Animal geographies III: Relational and political

Abstract

Animal geography is inherently relational. At its core is curiosity for relations between humans and nonhuman animals. As in other fields, relational approaches are increasingly adopted as conceptual framework and methodology. Two current relational themes of the field are care, killing and ethics; and how humans and nonhuman animals create space, particularly the home and the city. Animal geographies tackle diverse political elements of animals’ lives (and deaths), operating at multiple scales, through a variety of approaches. Major current themes include biopolitics, colonialism, state power and (in)justice. Relationality and politics are by no means separate. Relations have political outcomes – notably, in the form of value and commodification – and relationality can open possibilities for reframing political problems; a fitting goal for this time of conflict and dramatic change.

1 Introduction

I wrapped up my second report (Gibbs, 2021b) as the COVID-19 pandemic was taking hold. Since then, it has shaken the world. Already the pandemic has both enlivened the field of animal geography and seen it stretch, as the boundaries of human, nonhuman animal and microbe blur and our worlds become resolutely, unquestionably, interconnected. Research on the pandemic by animal geographers, and others with a focus on nonhuman entities, is emerging. Among such work is examination of changed human–animal relations in the context of the pandemic (Gibbs, 2022; Lunstrum et al., 2021; Rice and Tyner, 2021; Searle et al., 2021), and the structural changes needed for more just relationships (Royle, 2020) and for a post-pandemic new normality (Searle et al., 2021). This new work extends a longer tradition of social, cultural and political research on viruses, bacteria and other diseases (Enticott, 2017; Greenhough et al., 2018; Lorimer, 2020; Naylor et al., 2017; Patchin, 2020). Thorough review of the geographies of the pandemic is no doubt underway.

This third and final report considers two strong currents in animal geographies, of which the pandemic is an exemplar: the relational and political. Following from my previous reports (Gibbs, 2020, 2021b), here I have predominantly looked to work published in peer-reviewed journals within the discipline, in the years 2020–21 (online). This decision means I have inevitably missed some excellent research, including that published in interdisciplinary and bioscience journals, and the many brilliant books that offer sustained treatment of their subjects. The richness of the work published within the relatively narrow frame I’ve drawn attests to the liveliness and relevance of the field. In what follows, I review the literature along these two lines – relational, political – and consider connections between the two.

II Relational

Animal geography is inherently relational; at its core is curiosity for relations between humans and nonhuman animals. As in other areas of our discipline and cognate fields, recent years have seen relational approaches adopted explicitly as conceptual framework and methodology. No single concept dominates. Multispecies and more-than-human frameworks are strong; others include conviviality, coexistence and agency. In both styles of relational work – a focus on relationships and the adoption of relational theoretical approaches – animal geographers investigate diverse forms of relation, the agency and power that shape them, and their wide-ranging consequences.

A strong current relational theme is care, killing and ethics. This was a focus of my previous report (Gibbs, 2021b). But here, rather than care and killing per se, I examine their relational aspects. Substantial research continues on laboratory animals and technicians. Different notions of care are enacted alongside various forms of harm to both animals and humans. Roe and Greenhough (2023) call for greater attention to coexistence of care and harm. ‘Cultures of care’ are poorly defined, with care often equated to animal welfare. Further work is needed on human–human as well as human–animal relations (Williams, 2023), to help understand how cultures of care distribute power and responsibility (Gorman and Davies, 2023; Nuyts and Friese, 2023).

In other empirical settings, research examines the role of violence in human–animal relations. Violence and domination interact with care practices in zoos and aquaria, as illustrated in a study of an individual Giant Pacific octopus (Holmberg, 2022). In work on animal death, Mazhary (2021) investigates who is killed and who kills, and calls for further attention to animal-centric experiences. In the context of ecological crises, conservation can produce ways of living together that benefit some at the expense of others. For instance, Hirtenfelder and Prouse (2022) adopt a multispecies, anti-colonial framework to chart the violence that makes infant milk formula economies possible.

Multispecies research highlights how care and ethics are forms of relationality. Bear (2021) extends ethical consideration and care practices to insects (as ‘awkward creatures’) and insect farmers, and agrees with others that care cannot be reduced to a universal set of principles. Rather, ethics and care are informed by attentiveness and ‘tinkering’. Meanwhile, veganism is argued to be an under-studied phenomenon in geography that is not only about eating, but about relationships, ethics and ‘world-making’ (Oliver, 2022).

Recent research demonstrates an increasing tendency to include non-anthropocentric ethics in analyses (Quintero Venegas and López López, 2020). And yet, more can be done. Multispecies autoethnography may enrich understanding of how humans are implicated in animal life and death (Gillespie, 2021). The growth of multispecies research signals an opportunity to centre ethics, care and harm, including by reviewing ethics processes within universities (Oliver, 2021).

A second notable body of work examines how relations between humans and the other animals create places; in particular, home and the city. Pet–human relations shape the shared space of the home, through everyday practice and mobilities (Schuurman and Syrjämaa, 2021). Changing relations between humans and companion animals since the late 20th century have seen improvements in animal health and welfare, as animals are integrated into families. Reimagining home as co-constituted by nonhumans provides insights into experiences and strategies of marginalised urban communities, including non-Western migrant households (Alam et al., 2020).

Home is a site of relations where agency and mobility are key. Animal rescue and rehoming can be understood in terms of interspecies care, in which an animal is introduced to spaces and networks. Dog–human relationships are communicated through culturally shared ideas about attachment, control and agency (Schuurman, 2021b). In contrast, some domesticated cats are described as ‘wild companions’; animals that have ostensibly been domesticated but retain behavioural and reproductive independence (Crowley et al., 2020). Crowley and colleagues seek to develop a ‘companion animal ecology’ in which human–animal domestic relations link to ecological processes, to enable sustainable management.

Arguably, geographers are increasingly approaching the city through a more-than-human lens, but how we live with urban animals remains marginal (Oliver et al., 2021). Some conceptualise urban space as created through relations between humans and other animals (e.g. Schuurman, 2021a; Van Patter, 2022). Key here is our ‘fraught coexistence’ (Wilson, 2022). Large numbers of animals are ‘entangled’ with the machinations of the city, but remain largely unseen, including the millions of animals killed to make food for urban humans and their pets (Arcari et al., 2021). In a study of an urban seabird colony in Newcastle and Gateshead, England, Wilson (2022: 1137) shows how ‘avian claims to space have prompted fraught debates on coexistence, urban planning, and socio-environmental futures that reveal an inherently ambivalent politics’. Relatedly, in analysis of dogs in Chennai, India, Srinivasan (2019: 377) examines everyday and legal dimensions of urban life, and posits that ‘the chief puzzle for conservation and other more-than-humanisms’ is how to enable flourishing of nonhuman life where the human and nonhuman are entangled in unpredictable ways that are not necessarily positive. Animals co-create cities with humans, and present challenges that disrupt and prompt new urban thinking and practice.

Human–animal relations are a component of the widely studied urban process of gentrification. Animals are ‘caught up’ in gentrification struggles in numerous ways, including through displacement, upscaling, boundary-making, pedigree and property (Hubbard and Brooks, 2021). Including animals in studies of gentrification offers new ways of theorising how capital accumulation is dependent upon certain kinds of relations, and demonstrates how animals can be victims of gentrification. In two evocative studies of oysters, these nonhuman animals become ‘vital and lively components’ of the dynamic material processes of gentrification (Brooks and Hubbard, 2022), and are enlisted as infrastructure to support urban risk management as part of New York State’s Living Breakwaters project (Wakefield, 2020).

III Political

Animal geographies tackle diverse political elements of animals’ lives, operating at multiple scales, through a wide variety of approaches. Here I consider four themes: biopolitics, colonialism, state power and (in)justice.

Biopolitics is a key concept in recent research. Animal geographers adopt Foucault’s original idea directly or loosely. Foucault (1976: 138) defined biopower as ‘a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’; it sits in contrast to sovereign juridical power, to ‘take life or let live’ (136). For Foucault, biopower exerts a positive influence on life, through precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Mbembe’s (2003) concept of necropolitics extends Foucault’s ideas in key ways. It connects power explicitly to the colonial project, which I consider below, and its focus is death rather than life. For example, unexpected calf deaths due to hydraulic fracking-contaminated water are constructed by farmers as outside normal production, and by the state as farmer negligence. Here, death becomes a normalised mode of agrifood production (Sneegas, 2022) (see also Margulies, 2019).

Significantly, Foucault, (1976: 140) saw ‘an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations’. Animal geographers interrogate such techniques and consider rationales deployed by science-management regimes and their implications. In a study of wild animal surveillance technologies, von Essen et al. (2023) identify multiple modes of biopower that lead to complex relations between scientists, wildlife and publics (see also Schleper, 2022). Further work is needed to better understand effects of digital mediation.

Conservation is a key realm in which biopolitics is adopted as an analytical framework. Bersaglio and Margulies (2022: 23) ‘invoke biopolitics loosely’ to show how conservation discourse and practice make valuing of some species over others appear natural, technical and/or universal. In their account of the extirpation of caribou despite regulation, Collard et al. (2020: 1) demonstrate the tension between the state’s roles to promote economic growth and protect against its negative effects, urging ‘this tension needs to be more central to conservation biology’.

Species are prioritised or neglected based on categorisation, which becomes an apparatus for making live and letting die. In the context of Pacific hatchery salmon, legal and political boundaries are drawn between species considered worthy of conservation – ‘wild’ species – and those that are not (Berseth and Matthews, 2021). Branding animals as ‘feral’ marginalises life. This category contributes to a fraught political landscape, where boar belonging in the United Kingdom is highly contested (O'Mahony, 2020). Elsewhere, the label ‘feral’ justifies killing and violence. A goat eradication experiment that used dingos implanted with 1080 ‘time-bombs’ shows how a cycle of violence becomes normalised in conservation (Probyn-Rapsey and Lennox, 2022).

Similarly unwanted or ‘illegitimate’ creatures come into the spotlight in cities. A case of mysterious deaths of hundreds of domestic cats in the UK demonstrates ‘a politics of life in which some lives are considered more important than others, some populations more deserving of regulation and intervention, some deaths acceptable and some intolerable’ (Howell and Taves, 2021: 1056). In Baltimore, ecological stories become a biopolitical technique (Pitas, 2021). Pigeons are excluded through various tactics, including killing, while peregrine falcons are encouraged as idyllic urban nature to occupy the city as a site of capital accumulation. In light of growing interest in urban nature, Clancy (2021) – in a case of Canada geese in a European urban wetland – draws on biopolitics and a more-than-human perspective to ask who or what constitutes the urban citizen (see also Paniagua, 2020).

A second major theme of political animal geographies research is the relationship between biopolitics and colonialism. As Mbembe (2003) explored through necropolitics, animal geographers are grappling with multiple facets of ongoing colonialism. And yet, human–animal geographies ‘have often failed to engage deeply with Indigenous perspectives’ (Raven et al., 2021: 1527). Raven and colleagues propose a more-than-human and more-than-animal approach to the emu in appropriation and patenting of emu oil products. They seek to re-think and Indigenise the categorisation and commodification of nature, challenging the established human–animal binary of Enlightenment thought.

The biopolitics of settler colonialism causes damage, including obstructing Indigenous care practices. Interspecies knowledge and care push up against state marine mammal governance, as in a case of a traditional burial of a stranded whale in Hawai‘i (Ritts and Wiebe, 2021). The whale is also emblematic of the fragility of settler economies, as in whale endangerment and entanglement in the lobster industry (Besky, 2021). Contemporary attitudes, policy and practice towards wildlife follow historical patterns of colonialism. For instance, racialised policies toward predators in South West Africa in the first half of the 20th Century – wild dogs on white farmland and lions on ‘native’ reserves – remain visible today in Namibia (Heydinger, 2020).

Increasingly, animal and multispecies geographies are adopting an explicitly anti-colonial agenda (e.g. Hirtenfelder and Prouse, 2022). Conceptual developments are diverse. A special issue of the journal Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space explores Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the ‘contact zone’ (Pratt, 1991, 1992) – a way of understanding transformations that occur in colonial and imperial settings – and its potential for more-than-human (mostly animal) geographies (Fredriksen, 2019; Isaacs, 2019; Isaacs and Otruba, 2019; Pratt, 2019; Sutherland, 2019; Wilson, 2019). Hernández et al. (2021) explore a collective approach in the context of extinction, ‘the Anthropocene’, and Earth violence, to confront the erasures of colonialism and acknowledges the ‘creatures’ (animal and other) that enable research and writing.

Beyond biopolitics, animals are enlisted in the exercise of state power. Violence is one strategy used to exert power. In the United States, police shootings of dogs are concentrated in low-income communities of colour, illustrating the ‘distinctive spatiality of carcerality and state violence enacted in and on disenfranchised communities’ (Bloch and Martínez, 2020: 1). Historically, draught animals were enrolled in the agricultural transformations that formed part of the genocidal program of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, contributing materially and symbolically to state-building (Tyner and Rice, 2022).

State control of animals and human–animal relations is used to control people and enact particular forms of nationalism. Camel dairying is encouraged as a mode of poverty alleviation in Rajasthan (Narayanan, 2023). The practice is inconsistent with pastoralist ethics, but consistent with the ruling party’s agenda for Hindutva and developmentalism. Drawing on growing interest in Silk Road heritage, Bactrian camels are being enlisted in national narratives in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Camel-based connectivity is used to defend pastoral livelihoods threatened by state territorialisation through grassland management (White, 2020).

Elsewhere, animals and human–animal relations are at the centre of conflict between farmers and Sami reindeer herders in Norway, triggering debate about property rights (Brown et al., 2019). Cattle are enrolled in disease eradication projects that draw on Scottish identity and biosecurity citizenship (Shortall and Brown, 2021). And wolves, counterintuitively, become symbols of white nationalism in Canada and the USA (Rutherford, 2020).

In a deeply considered, nuanced special issue introduction, Braverman (2021) discusses how environmental justice, settler colonialism and the more-than-human play out in the occupied West Bank. This issue explores how Israeli state systems of control operate through animals’ bodies to reproduce and interrupt colonial relations (Gutkowski, 2020). Animals challenge power through their mobility and potential as sources of disease, ecological risk and threat to public health. Braverman (2021) notes that producing the volume was itself highly political. The collection demonstrates unquestionably how ‘environmental issues are inextricably intertwined with relationships of power and domination’ (Braverman, 2021: 9). It points also to the dearth of research on human–animal relations in Palestine/Israel, and the need for environmental justice and political ecology work beyond water and land (Gutkowski, 2020). These questions gain even greater import in light of ongoing conflict in the region and around the world.

Justice is the final strand of political research to explore briefly here. Hovorka et al. (2021: 1) ask: ‘How might animal geographers become stronger allies in shaping a more just and sustainable future?’ Celermajer et al. (2020) point to beings other than humans ‘entering the scene of justice’. For Braverman (2021: 8), a ‘more holistic and less anthropocentric view of environmental justice is a good starting point from which to incorporate more-than-human bodies and materialities’. An expanded notion of ‘multispecies justice’ is gaining momentum. For example, Srinivasan (2023) analyses the justice implications of India’s livestock landscape – the largest in the world – arguing that more-than-human impacts of agriculture remain marginal in research. In the context of growing privatisation, extraction and conservation of the ocean, livelihood and justice are disregarded, with consequences for communities such as the people who gather lucrative edible birdsnests in northern Palawan (Satizábal et al., 2022). And as illustrated by Guasco’s (2021) study of the extinction of the iconic dodo, oversimplified narratives obscure many forms of injustice.

IV Relational + political

Relationality and politics are by no means separate. Here I examine two points of connection. First, relations have political outcomes; notably, in the form of value and commodification. Living animals are transformed into commodities through various processes, and value is created through relations. ‘Companionability’ – corporeal relations between human and animal – is the key technology for transforming a wild American Mustang horse into a commodity (Pütz, 2021). ‘Breed wealth’ captures relations between horse, human and place to create value of Icelandic horses. Breed wealth is a dynamic relational quality that includes ‘genetic capital’, cultural value and encounter value (Nash, 2020). Particular ‘entanglements of human and nonhuman life’ provide the conditions for capital accumulation via gentrification (Hubbard and Brooks, 2021). Capital accumulation occurs through multispecies difference and hierarchies, as demonstrated by Collard and Dempsey's (2017) influential work. Power et al. (2022) find that capitalism’s valuation of one species – Atlantic salmon – has implications for values of others, namely, lumpfish and sea lice. Similarly, Pitas (2021) highlights differential outcomes for pigeons and falcons as a result of their value under capitalism.

Animals are entrained in the production of surplus value. Stevens et al. (2022) demonstrate, through greyhound rehoming, how bodies and labours are brought back into value so accumulation can continue. They explore ‘sentient surplus’, arguing for engagement with morality and economy. Capitalist logics are at work in even the most ‘banal’ of commodities, including dew worms (Lumbricus terrestris), the most popular live bait for recreational freshwater fishers across North America. The materiality of L. terrestris physiology is enrolled in the constant experiment ‘to increase productivity and accumulate surplus value through market exchange’ (Steckley, 2022: 1361). The lives and deaths of individual animals and species are implicated. Bersaglio and Margulies (2022: 12) discuss ‘extinctionscapes’ as ‘spaces where the memorialization of nonhuman life generates affective and commodifiable experiences’. Animals are made to work for conservation in their lives and afterlives.

Animals as commodities become geopolitical. Aquaculture is one of three cases analysed by Banoub et al. (2021: 1534) to better understand ‘appropriation and transformation of environments and raw materials as a consequence of their enrolment within processes of accumulation and/or strategies of geopolitical power’. Debates about animal-based commodities also have political consequences, as evidenced by Margulies et al. (2019) in their critique of the imaginary ‘Asian super consumer’ in the context of illegal wildlife trade. They call for more nuanced understandings of consumption to avoid reproduction of harmful stereotypes. Finally, technologies that mediate relations between humans and other animals have political outcomes. Technological monitoring of wildebeest migration in the latter 20th century mediated normative views of human–wildlife relations, which had consequences for local livelihoods (Schleper, 2022; see also von Essen et al., 2023).

A second strand of relational-political research shows that relationality can open possibilities for reframing political problems. Relational approaches offer alternatives to divisive and polarising outcomes of binary framing. In their case of free-roaming donkeys, Clancy et al. (2021) argue that the dominant ‘in/out of place’ discourse leaves diverse voices out of the frame, including the donkeys themselves. They offer instead ‘entangled autonomy’, focussing on the ecological, cultural, historical factors that connect donkeys with the places they occupy. More-than-human agency allows us to avoid immediately searching for solutions. It can turn the gaze from the animals centred in conflict – for instance, sharks – to a wide suite of factors underlying conflict, and present other possibilities for navigating coexistence (Gibbs, 2021a). Relational values thinking contributes to more just management. Introduced species management demands nuanced understanding of multispecies relations in postcolonial Aotearoa/New Zealand (Tadaki et al., 2022). Relational value presents different perspectives on trout, and a foundation for future freshwater management.

Particular relational models highlight inadequacies in existing practices. In gorilla conservation and tourism in Bwindi, Uganda, relational animal agency can help trace interactions between gorillas, humans and their environments, pointing to the failings of conservation efforts based on fixed categories of wild, liminal and domesticated, or habituated and unhabituated (Ampumuza and Driessen, 2021). Once limitations are identified, relational models can help form new frameworks for coexistence. For instance, ‘integrative rehabilitation’ is a method for supporting cohabitation of people and elephants in post-conflict Assam, India (Kikon and Barbora, 2021). This system incorporates changes in agricultural practice, including planting lemon trees: a cash crop for people and a barrier to elephants. Healing and restoration involve the self in relation with other life forms. Humans and brown bears coexist in the Ropoldi mountains of Bulgaria, in part through pursuit of knowledge of the other and active avoidance of conflict (Toncheva and Fletcher, 2022). This case contributes to growing discussion of how nonhumans are included in conservation policymaking, and might inform other areas of politics.

V Conclusion

Animal geographies is a subfield that fosters relational and political methodologies and diverse and creative methods. Innovation in research methodology continues, as evidenced by the diverse work reviewed in this report. Some address the need for methodological innovation explicitly, adopting multispecies ethnography (Gillespie, 2021; Smith et al., 2021) and visual methods (Smith et al., 2021; Turnbull and Searle, 2022) in order to: decentre the human (Gillespie, 2021; Smith et al., 2021); reveal the nonhuman actors who co-create worlds (Van Patter, 2022); and acknowledge the collaborators – ‘human and otherwise’ – who make our work possible (Hernández et al., 2021). Such research has implications for acknowledging and contending with other asymmetries and injustices in the world, and is therefore valuable to the discipline of Geography as a whole.

Within the field of animal geographies, relational and political research will continue apace. Its analysis has so much to lend to other fields, particularly in times of dramatic change and conflict. Caring and killing will remain vital topics, as global discourse of extending ethics beyond the human gains attention, and appreciation of the interdependence of humans and the rest of the planet settles in. For me, the extension of animal geographies into multispecies and more-than-human research has to be a good thing. Animals are entities worthy of study in themselves. But to understand and attend to them we need to grasp all manner of other beings, living and otherwise: plants, minerals, the elements, Dreamings, connection, Country. This truth, our First Nations teachers, colleagues and friends patiently keep sharing. The ways we choose to do these things brings creativity and hope to our research. Established methods provide a stable base, and new experimental, creative, interdisciplinary methodologies expand our imagination, enable us to ask (not only answer) new questions and bring joy to our work.