‘Caching’ or ‘scatter hoarding’, is when animals like birds, squirrels and other rodents store food in preparation for leaner times, sometimes in a single location, sometimes scattered around.

Michael and I have a David Attenborough DVD box set that we bought at the dump.

Once, when high, swimming in the ocean I  tried to imagine my death at the jaws of a couple of sharks. Sometimes I force myself into these games  when I’m high as a kind of test for whether it’s the anxiety inducing variety. Other times I imagine the world after or without Attenborough.

Last week we watched disc five “Private Life of Plants”.

In “Private Life of Plants” (1995) Attenborough casually wanders through the Brazilian Amazon showing examples of tropical seed dispersal. Brazil nut trees have ginormous seeds that fall from as far as 8m high. And yet their seeds are so tough that not even a fall from that height is capable of breaking it open to scatter their seeds. Instead the tree relies upon the agouti, a small rodent not dissimilar to a pint sized capybara whose chisel sharp teeth crack open the tough husk before munching down on a few of the seeds. The brazil nut seed pods are prolifically full of nuts and afford much more than a single feed, leading the agouti to hide the remainders in dug out holes or under leaf litter.

Scatter hoarding is driven by the fear that a food stash may be dug up by other creatures. Spreading hidden food across an area prevents scavengers from happening upon the loot and cleaning it out in one hit. The breadth of the agouti’s brazil nut collection, Attenborough suggests, is unfortunately sabotaged by its poor memory. The nuts, forgotten in their storage facilities, germinate and grow into fruiting trees that in turn drop more nuts.

I find it funny that we assume animals are incapable of mirroring (or even excelling) our levels of agency and intelligence. We view ourselves at the peak of evolution, the most well formed of nature’s projects, with animals coming in a concessionary second and plants an even more more insulting third. I find it odd that we never consider that maybe  other life forms have motivations and desires that we will never be able to know or understand. Creatures who are seeing and being in the world in ways that we have neither the words nor intelligence to even comprehend. 

Is it this epistemological hierarchy that stops us from considering the agouti as small farmer rodents? What is stopping us from considering that the agouti not only has an interest in spreading the Brazil nut, but a knowledge too, of exactly what it is doing when it scrapes leftovers into a loamy hole and covers it with some twigs? Is it that animals can’t and won’t know what we do? Or shouldn’t and don’t? Because if they are us, then we are them. Monkey’s in shoes, cucumbers with anxiety and maybe that is the (brazil) nut of our desire: to disassociate. 

When we bury and hoard and scurry away we want it to be different. I wonder if the agouti knows that when we empty seed stocks onto barren ground we are setting ourselves up for failure. Could teams of agouti make documentaries about our ridiculously centralised grain storage silos —all that wheat just waiting for a rat to ransack.

I spent much of my twenties as a scatter hoarder, leaving things behind at share houses that i would struggle to part with. I wouldn’t say I’m reformed but a scarcity complex runs through my family. This was perhaps promoted and passed down by my grandmother who lived on sweet potatoes in a cave hiding from the Japanese as they invaded her home country. A tragedy made two fold when you come from a culture that prides itself on overfeeding guests. I never realised how much I had taken on this cultural practice. I’ve always considered myself someone who hates food waste but recently my boyfriend pointed out to me that I always leave a single mouthful of food on my plate. Maybe it’s epigenetic, maybe I learnt it somewhere. It’s “A mouthful for the Gods” I always tell my boyfriend when his errant fork begins stabbing at my plate.

The fridge at my parent’s place groans with food, tactfully out of earshot of the deep freezer and second fridge in the laundry. I try and deplete the fridge stocks like it’s a game. Sometimes it just involves shuffling around the containers to make things look less imposing, decanting a single fried enoki into a thimble sized container. Other times it involves eating things that are surely beyond the pale. Do agoutis know when they have too much in storage? Do they ever crack open a fresh brazil nut to experience the fresh aroma, even when the stocks are rotting in the ground? What do they feel about it, if anything? Maybe it’s a misplaced defence that I’m trying to carve out for the agouti. I don’t know why I need to believe that they haven’t forgotten where they put their brazil nuts, that they too are just scattering mouthfuls for the Gods.