When I was a teenager I used to see goannas frequently. My parents owned a property on the far south coast of New South Wales and I knew of at least two locations there where it was possible to see goannas. Red-bellied black snakes were regularly seen, too. Swifts would come like clockwork every Christmas, migrating down the length of Australia’s east coast and swooping so low over the house that you could hear the rattle of their wings. A pair of swallows raised a brood every year in a carefully constructed mud nest under the eaves of the house until one year, suddenly, they didn’t. We blamed the family dog for scaring them off, or a failed season when the young fell out of the nest on to the bricks below. We imagined the adult swallows still out there, making a conscious decision to avoid the nest. We imagined them associating the nest with breeding failure, and so avoiding it.

The lives of animals happen mostly out of our sight. In particular their deaths happen away from us, hidden from view, their bodies broken down and recycled without us even knowing they’re there. Very few of us ever take the time to learn to recognise individuals among populations of wild animals—the specific arrangement of whiskers, the particular pattern of bumps, that distinguish one kangaroo or humpback whale from another. All animals of a species look alike to most of us, and so the fate of individual animals is lost; without individuality the lives of animals become weightless in our minds, one animal blending into another, each animal becoming interchangeable and so the species becoming eternal. Until we stop seeing them altogether.