have long understood: animals feel, communicate, and make decisions. Whether it is an orca mourning her dead calf or a wolf choosing loyalty over self-preservation, the evidence is there—if we are willing to see it. If the goal is to understand the animal world, perhaps the question is not whether we project too much of ourselves onto them, but whether we have spent too long pretending we are nothing alike.

Many wildlife photographers take their cues from science, instinctively shying away from anthropomorphizing animals, fearing that it undermines their credibility as objective observers of the natural world. Photography, especially when aimed at conservation, often strives for objectivity—a visual record of animal behavior without human interpretation. Great amounts of effort go into attempting to photograph animals without altering their natural behavior, conveniently ignoring the fact that our attempts are based on our assumptions on how other animals experience the world.  The concern is that by attributing human emotions or narratives to wildlife, we risk misleading audiences or diminishing the reality of the animals’ experience.

Photography is not and has never been purely objective. The act of composing a frame, choosing a moment, and deciding what story to tell is inherently subjective. The most powerful wildlife images resonate because they invite an emotional connection. A snow leopard gazing over a mountain ridge can evoke solitude; a grieving elephant standing over their fallen kin can stir empathy. These responses are not fabrications—they are rooted in something real, an ancient recognition that our lives are intertwined with those of other beings. The reluctance to acknowledge this connection does not make an image more truthful; it simply upholds a medieval, outdated view of nature as something separate from ourselves.

Science and art have always been uneasy partners. One traffics in empirical facts, the other in feeling and interpretation. But in fields like wildlife photography, these two worlds don’t just meet—they depend on each other. The mistake is thinking that because an artist operates within a scientific space, they should be bound by the same strict rules as scientists.

That’s not how this works.

The scientist’s job is to seek objective truth, to document what is, with as little interference as possible. The artist’s job—whether wielding a camera, a pen, or a paintbrush—is to take those truths and translate them into something that resonates. Something that sticks. Science may tell us that Arctic sea ice is vanishing, but it’s the haunting image of a lone, starving polar bear clinging to a diminishing iceberg that makes people pay attention. If the goal is to make people curious, to force them to interact with our photographs then emotion, narrative, and imagery are not optional. They are the difference between awareness and apathy.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring wasn’t just an exposé on pesticides; it was a meticulously researched indictment of humanity’s arrogance in manipulating nature. She revealed how chemicals like DDT, meant to control “pests,” were poisoning entire ecosystems, accumulating in the food chain, and silencing the very creatures that signaled a healthy world. Carson’s storytelling turned abstract science into something visceral—a spring without birds, a world unraveling under its own hubris. More than the data alone, it was this warning—urgent, poetic, and undeniable—that unsettled the public and sparked a movement. Her work didn’t just change policy; it changed how people understood their place in the living world.

Emotion is not the enemy of truth.

In scientific discourse, emotions are often seen as interference—something to be controlled to maintain objectivity. In art, emotion is the currency of engagement. A compelling wildlife photograph is not a neutral document; it is an invitation to feel. If our work as visual storytellers was bound by the same rigid structures as peer-reviewed journals, it would lose its most powerful tool: its ability to make people, especially those well outside the realm of the scientifically curious, care. Art is what makes knowledge personal.

While anthropomorphism can foster empathy, it indeed carries risks. Misunderstanding animal behavior can lead to real-world harm.  When I volunteered for a wild bird rehabilitation center, every spring we received hundreds of “orphaned” young birds. Nearly 100% of the time, these birds were merely fledglings, closely watched by their parents as they learned to fend for themselves. Instead, the avian parents witnessed the well-meaning human birdnapping their perfectly fine offspring.

Who among us hasn’t seen a story where people who assume that a baby deer is abandoned—rather than temporarily left by its mother— “rescue” it unnecessarily, disrupting its natural survival process? Similarly, viewing wild animals through a human emotional lens may encourage inappropriate interactions, such as feeding them or attempting to domesticate them. This, too, can lead to irreparable harm or even death for an animal despite the fact that the human is the actual problem.

But is this risk greater than the alternative? If we strip animals of all emotion and character, do we not risk making them easier to exploit, easier to ignore? They become biological machinery, nothing more than moving parts in an ecosystem. A bear is just a bear, a jaguar just a jaguar, and if one disappears, what does it really matter?

The very thing that makes photography effective is emotional connection, and if avoiding anthropomorphism in wildlife photography means severing that, we must ask which is the greater danger.

Art—whether photography, literature, or music—has long been a force for challenging misconceptions and reshaping belief systems. If anthropomorphism brings people closer to nature, compels them to rethink their place within it, and challenges them to see animals as beings rather than objects, then doesn’t it serve a purpose worthy of equal footing with scientific accuracy?

I think back to Grazer, standing in the river, water surging around her as she squared off against a bear twice her size. She had no reason to win that fight. The odds were against her, but she fought anyway. Because survival—real survival—has never been passive. It's a struggle. It’s persistence.

Maybe that’s why we reach for stories when we watch animals like Grazer. Maybe it’s not projection, but recognition. We are pressured to suppress feelings in favor of reason. But allowing ourselves to see something more—intelligence, resilience, memory, decision-making—suddenly, a mother bear defending her cub isn’t just an instinctual reflex. It’s a choice, a calculation, shaped by experience and the urgency of survival.

Feeling isn’t a flaw, it is survival in motion. The wild doesn’t reward numbness.

Grazer knew that. Her cub, barely standing, knew that.

Maybe, if we let ourselves feel—really feel—we’ll remember it, too: that humans are not separate from nature, that our lives are intertwined with the creatures we study and photograph. If a glimpse of emotion—a word, an image, a moment that feels familiar—is what reminds us of that connection, then maybe anthropomorphism isn’t the misstep science would have us think it is. Maybe it’s the most honest thing we can do.