Animal Places

Lively Cartographies of Human-Animal Relations

Jacob Bull, Tora Holmberg, Cecilia Åsberg, Jacob Bull, Tora Holmberg, Cecilia Åsberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317180753
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Nonhuman animals are ubiquitous to our 'human' societies. Interdisciplinary human/animal research has - for 50 years - drawn attention to how animals are ever-present in what we think of as human spaces and cultures. Our societies are built with animals and through all kinds of multispecies interactions. From public spaces and laboratories to homes, farms and in the 'wilderness'; human and nonhuman animals meet to make space and place together, through webs of power relations. However, the very spaces of these interactions are not mute or passive themselves. The spaces where species meet matter, and shape human/animal relations.

This book takes as its starting point the relationship between place and human/animal interaction. It brings together the work of leading scholars in human/animal studies, from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds. With a distinct focus on place, physical space and biocultural geography, the authors of this volume consider the ways in which space, human and nonhuman animals co-constitute each other, how they make spaces together, produce meaning around them, struggle over access, how these places are storied and how stories of spaces matter. Presenting studies thematically and including a variety of nonhuman creatures in a range of settings, this book delivers new understandings of the importance of nonhuman animals to understandings of place - and the role of places in shaping our interactions with nonhuman creatures. As pets, as laboratory animals, as exhibits, as parasites, as livestock, as quarry, as victims of disaster or objects of folklore, this book offers insights into human/animal intermingling at locales and settings of great relevance to many areas of research, including geography, sociology, science and technology studies, gender studies, history and anthropology. This book meets the evolving interest in human/animal interaction, anthrozoology, and the environmental humanities in relation to the research on space and place that currently informs the humanities and the social sciences.

Part I

Humanimal place making

Cartographies of convivial life

1Sheep-shaped

Philip Armstrong

Sheep were the first animals farmed by human beings: evidence for their domestication goes back 11,000 years.¹ Today there are over a billion domestic sheep (Ovis aries) on the planet. Prodigious populations exist throughout Europe and Asia, in various parts of Africa, all over Australia and New Zealand, and in Latin America.² Small wonder, then, that the sheep might seem the epitome of ubiquity, an animal emblem of the elimination of specific places in favour of global everywheres (or anywheres). A field of white sheep looks, to most eyes, interchangeable with any other such field, whether in the Himalayan foothills, New Zealand’s Wairarapa Plains, England’s Yorkshire Dales, or the Patagonian Steppe. Even the morphology of the most populous breeds of sheep – the amorphous woolly cloud of the body, the apparently expressionless and interchangeable face – seems to evoke a nebulous generality.

And yet every flock – indeed, every individual sheep – embodies an entirely specific relation to place. Of course this is true of all organisms, but it becomes especially important to remind ourselves of this fact when thinking about animals farmed on an industrial scale, over an extremely long period of time and in most parts of the globe. Attentiveness to such specificity not only helps us to respect life forms different from our own, but also adds to our knowledge about how mass agricultural practices have been a crucial factor in shaping animals, human societies and environments.

Thinking carefully about the relationships to place embodied by sheep requires us to examine the interaction between, on the one hand, the inborn orientations and learnt attachments peculiar to Ovis aries as a species and, on the other hand, the histories of different breeds, flocks and individuals, which are all legatees of an ancient genealogy of human-induced selections, enclosures, displacements, migrations and resettlements – a genealogy that extends across countries, continents and oceans, from one side of the planet to the other.

To exemplify this point, I want to begin with one of the odder modes of relationship that sheep are capable of establishing with their locations. In Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station, Herbert Guthrie-Smith documents the changing ecology of his sheep station in New Zealand’s Hawke’s Bay over the course of half a century, from the 1880s to the 1930s. The book is a vivid record of the author’s sustained, precise and subtle attentiveness to the varied relations to place forged by the animals, plants and humans of his farm.³ In a late chapter entitled ‘Vicissitudes’, Guthrie-Smith looks back over the decades of struggle that have gone into transforming his 60,000-acre run into a functioning sheep station. In this retrospective mood he recalls in passing – indeed, in a footnote – an occasional tendency for particular animals to develop into what he calls ‘“placer” sheep’. The phrase, he explains, is borrowed from ‘the term used to denote a gold digger who remains year after year on the one spot, on the one place’. Guthrie-Smith’s ‘placer’ is an individual sheep who remains single-mindedly fixated upon a particular spot on the farm, and so isolated from the flock (Guthrie-Smith 1969: 398 n. 1).

This behaviour, in its very abnormality, illustrates the multiplicity of factors, constituents and processes that make up the more usual relationship between this kind of farm and this species of animal. Guthrie-Smith is a proponent of ‘networked agency’ avant la lettre:⁴ his way of putting this is to say that the development of the ‘placer’ sheep is, ‘like other small phenomena already noted on Tutira … the outcome of a combination of special conditions’ (1969: 398 n. 1). For a sheep to become a ‘placer’, he goes on to explain, the young animal’s mother must die at a very particular moment in her lamb’s life-history; that is, when the ‘lamb is young enough to miss greatly its former diet of milk, yet old enough to be able to support life on grass’. This precise timing must also be accompanied by a special kind of location: the ewe ‘must die in an out-of-the-way, thinly-stocked corner of a paddock, where the orphaned lamb cannot attach itself to another lamb of about similar age’ and thereby come to be fostered by another ewe. Finally, the death must occur ‘within measurable distance of some … conspicuous object’, for example a ‘rock, log, nettle-clump, bush, or tree-stump’, which then becomes the lamb’s ‘foster-parent’.

At first the unfortunate lamb may be seen standing for long intervals by its dead dam, now and again bleating, cold, hungry, expectant still of its needed milk. When compelled by hunger to crop the turf, it never strays far; when disturbed by passing shepherds, it runs back bleating to the spot where its mother lies. With increase of age and appetite it feeds farther afield, but always when alarmed runs for protection and companionship to the patch of fast-disappearing fleece in the lee of the boulder; by the wool and bones it camps at night… It forms no association with other sheep; at dusk, when they draw upward to the tops, it remains alone by the rock where its mother died; at dawn during musters, when shepherds shout and collies bark, it stands fast at the accustomed spot. In course of time wool and pelt alike become lost in the soil, the bleached bones become hidden by the autumn fall of foul rank grass—only, as always, the rock remains. Round it, as always, the lamb circles when feeding, to it as always she returns to sleep. At last feelings originally called forth by the dead ewe are entirely transferred to the rock, which becomes parent, protector, companion.

(Guthrie-Smith 1969: 398 n. 1)

Alongside the ‘special conditions’ identified here as the more obvious determinants of the ‘placer’ sheep phenomenon – that is, the timing and location of the mother’s death – other and larger factors are also implied, ones that derive from breed and agricultural history, and from geographical location. These include the creation of flocks vast enough that strays and outliers can fall by the way, which would not occur in small, closely-knit and intimately-shepherded groups; and the inhabitation by the animals of a station large enough to include both out-of-the-way lowland ‘corners’ and hills up which the rest of the flock withdraws to sleep at night. Finally, there are the factors produced by the animal’s ovine inheritance itself; that is, its membership of a species for which the relationship between mother and offspring remains a fundamental bond even after weaning, a bond that under normal circumstances provides the necessary channel through which the young animal establishes its place in the larger social structure of the flock, and indeed through which the flock as a whole continues to orient itself in its location.

The ‘special conditions’ referred to by Guthrie-Smith thus range from the individual level (a particular rock and a particular animal) to very general (the biological and social make-up of species, the global history of pastoralism). Examination of these different levels of sheep-shaping will be the task of this chapter. For the sake of focus and coherence, I will concentrate on the particular breed of sheep initially farmed by Guthrie-Smith, namely, the merino, and the particular histories that brought this breed to his farm in New Zealand in the late nineteenth century. By this means, I will seek to lay out some of the factors that seem crucial in considering the relationships between certain animals – particularly farmed animals, and especially sheep – and place.

As Guthrie-Smith asserts of sheep in general, ‘their instinctive desire is at night to lie on a summit’ (1969: 192). Moreover this characteristic is especially strong in the type of sheep initially farmed on Tutira, the merino, which he describes as ‘an easily scared breed, which upon the least alarm sought refuge on the heights’ (1969: 190). In addition, he also mentions another powerful feature of sheep psychology that is intensified in the merino: the overwhelmingly strong sentimental attachment to a home range. ‘All sheep suffer from nostalgia,’ he asserts, ‘but the merino is perhaps the most miserably home-sick beast on earth’ (1969: 141). One way of understanding the developmental oddity of the ‘placer’ sheep is to perceive it as the result of an individual animal’s inability to resolve these two ovine tendencies: the young lamb’s obsessive nostalgia for the ‘home’ represented by the spot on which its mother’s body lies, and the rest of the flock’s driving impulse to seek the hilltops at night. It would not be surprising, then, to find that ‘placers’ are more common on farms that run merinos.⁵

The origins of the merino are debated, but probably involve the interbreeding of the fine-wooled Tarentine breed of Roman Spain with North African animals introduced by the Moors. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the name merino most likely derives from the Arabic ‘Marīnī; that is, a member of the Banū Marīn, a Berber people and former dynasty of Morocco … from whose territory sheep were imported to Spain’. Hence the name merino itself, no less than the bodies of the animals so labelled, encodes the centuries-long propulsion of certain sheep breeds through Europe westward and southwards, and other breeds through North Africa westward and northwards, until they met in the Iberian peninsula – trajectories enabled by the territorial conquests, migrations and settlements enacted successively by the Roman Empire and the Umayyad Caliphate.

When the system used today for assessing wool fineness is applied to samples from early merinos, their wool proves to be as fine as 21 microns (a micron is one thousandth of a millimetre), whereas the finest British wool available in the same period was 26 – and that is from the Ryeland breed, which was never as plentiful as the merino (Ponting 1980: 16). Merinos were thus the finest fine-wool sheep ever bred. In Spain they were (and still are, in some areas) managed by transhumance: that is, driven in herds as large as 10,000 animals between summer and winter pastures. In Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha (1995 [1605]), the would-be knight and his squire encounter two huge flocks of transhumant merinos ‘on their great annual trek from their summer pastures in the north uplands to the winter pastures in the plains of Estremadura and Andalusia’ (Power 1941: 13). Don Quixote and Sancho are trotting along, discussing chivalry, when they see two great palls of dust approaching. In fact these clouds are ‘raised by two flocks of sheep which chanced to be driven from different parts into the same road, and were so much involved in the cloud of their own making, that it was impossible to discern them until they were very near’. To Don Quixote, however, whose ‘imagination was engrossed by those battles, enchantments, dreadful accidents, extravagant amours and rhodomontades, which are recorded in books of chivalry’, the dust clouds are produced by ‘two armies in full march to attack each other’, and the situation offers a perfect opportunity to fulfil his knightly duty ‘to assist and support that side which is weak and discomfited’. He identifies the two woolly armies as belonging to a Muslim and a Christian ruler respectively, and he rides ‘into the thickest of the squadron of sheep’ and begins ‘to lay about him, with as much eagerness and fury as if he had been actually engaged with his mortal enemy’. The shepherds eventually manage to knock him from his horse with their slingshots and, ‘gather[ing] together their flock with all imaginable dispatch, and taking their dead, which might be about seven in number, upon their shoulders’, they leave him unconscious on the road. When Sancho rejoins him, Don Quixote dejectedly admits that his imaginary enemy Freston the magician, ‘envying the glory I should have gained in this battle, hath doubtless metamorphosed the squadrons of the foe into flocks of sheep’ (Cervantes 1995: 104–107).

For all Don Quixote’s craziness, his encounter reflects the awe felt by many who recorded the huge regiments of sheep that crossed and recrossed the peninsula, during which ‘the sheep were said to keep admirable order’ (Ponting 1980: 15). The capacity to do this results from the extraordinarily tight social structure endemic to sheep as a species, as well as from the ‘nostalgia’ that Guthrie-Smith considered especially characteristic of merinos, which would make them disinclined to stray from the migratory route familiar to the older leaders of the flock, and eager to reach their seasonal homes.

Such was the economic importance of the merino to Spain that the national organisation created to control the transhumances, the Mesta, came ‘to dominate the whole of Spanish economy and subordinate agriculture entirely to its demands’ (Power 1941: 13). At the same time, recognition of the pre-eminent fineness of merino wool created a growing competition between Spain and Britain for domination of the European trade. At least since the Norman invasion, wool had also been a fundamental basis of the English economy – especially since English wool, too, had been highly valued through Europe for its fineness. The Norman kings ‘established a central depot known as the Wool Staple, to collect an export tax on wool’ (Ryder 1983: 190). By the end of the thirteenth century, the English barons could make the claim that half their country’s wealth was derived from wool (Sumption 1991: 41–42), while Edward III commanded that his Lord Chancellor sit on a wool bale while in council, to remind him of the importance of this commodity to the wealth of the realm – a tradition continued today in the House of Lords, were the Lord Speaker sits on the ‘Woolsack’, a cushioned seat stuffed with wool placed directly in front of the royal throne. Protecting the wool trade became a decisive element of English foreign policy, and was a motivating force behind such major events as the Battle of Crécy in 1346 (Sumption 1991: 41–42).

According to Joyce Salisbury, ‘the wool of the sheep defined the transition to commercial life that marks the modern world’ (1994: 24). This claim echoes Karl Marx, who identified English wool during the sixteenth century with the initial appearance of capital, insofar as it ‘o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introducing animals, places and lively cartographies
• Part I Humanimal place making: Cartographies of convivial life
• Part II Mapping (sym)biographies of humanimal relations
• Part III : Unsettling spaces of humanimal cohabitation
• Index