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these animals actually live out their lives as beings in the world. (It might be added
that most people do not necessarily live their lives through such abstract
classifications and representations; such placings are indeed always unstable, relational
productions, formed through diverse actions and interactions, as many of the
chapters below clearly demonstrate.) Furthermore, as well as establishing the logical
standings of different animals vis-à-vis one another—as in the biblical distinguishing
of 'clean' animals from the 'unclean'—the conceptual work involved in these systems
always runs up against the inevitable and fundamental question of just 'what is an
animal?' Since this is also a question that cannot be avoided in our introductory
chapter, we will now briefly examine what it entails—together with related points
about the contesting of knowledges about animals—before returning to the theme of
placing animals.
'What is an animal?' and related matters
The conceptual placing of animals is first about deciding what is or is not an
animal, and such a question is pertinent to animal geography because how it is
answered will in part determine the purview of the subfield, and also because new
animal geographers must be aware of how different human societies have chosen to
answer the question. So, where and how do the lines get drawn, particularly between
humans and non-human animals? Do we (as animal geographers) follow systematics
in constructing groupings based on multiple correlations of common bodily
features, or certain molecular biologists in using chromosomal studies? Do we follow
the philosophers who speculate on the differing capacities for agency between
humans and animals (see below), or do we take more commonsense approaches
such as those of animal rights campaigners who tend to limit the discussion of rights
to 'sentient' beings which can 'sense' their environing worlds? Most people may be
happy to include birds and reptiles as animals, 8 but not everyone includes fish or
other non-mammalian sea creatures, and many people who regard themselves as
vegetarians nonetheless eat fish because they do not regard them as 'proper' animals
(Willetts 1997). For the record, we personally would include fish as animals, and we
are pleased that in the present collection Waley considers fish in Japanese rivers
while Jones offers a brief discussion of encountering fish and their aquatic spaces. 9
Fewer people still may be happy to count insects and other creatures with an
external skeleton as animals, perhaps because they are so small and numerous that it
is impossible to distinguish individuals among them in a fashion supposedly
essential for the conferment of 'animalhood' (see also Jones, this volume). Again, we
personally would include insects as animals, and would wish to see more work done
on insect geographies which goes beyond merely a zoogeographical concern for their
distributions. 10 Very few people may then wish to go so far as to include non-
humans such as viruses in the category of animals, since this would amount to
incorporating anything that is animate, thereby raising additional thorny questions
about the dividing lines between animals, plants and organisms. We are attracted to
the prospect of this extreme manoeuvre, reckoning that any animal geography must
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