Animal Spaces, Beastly Places

Chris Philo, Chris Wilbert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134640119
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Animal Spaces, Beastly Places examines how animals interact and relate with people in different ways. Using a comprehensive range of examples, which include feral cats and wild wolves, to domestic animals and intensively farmed cattle, the contributors explore the complex relations in which humans and non-human animals are mixed together. Our emotions involving animals range from those of love and compassion to untold cruelty, force, violence and power. As humans we have placed different animals into different categories, according to some notion of species, usefulness, domesticity or wildness. As a result of these varying and often contested orderings, animals are assigned to particular places and spaces. Animal Spaces, Beastly Places shows us that there are many exceptions and variations on the spatiality of human-animal spatial orderings, within and across cultures, and over time. It develops new ways of thinking about human animal interactions and encourages us to find better ways for humans and animals to live together.

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Animal spaces, beastly places An introduction

Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert

Human—animal relations and the new animal geography

Kahuzi Beiga [national park in eastern Congo] was the birthplace of gorilla tourism and the place where Dian Fossey, the anthropologist and subject of the film Gorillas in the Mist, first encountered the highland gorilla…. But in the 1990s the park’s once healthy population of gorillas has been severely reduced by poachers and Rwandan rebels, who use it as a hideout…. Twenty gorillas have been killed since April, and the days when tourists rubbed shoulders and shook hands with these magnificent creatures are now long gone…. Basengezi Katintima, the governor of South Kiva province, where the park is situated, said: ‘In Rwanda they are talking about a human genocide, but here we are talking about an animal genocide.’

(Gough 1999:13)

Scientists are secretly killing up to nine million laboratory animals a year because too many are being bred for research, an investigation has found…. Last year more than 6.5 million mice and around 2,400,000 rats were culled. And more than 1,000 laboratory dogs, an estimated 25 percent, were killed because they were not needed. Most were bred for testing pharmaceuticals and spent their whole lives in kennels waiting to be experimented upon. [One anti-vivisectionist] said: ‘This waste of life is totally outrageous…. This is the hidden side of the research industry.’

(Woolf 1999:6)

Scientists have discovered a startling new source of air pollution: pig and chicken farms. …They have found that nitrogen emissions from units for intensively rearing animals are killing woods and forests at the same rate as the effects of industrial pollution…. The emissions—most of them from animal farms’ growing piles of manure—are causing

serious damage to woodland in some areas. In Denmark and Holland, where large pig and chicken farms are a major industry, precious heathlands are being destroyed.

(McKie 1999:4)

These three extracts from recent newspaper stories show some of the myriad ways in which human relations with the world of non-human animals ¹ can become the focus of attention, and all three point to the importance of the spaces and places bound up in the human—animal relations under scrutiny.² The first extract tells of a place which had initially witnessed one of the first sustained encounters between humans and gorillas, a remote and wild place, now undergoing serious changes: first as a designated national park encouraging a ‘gorilla tourism’ entertaining casual encounters between tourists and gorillas, and then as an environment for an ‘animal genocide’ occurring in the shadow of humans waging war. From being a ‘natural’ place where the gorillas remained relatively undisturbed by humans,³ this place has become, variously, the scientist’s site of fieldwork, the naturalist’s site of biological conservation, the entrepreneur’s site of capital accumulation, the poacher’s site of prey, and the soldier’s site of refuge. Different sets of humans possessing differing purposes and technologies have hence flowed into and out of this East African region, reflecting broader geographies of science, state intervention, capitalism, colonialism, politics and human struggle, and in the process they have shaped widely divergent kinds of human—animal relations (see also Haraway 1989:263– 268).

The second newspaper extract tells of a type of space, the scientific laboratory, which has seemingly seen the mass extermination of mice, rats, dogs and other mammals simply because many more of them have been bred than are actually ‘necessary’ for the conduct of pharmaceutical scientific experiments. The impression is of a whole hidden geography of such laboratories and breeding stations, tucked away in countryside complexes and university campuses, wherein many animals live and die as part of a highly unequal human—animal relation predicated on the utility, adaptability and expendability of the animals so incarcerated. Questions about science, state intervention (or lack of it) and capitalist industry are obviously again to the fore, as well as those of ethics, welfare and politics.

The third extract then tells of how animal products, their bodily wastes in this case, may have effects which can diffuse beyond the bounds of the spaces where they are immediately present, creating a spatial connection from the pigs and chickens on their farms to a range of environments beyond the farm boundaries (a ‘spatial externality’ neatly underlined in a cartoon accompanying the article: see Figure 1.1 ). In this instance, a complex human—animal relation is established which does not operate solely through the physical proximity of humans and animals, but rather entails a spread-out geography through which animals are able to have an effect on humans at-a-distance. Wider questions, for example about private property, the byproducts of economic activity, and the duty of the state to regulate agricultural activities in the interest of preventing pollution and preserving heathlands, are once more deeply implicated.

Humans are always, and have always been, enmeshed in social relations with animals to the extent that the latter, the animals, are undoubtedly constitutive of human societies in all sorts of ways. Humans are ecologically dependent on animals, principally as sources of food, clothing and many other materials which sustain ‘our’⁴ human existence, which means that animals, especially dead ones, enter centrally into what humans can themselves be and do in the world (Cockburn 1996; Cole and Ronning 1974). Rimbaud once declared that ‘[t]he man [sic] of the future will be filled with animals’ (quoted by Deleuze in Rabinow 1992:236); and, with the rise of global meat-eating, xenotransplantations of organs, and blood products grown in the bodies of animals, such an observation is gaining even more truth than Rimbaud could have anticipated.⁵ In return, of course, animals are dramatically affected by the actions of humans, not least through farming and, increasingly, genetic engineering. Indeed, humans past and present have radically changed the life conditions of all manner of animals, whether pets, livestock or wild (Benton 1993:68–69; see also Watts, this volume). Human—animal relations have hence been filled with power, commonly the wielding of an oppressive, dominating power by humans over animals, and only in relatively small measure have animals been able to evade this domination or to become themselves dominant over local humans. Examples can be adduced of the latter, such as plagues of locusts, rampaging elephants, or perhaps the ramifications of BSE or ‘mad cow disease’.⁶ Yet, usually animals have been the relatively powerless and marginalised ‘other’ partner in human—animal relations. What surely cannot be denied is the historical and global significance of such human—animal relations for both parties to the relationship—to be sure, they commonly entail matters of life and death for both parties, the animals in particular—and any social science which fails to pay at least some attention to these relations, to their differential constitutions and implications, is arguably deficient.

Figure 1.1 ‘And this little piggy…’
Source: Observer (1999) 25 July, p. 4, © Robert Thompson Artworks

A ‘new’ animal geography has emerged to explore the dimensions of space and place which cannot but sit at the heart of these relations, and contributions here are now running alongside more established anthropological, sociological and psychological investigations into human—animal relations (see the journal Society and Animals). An older engagement between academic geography and the subject-matter of animals, often cast as ‘zoogeography’, had been preoccupied with mapping the distributions of animals—describing and sometimes striving to explain their spatial patterns and place associations—and in so doing it had tended to regard animals as ‘natural’ objects to be studied in isolation from their human neighbours. A branch of geographical inquiry expressly named as ‘animal geography’ secured a modest foothold for itself, notably when it was positioned as one of the ‘systematic geographies’ by Hartshorne in his famous diagram of the discipline’s logical structure (Hartshorne 1939:147, Figure 1). The importance to animal geography of the human influence on animal lives was noted in a few papers published in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in Bennett’s (1960) explicit call for a ‘cultural animal geography’ drawing upon the interest of the Berkeley School in themes such as animal domestication, but the connections to research in human geography (as opposed to physical geography) remained tenuous. In fact, Davies (1961:412) complained that the concerns of animal geography remained ‘too remote from the central problems of human geography’. It was therefore not until much more recently that geographers in any number began to recognise the possibilities for, and indeed socio-ecological importance of, a revived animal geography which would focus squarely on the complex entanglings of human—animal relations with space, place, location, environment and landscape. The publication of the ‘Bringing the animals back in’ theme issue of the journal Society and Space (Wolch and Emel 1995) was a landmark in this respect, to be followed by an edited book drawing upon contributions to this theme issue and adding others (Wolch and Emel 1998), and also by a theme issue of the journal Society and Animals (Wolch and Philo 1998) introducing a geographical perspective to a wider, inter-disciplinary audience.⁷

This history of animal geography and account of an emerging new animal geography have already been reviewed in some detail elsewhere (Philo 1995: 658– 664; Philo and Wolch 1998:104–108), and there is no need for us to cover this ground any further. Suffice to say that the emphasis now is indeed on excavating the kinds of networks of human—animal relations sketched out in the opening examples, tracing their ‘topologies’ (Whatmore and Thorne 1998), and showing how the spaces and places involved make a difference to the very constitution of the relations in play. The present volume should also be seen as a sustained attempt to contribute further to this small, but we would argue significant, corpus of research and scholarship.

One of the things a new animal geography seeks to do, moreover, is to follow how animals have been socially defined, used as food, labelled as pets or pests, as useful or not, classed as sentient, as fish, as insect, or as irrational ‘others’ which are evidently not human, by differing peoples in differing periods and worldly contexts. It thereby endeavours to discern the many ways in which animals are ‘placed’ by human societies in their local material spaces (settlements, fields, farms, factories, and so on), as well as in a host of imaginary, literary, psychological and even virtual spaces. It is thus not only the physical presence of animals which is of importance here, since animals also exist in our human imaginings—in the spoken and written spaces of folklore, nursery rhymes, novels and treatises; in the virtual spaces of television or cinema, in cartoons and animation—while they are also used as symbols to sell a huge variety of commodities and products (Rowland 1973; Wilbert 1993). All such imaginings of animals, as bound up with human uses made of them, must be seen as affected deeply by the form of ‘animal—human mode of production’ underlying the specific society in question, whether it be hunter-gatherer, feudal, industrial, capitalist, post-industrial or whatever (Tapper 1994).

Such an orientation, looking at how animals are imagined or represented in human societies, is only an element of a larger picture. If we concentrate solely on how animals are represented, the impression is that animals are merely passive surfaces on to which human groups inscribe imaginings and orderings of all kinds. In our view, it is also vital to give credence to the practices that are folded into the making of representations, and—at the core of the matter—to ask how animals themselves may figure in these practices. This question duly raises broader concerns about non-human agency, about the agency of animals, and the extent to which we can say that animals destabilise, transgress or even resist our human orderings, including spatial ones. Noske’s (1989:169) query, which she frames in terms of anthropology, can hence be paraphrased for geography: that is, can a ‘real’ geography of animals be developed, rather than an anthropocentric geography of humans in relation to animals? It is around precisely such themes that our collection of essays is composed, as we will now elaborate in the remainder of this introductory chapter.

‘Proper places’; or specifying ‘animal spaces’

I do not like animals. Of any sort. I don’t even like the idea of animals. Animals are no friends of mine. They are not welcome in my house. They occupy no space in my heart. Animals are off my list…. I might more accurately state that I do not like animals, with two exceptions. The first being in the past tense, at which point I like them just fine, in the form of nice crispy spareribs and Bass Weejun penny loafers. And the second being outside, by which I mean not merely outside, as in outside my house, but genuinely outside, as in outside in the woods, or preferably outside in the South American jungle. This is, after all, only fair. I don’t go there; why should they come here?

(Fran Lebowitz in Metcalf 1986:16)

A key concern for the new animal geography, and particularly for this volume, is the geographical conception of place in relation to animals (see also Philo and Wolch 1998:111–113). There are two main senses of place to be explored here, between which there is a close, sometimes inseparable, connection. The first refers to the ‘place’ which a particular animal, a given species of animal or even non-human animals in general can be said to possess in human classifications or orderings of the world. We can follow de Certeau (1984:117), who argues as follows:

A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location (place). The law of the ‘proper’ rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own ‘proper’ and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.

The emphasis is on the setting up of classificatory schemes wherein each identified thing has its own ‘proper place’ relative to all other things, and can be neatly identified, delimited and positioned in the relevant conceptual space so as to be separate from, and not overlapping with, other things there identified, delimited and positioned. Such a conceptual placing of animals in the wider ‘scheme of things’—such a specifying (‘species-identifying’) of animals—reflects an impulse with deep roots and wide cultural diversity (Foucault 1970). These go back to both pre-Neolithic totemic societies (Shepard 1993) and biblical classifi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1: Animal spaces, beastly places an introduction
• 2: Flush and the banditti Dog-stealing in Victorian London
• 3: Feral cats in the city
• 4: Constructing the animal worlds of inner-city Los Angeles
• 5: Taking stock of farm animals and rurality
• 6: Versions of animal—human Broadland, c. 1945–1970
• 7: A wolf in the garden Ideology and change in the Adirondack landscape
• 8: What’s a river without fish? Symbol, space and ecosystem in the waterways of Japan
• 9: Fantastic Mr Fox? Representing animals in the hunting debate
• 10: ‘Hunting with the camera’ Photography, wildlife and colonialism in Africa
• 11: Biological cultivation Lubetkin’s modernism at London Zoo in the 1930s
• 12: Virtual animals in electronic zoos The changing geographies of animal capture and display
• 13: (Un)ethical geographies of human—nonhuman relations Encounters, collectives and spaces
• 14: Afterword Enclosure