Of the many words used to describe this era, the Eremocene, or the age of loneliness is the one that most powerfully speaks to me, gesturing as it does to the experiential dimension of the alienated, exceptionalist forms of human life that are also devastating the Earth and Earth others. In this talk, I will share a number of stories of how other animals have insinuated themselves into my practice as an animal studies scholar, and the ‘thinking’ we have done together. These stories will enable us to challenge three aspects of separatist forms of human life that also show up in research practice. The first challenge is to the standard view of humans as researchers and other animals as objects of research, even ones that we respect and treasure. Collaborative research practices with other animals, which may take weird forms like Penny the pig throwing a book I am reading into the bushes, disrupt this dichotomy, along with the distribution of capabilities (like knowing, theorising and so on) it organises. The second (related) challenge is to the understanding of theorising (as the highest form of thought according to Plato) as a form of transcendent, distant and fundamentally immaterial relation. As a counterpoint, I offer me picking up manure and other practices with other animals as a form of theorising. The third challenge is to the view that the most robust forms of knowledge are ones that derive their claims from an abstracted analysis across cases. By way of rebuttal, I offer a passionate defence of the anecdote, where it is in his very particularity that blind 35-year-old Wookie the horse creates precisely the knowledge capable of making a difference in a world of alienated relations and knowledges.