Research on human-wildlife interactions has traditionally not focused on wild animals as intentional agents. “Intentionality”, in psychology, denotes the state that a being pursues a goal (APA Dictionary of Psychology). Accordingly in this article, the term “intention” denotes the mental state directing an agent's behavior. The term “motive” refers to the broader motivational background in which individual intentions and actions are embedded (Ryan and Deci, 2000). While classifying animal behavior as intentional is conceptually intricate (Heyes and Dickinson, 1990), in both the natural and social sciences, animals' intentional agency is increasingly being substantiated (De Waal, 1996; Bekoff, 2007; Lestel, 2011; Belgrad and Griffen, 2016; Brakel, 2016). Since von Uexküll's (1909) work has suggested how even allegedly simple organisms entertain their respective forms of intentions when acting upon their umwelten, it is now widely accepted that minds of animals as different as chimpanzees (Call and Tomasello, 2008), crows (Emery, 2004), wild boars (Masilkova et al., 2021), and even fish (Brown, 2015) and insects (Prete, 2004) are richly populated by intentions and motives: by emotions responding to given states, by thoughts about these states, by desires for certain further states, by orientations toward attaining these states, and by behavioral attempts to realize them. The degree to which animals are conscious of their intentional states is hardly possible to establish empirically (Shettleworth, 2001, 2009), yet precursors of human forms of consciousness and sense of self arguably are present in all animals (Fogassi et al., 2005; De Waal and Ferrari, 2010; Low, 2012; Gupta and Sinha, 2014; Reber, 2016; Rowlands, 2016). Concurrently, fields of study have emerged that are specifically devoted to elucidating animal agency. For example, Human-Animal Studies, or Anthrozoology (Mills, 2010; Siddiq and Habib, 2016) investigates relations of human and animal agents in all areas of life; and political ecology and political geography (McCarthy, 2002; Nygren and Rikoon, 2008; Poerting and Marquardt, 2019) i.a. approach human-wildlife interactions under the premise that animals ought to be conceived as “actors, rather [than] objects only to be acted upon” (Margulies and Karanth, 2018; p.3) who co-create human-wildlife encounters (Lescureux and Linnell, 2010; Nair et al., 2021). Accordingly, wild animals have their respective ways of representing human-wildlife interactions and imply their human counterpart in their intentional agency (Lestel, 2011; Jürgens, 2017).

Attributing intentionality to animals is a particular aspect of the general process of mind perception in non-human beings (Waytz et al., 2010). Our way of representing animal minds is based on the same cognitive, perceptual and neurobiological mechanisms by which we represent our fellow humans' minds (Urquiza-Haas and Kotrschal, 2015; Sevillano and Fiske, 2019), notably on the largely automatic functioning of the “theory of mind” module (Epley et al., 2007). This means that we are prone to interpret animals' behavior in human terms. This may indeed yield correct interpretations in cases where humans' and animals' mental lives exhibit homologous or analogous functioning (De Waal, 1999; Emery and Clayton, 2004; Epley et al., 2008), but in other cases, judging animals' behavior from a homocentric place leads to misconstruing their intentions. According to De Waal (1999), humans' misconceptions of animals' mental states may range between the extremes of anthropocentric anthropomorphism, i.e. a “naive” attribution of “human feelings and thoughts to animals” (ibid., p.260), and “anthropodenial”: “the apriori rejection of shared characteristics between humans and animals when in fact they may exist” (ibid., p.258).

People's penchants for anthropomorphizing differ, based on their specific knowledge of animals, their life histories, their personalities, and on situation-specific aspects (Epley et al., 2007). Additionally, the more unpredictably animals behave, the more readily they are perceived as exhibiting intentional agency (cf. Johnson and Barrett, 2003; Gray et al., 2007). In human-wildlife encounters, wild animals typically appear to evade human control, and thereby are likely to attract attributions of intentionality. For example, in the wake of resurging wolf populations, introducing measures for preventing or compensating attacks on livestock are meant – but fail – to provide a complete alleviation of risk (Lute et al., 2018; Bautista et al., 2019). In such a setting largely ruled by affect (Glikman et al., 2012; Slagle et al., 2012), attributing intentions to wolves can “fulfill a basic need for understanding, control, and predictability” “by providing a sense of understanding and control of a nonhuman agent” (Epley et al., 2008, p. 149). Yet, while perceiving wild animals as holding intentions toward humans may alleviate ambiguity for an individual person conceiving of human-wildlife relations, such a conception may fuel human-wildlife conflicts and their politicization on the societal level. Human-animal interactions already are polarized due to different economic and political interests (Nie, 2001; Adams, 2015; Carlson et al., 2020; Pates and Leser, 2021), diverging beliefs about and affective responses to wildlife (Treves and Karanth, 2003; Flykt et al., 2013; Jacobs et al., 2014; Behr et al., 2017; Stauder et al., 2020), and opposing value orientations with regard to nature more broadly (Bjerke and Kaltenborn, 1999; Bauer et al., 2008; Marvin, 2010; Teel and Manfredo, 2010; Dietsch et al., 2017; Breyne et al., 2021). Existing lines of conflict are likely to be reflected in stakeholders' conceptions of wild animals' alleged intentions (Bell, 2015; Jürgens and Hackett, 2021).

Therefore, the role of attributing intentionality to wildlife may be a relevant factor to consider within the complex geography of human dimensions. If construing wild animals as holding intentions toward humans is an impactful dynamic, then interpretation patterns based on such ascriptions are expected not only to make media catchlines, but to consistently surface in people's habitual way of speaking about human-wildlife interactions (Oevermann, 2001). The present study investigates this hypothesis by exploring the presence, as well as the form and content of the attributions being made to wild animals.

I interviewed 20 participants purposefully sampled by a scheme of maximum variation sampling (Lamnek, 2006) suited to investigating the “shared dimensions” of a phenomenon – like human-wildlife relations – exhibiting “a great deal of variation” (Patton, 2002, p. 235). The two criteria for which a maximum of variation was sought were the valence of attitude (positive vs. negative, as assessed in a short recruiting conversation via phone or email), and subjects' formal relation to the respective animals, (operationalized by their profession or vocation, e.g. scientist, shepherd, hunter, or environmentalist). As a consequence of choosing these criteria, the sub-samples for interviews on wolves, corvids, and spiders, respectively, differ widely with regard to other variables. For example, sociodemographic variables do not distribute evenly over sub-samples, since, e.g., interviewing hunters (predominantly elderly males) is of particular importance for the case of wolves, while interviewing spider phobics (predominantly young and female) is informative for the case of human-spider relations. Appendix 1 provides demographic details of the participants. Subjects were recruited by means of the snowball technique (Patton, 2002). Also, I selected critical cases by contacting users having posted expressive commentaries in online news feeds on human-wildlife interactions. Based on the pragmatic criterion for theoretical saturation proffered by Low (2019), the recruiting of further participants was discontinued as a saturation set in with regard to the concepts deemed relevant in the framework project (Jürgens and Hackett, 2021). Theoretical saturation notably was reached within and across sub-samples interviewed on the three model wildlife despite heterogeneity of those groups. I took this as an indication that this heterogeneity did not introduce any significant bias with regard to the research questions. Seven participants were interviewed on wolves, 6 on corvids, and 7 on spiders. German is the primary language of communication for all subjects, 19 of them German citizens, one of Swiss nationality. For this article, participants' quotes were translated from German as literally as possible. In this article, interviewees are referred to by a code indicating the focus species in the interview (“W”, “C”, or “S”), and the order of that interview in the series (e.g. “C6” being the sixth participant interviewed on corvids).

Participants were interviewed in person between June of 2016 and October of 2020. Interviews lasted between one and three h and were video-taped. After gathering informed consent, the conversation started by participants recounting a memorable encounter they might have had with the respective animal. The interview then was semi-structured by a set of 15 open-ended questions (see Appendix 2) whose themes were all discussed in the interview, but their order and phrasing was adapted to the flow of the conversation. Verbal questions were complemented by a projective technique: I asked interviewees to express their thoughts also by building configurations of little wooden figures. Projective approaches serve to gain additional insights by tapping below subjects' conscious filter, and by initiating deeper conversation based on striking aspects of those configurations (Hackett et al., 2016). Participants were free not to use the figures. Fifteen subjects did use them, and 5 chose not to use them. The total of 80 items consisted of three figures representing the model animals, other wildlife, domestic animals, people, cars, fences, trees, as well as buildings, and undefined elements. The set of questions and projective prompts was the same for interviews on all three model animals.

In this study, I pursued a four-step process of thematic analysis (Clarke and Braun, 2017) within the framework of a grounded theory paradigm (Mey and Mruck, 2011). Figure 1 gives an overview of these steps and the results they yielded. In the first step, I went through all participants' transcripts in search of statements that attribute intentionality to animals. Statements were coded as attributions of intentionality and included into further steps of analysis if (i) participants spontaneously made these statements, i.e. they did not refer to or echo the interviewer's phrases; and (ii) participants plainly talk about animals' presumed perspective or intentions, i.e. no interpretative effort was required to evidence the attribution of intentionality.

In a second step of analysis, I collected all statements that were clearly identical in meaning and gave them a common heading. These themes will be referred to by the term “intentions” in this article.

In a third step, I classified these intentions based on three criteria describing the forms of the intentions attributed to animals: concreteness, accuracy, and whether the attribution was made to animals on an individual or species level.

The 12 intentions fell into 6 of the 8 possible categories that resulted from combining the extremes of the three continua (concreteness, accuracy, and level of ascription): No attribution was found to simultaneously be “metaphoric” and “accurate”, neither on the individual, nor species level. The lack of intentions falling into a metaphoric-and-accurate category is possibly due to the fact that if participants made ascriptions that might be accurate, they stated them as literal attributions. In the following sections, I present the intentions ascribed to the model animals by categories. Table 1 gives an overview of the intentions by categories.

Across the different categories defined by the three continua, some of the 12 individual intentions exhibit analogies with regard to their content. For example, the metaphoric allegation that “problematic wild animals challenge human sovereignty over nature” and the more literal attribution that “problematic wild animals break the rules of the cultural landscape and disturb its orderliness” share a common thread with regard to animals' presumed incentive to rebel against human rule and rules. By integrating the kindred intentions in this way, a total of four motives emerged:

Rebellion: The animal intends to challenge human rule and rules. The animal recognizes a human claim for hegemony over nature and intends to rebel against the entitlement presumed by humankind.

Menace: The animal holds an intention that either directly threatens human life and livelihood, or that implies a menace to human wellbeing. The animal recognizes and intends to seize an opportunity for preying on the human or for exploiting the human's resources.

Relationality: The animal intends to enter into and to entertain a bidirectional relation with the human, either as a competitor, as a contemporary agent, or as a confederate. The animal deliberately proposes itself as a relational counterpart to the human.

Unintentionality: The animal innocuously transgresses red lines defined by humans while holding intentions of pursuing their own lifeway (foraging, exploring, residing, etc.). The animal's intention is not directed at humans, but unbeknown to the animal or unavoidably, the animal's behavior affects them.

Diverse, even contradictory, intentions and motives have been attributed to each of the three model species by different participants. Opposing construals of animals' intentional agency correspond to the variety of possible valences of human-wildlife relations (Bhatia et al., 2020; Pooley et al., 2021), and to polarized discourses within the context of a community's interaction with a particular species, e.g., hunter- and farmer-wolf interactions (Bell, 2015). The polarization of stances in many human-wildlife interactions (Jürgens and Hackett, 2021), and in many instances of conservation conflicts more generally (Adams, 2015), has been traced to, i.a., disparate value orientations (Stern and Dietz, 1994; Thompson and Barton, 1994; Kaltenborn and Bjerke, 2002; Dietsch et al., 2017), group identity (Dressel et al., 2015; Carlson et al., 2020), and differential perceptions of the risks and benefits of wildlife presence (Bruskotter and Wilson, 2014; Slagle et al., 2019). I have insinuated how these aspects may play out for the participants in this study by sketching some of their personal life histories, idiosyncratic perspectives, and ideals. For example, the elderly couple C6 felt threatened by rooks flying by their neatly arranged balcony. Conversely, crow feeder C5's heart burgeoned by close contact with her bird friends. Animal rights advocate S2 perceived spiders as beings utterly disinterested in humankind; spider phobics S1 and S4 described spiders as intruding their intimate spaces; whereas emotionally fragile S3 praised his pet spider as a benign teacher. For the case of wolves, Herzog (2019) describes how people's biographies relate to diverging attitudes. It seems that likewise, the intentions attributed to wild animals map onto the attributors' identities. A particular pattern with regard to a potential influence of group identity can be sketched by considering the seven hunters in the sample. Hunters did not seem to differ from the other participants in the concreteness and accuracy of attributions – in spite of their arguable rich asset of practical interactions with wildlife. Yet, they solely attributed intentions to wildlife at the species level. This is possibly owing to a holistic view of nature and wildlife (Klaver et al., 2002) prevalent in the hunting community and embodied in hunting jargon (cf. Howe, 1981; Wade, 1990). In this explorative study, a potential systematicity of a correspondence between biographic variables and attributions to wildlife can only be adumbrated due to the small sample size, and remains to be established and quantified in a larger and representative sample by future research.

In addition to participant-specific differences, patterns of species-specific differences appear in the data: Attributions made to wolves, corvids and spiders seem to exhibit different forms. Wolves predominantly attract attributions at the species-level; while individual-level intentions are ascribed to corvids and, particularly, to spiders. Corvids are attributed with mostly accurate intentions stated at the individual-level; whereas spiders are ascribed individual-level intentions that are of a projected quality. I propose that these differential qualities of attributions reflect the differences in experiences that participants have made with the respective wildlife (cf. Lescureux and Linnell, 2010).

For two decades, area-wide sedentary populations of wolves have established in the eastern federal states of Germany and in Lower Saxony. In the remainder of Germany, only a few packs and individuals have become sedentary to date. Residents seldomly see wolves (Poerting and Marquardt, 2019) and depredation on livestock evidences the side-effect of human-wolf coexistence (Arbieu et al., 2019), while wolves themselves remain elusive. Lescureux and Linnell (2010) report that even in Macedonia, where people have virtually always coexisted with wolves, they are perceived as “hard to localize” and “as a homogenous population rather a collection of individuals” (ibid., p. 394). The predominantly abstract species-level attributions of intentionality to wolves correspond to the rather amorphous character of wolf presence. Simultaneously, wolf issues are politicized in Germany as fiercely as elsewhere (Nie, 2001; Poerting and Marquardt, 2019; Pates and Leser, 2021), probably accounting for the projected attributions to wolves, whereas the accurate ascriptions may be due to education campaigns about wolf ecology, for example the popular “Welcome Wolf”-Campaigns of Germany's largest environmental organization NABU¹ Both the ecologically framed attributions, and the blatant anthropomorphizations – e.g., attributing a penchant for recalcitrance or even a prowess to mastermind a rebellion of nature against humankind – may be attempts to understand and gain a sense of cognitive control (cf. Johansson and Karlsson, 2011) over an intangible natural phenomenon: the return of a predator to a previously tamed cultural landscape.

In a similar, but more mundane way, spiders may linger everywhere unsighted and can appear any time out of thin air. Thus, spiders are able to evoke a primal startling response that arguably is evolutionarily imprinted (Öhman and Mineka, 2001; Miltner et al., 2004). Moreover, spiders are utterly foreign to us in their ways of being, making it virtually impossible to intuitively pick up on their intentions. In the absence of any discernible emotional display, the deliberate, yet unpredictable motions of spiders may evoke disproportionate attributions of intentionality (cf. Johnson and Barrett, 2003; Epley et al., 2007). Consequently, while the concrete form of attributions to spiders likely is reflective of the every-day, one-on-one quality of human-spider encounters, the assumptive projected statements about spiders' intentions may constitute participants' attempts to mentally and practically master the challenge of facing an unpredictable animal counterpart in an under-determined situation (Epley et al., 2008).

Contrarily, corvids exhibit an ostensible presence. A shepherd confronted with ravens eying their newborn lambs or citizens faced with crows full-throatedly engaging in the social life of their rookery, face a well-defined challenge, the management of which hinges on efficiently interpreting the birds' behavioral intentions. Corvids' demeanor is so human-like in many respects that “heuristic anthropomorphization” (De Waal, 1999) suggest their “applicability” (Epley et al., 2007; p. 871) for understanding corvid agency. Hence, the predominantly concrete and potentially accurate attributions to corvids.

In sum, people face different challenges in encounters with wolves, corvids, and spiders, which seem to get reflected in the quality of attributions made to these animals. This idea conforms with the findings of Lescureux and Linnell (2010), who have found that the distinct images their participants held about wolves, bears, and lynx, respectively, correspond to the differential experiences they have made with members of these species. The present study is a mere exploration of such dynamics, and due to its small number of purposefully sampled participants, generalizing the presumed patterns is unfeasible at this point. Comparative investigations specifically geared at validating species differences are needed to elaborate and confirm the speculations presented in this discussion.

Differences in the form of intentions attributed to wolves, corvids, and spiders seem to exist, yet similar overarching motives – rebellion, menace, relationality, and unintentionality – appear to underlie the seeming diversity of ascriptions with regard to their content.

For example, while the concreteness of the form in which an attribution of intentions to wildlife is expressed (literal vs. metaphoric) may be based on the level of concreteness of one's experience with the respective animal (cf. Lescureux and Linnell, 2010; Slagle et al., 2019), these different rhetoric manifestations may reflect variations “regarding the strength and behavioral consequences” of that attribution, “not a fundamental difference in kind”, as Epley et al. (2007, p. 867) state with regard to “strong” and “weak” forms of anthropomorphism. When we accordingly abstract from the form-related differences of ascriptions, and focus on the underlying stable cores of meaning as expressed in the four motives, the differences between the three model animals level out: The motives of relationality and unintentionality are present in intentions attributed to all three model animals. Rebellion and menace manifest in attributions made to wolves and corvids, not to spiders. However, it is likely that participants entertain, but withold attributions of menacing intents to spiders since only very few poisonous spiders exist in central Europe (cf. Bellman, 2006) and therefore people may correct their “automatic anthropomorphic interpretation” based on rational knowledge (Expley et al., p. 870). Still, the theme of menace is present in human-spider encounters: Not only the three spider phobic participants, but also some of the non-phobic subjects, including arachnologist S7, conceded having a sense of “healthy respect” (S7) with regard to endemic spiders, because “I know that they could hurt me, and I am wary with regard to that possibility.” Likewise, it may not seem adequate to overtly attribute a motive of rebellion to spiders, given that “they do not even have an actual brain” (S6), and given the comparatively insignificance of human-spider conflicts, where human superiority can easily be restored. Yet, as S4 states somewhat abashedly with regard to huge, fast-moving spiders: “I actually feel like they have power over me, because they put me in the position of panic and dread […]. And when I do not capture them, I would not be able to sleep because I fear that they are around somewhere [...] Indeed! It is an issue of power.” Consequently, the fact that people's anxiousness, at least within the scope of my interviews, did not translate into explicitly attributing a menacing or rebellious motive to spiders, should not be taken to mean that such attributions do not tacitly exist.

These findings indicate that interactions with wild animals as diverse as wolves, corvids, and spiders – and arguably also with many further kinds of wildlife – have the potential of evoking similar reactions in people (Jürgens and Hackett, 2021).

The idea that virtually all kinds of human-wildlife encounters may evoke similar sentiments in people, is moreover corroborated by the fact that the 12 intentions and four motives attributed to the three model animals by participants of this study correspond to themes that have been described in previous research on human relations to various wildlife and to nature in general.

The motive of rebellion corresponds to the concepts of human domination of nature, or anthropocentrism, proposed as value orientations pivotal to human-wildlife relations (Kellert, 1980; Callicott, 2004; Teel and Manfredo, 2010; Jürgens et al., 2022). Animals' intentional agency may challenge some humans' claim on a “supremacy over nature” (Bell, 2015, p.149). Similarly, non-human agents who transgress the conceptual line between the spheres of civilization and nature, and thus populate spaces where they presumably do not “belong” (Figari and Skogen, 2011; Breyne et al., 2021), refute “human social orderings of space” (Poerting and Marquardt, 2019, p. 147). In this vein, particularly wolves are construed as animals “disrespectful of borders and norms” (Lescureux and Linnell, 2010, p. 394). Bell (2015, p. 239) described how wolf behavior is perceived by many US farmers and hunters as perturbing the “social order” of communities in the West, founded on the ethos of “conquering” wilderness. For members of various cultural backgrounds, similar sentiments are stirred not only by wolves, but by bears, feline predators, foxes, wild boars, corvids, spiders, and arguably many further species (Hunziker et al., 1998; Kotulski and König, 2008; Margulies and Karanth, 2018; Mondini and Hunziker, 2018; Jürgens and Hackett, 2021). It would be a valuable endeavor for future research to elucidate whether such views of a “symbolic threat to human groups' identity […] and to the perceived higher status of human beings” (Sevillano and Fiske, 2019), are systematically accompanied by explicit attributions of rebellious intentions to the allegedly perpetrating animals.

A not only symbolic, but manifest threat is expressed in the motive of menace. This motive is mirrored by human fear, a factor pertinent in the human dimensions literature. Either in the form of fear for their livelihoods or for their physical lives, feeling threatened by wildlife is a major driver of conflicts between communities as diverse as Ladakhi, Sàmi, Botswanians, and Eastern Germans, with wildlife as diverse as large canine and feline predators, beavers, and snakes (Lindquist, 2000; Öhman and Mineka, 2001; Flykt et al., 2013; Siemer et al., 2013; Bhatia et al., 2021; Grinko et al., 2021). When wild animals are considered “natural enemies” (Knight, 2000), or perceived as emanating a sense of “abstract danger” (Poerting and Marquardt, 2019, p. 148), the idea of a menacing intent implicitly or explicitly directed at humankind is implied. This idea also is latently present in rituals, for example the worship of Waghoba in Warli culture that is, i.a. dedicated at appeasing menace through big cats (Nair et al., 2021).

Such rituals moreover indicate ascriptions of the motive of relationality to wildlife – or to master spirits governing wild animals' behavior: The effect of Waghoba worship on mediating human-big cat coexistence described by Nair et al. (2021) hinges on construing the deity and its kindred physical felines as being willing to entertain transactional relationships with humankind. In a similar vein, Westerners subscribe to “mutualism”, a value orientation construing wildlife as “capable of relationships of trust with humans, as if part of an extended family, and as deserving of rights and care” (Dietsch et al., 2017, p. 177). Concurrently, Swiss citizens viewing nature as a partner tend to endorse lynx protection (Egli et al., 2001), and US Mid-West hunters conceiving of humans as being “part of a web” of life concede a “right to hunt” and “respect” to wolves (Bell, 2015, p. 295). Given that a true understanding between human and non-human beings is an actual possibility (Jürgens, 2017), attributions of relational intent to wildlife are more than mere “anthropocentric anthropomorphisms” (De Waal, 1999). Yet, it seems that research into human-wildlife interactions, as a field, has virtually exclusively relied on animal unintentionality as a premise, either due to a lack of taking other-than-human perspectives into account, or seeking to avoid framing human-wildlife interactions as conflicts between “antagonists” (Peterson et al., 2010, p. 79), in order to facilitate a coexistence mindset (Pooley et al., 2021). However, animal intentionality is a meaningful phenomenon in human-wildlife encounters – both in the shape of human ascriptions to wildlife, as evidenced in this paper; and in the shape of actual intents on the part of the animals, as considered by ethology, comparative psychology, and by political geography approaches to human-nature relations.

Evidently, the intentions attributed to wildlife shape the human relation to the respective animals. The results of my study pinpoint possibilities for how to employ these conceptions for conservation and management. Harnessing the potential of attributions conducive to tolerating or welcoming animal agency, as inherent in the motives of unintentionality and relationality, and carefully molding the attributions detrimental to conserving wildlife, e.g., sentiments related to the motives of menace or rebellion, may help with “designing culturally meaningful strategies to facilitate human-wildlife coexistence” (Bhatia et al., 2021, p.8). Particularly, debunking the idea that wild animals may seek to rebel against human supremacy and the unspoken rules of the human-dominated landscape, and replacing such a conception by a more adequate “animalcentric” anthropomorphization (De Waal, 1999, p. 265), is likely to be important for mitigating human-wildlife conflicts. Fine-tuning such an intervention to the form in which ascriptions are stated may prove important: Depending on whether the idea of rebellion is proposed in a concrete, literal way, or in a rather abstract, metaphoric manner, education about ecological and ethological facts, or creative approaches based on storytelling, respectively, may be effective. Similarly, different strategies for reshaping people's assumptions about animals' motives need to be pursued depending on whether these assumptions are based on actual encounters with individual animal agents, or on a general image of the animal species (cf. Siemer et al., 2013; Slagle et al., 2019).

More fundamentally, the results of this study are yet another invitation to animal ecologists – studying “animals-as-such” – and social scientists – investigating “animals-as-constructed” – to join forces (Echeverri et al., 2018, p. 59). The content and the form of intentions attributed to wildlife are co-determined by both the animals' actual behavior and human psychology. Animal ecology provides the baseline that defines which kind of interactions will or could take place between humans and wildlife (cf. Lescureux and Linnell, 2010). Then, it is the human mind that interprets and thus gives meaning to these encounters (Waytz et al., 2010; Sevillano and Fiske, 2019), i.a. in terms of feeling targeted by animals' intentions and agency. Ideally, an approach taking a political ecology or political geography angle for could illuminate the deeper psychological purpose that attributions of intentionality to wildlife fulfill for people within the framework of a given human-wildlife encounter (Nygren and Rikoon, 2008; Pooley et al., 2017), by relating these ascriptions to the manifest political and ecological factors on different scales of the human-wildlife interaction (cf. Margulies and Karanth, 2018). By such a mapping of ecological, and socio-economic linkages, research would enable an adequate recognition of animal intentionality and agency (cf. Latour, 2012) along with fuelling a collective discourse about how we choose to coexist with non-human persons in a human-defined world (Donaldson and Kymlicka, 2011). In this discourse, the media assume a pivotal role. Currently, they seem to predominantly play on themes of rebellion or menace that exacerbate the perception of human-animal interactions as conflicts, or they anthropocentrically anthropomorphize animal relationality. Instead, they ought to responsibly frame their headlines in terms that acknowledge animal agency without romanticizing or badmouthing it. In this vein, the initial examples could be rephrased: