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conceptual and material placements of animals under discussion here, and offers a
good point at which to flip to the next stage in our argument.
'Other spaces'; or making 'beastly places'
The longest spell of liberty ever enjoyed by an inhabitant of the Zoo was
over two years. It was a very rare legless newt, which looks like a shiny
black worm, banded at intervals with startling rings of white. One
morning it simply wasn't there…. Over two years passed and it had
been forgotten. Then a gardener was turning out a dead plant in the
Reptile House. There, in its roots, was the missing newt, who had been
flourishing on casual cockroaches.
(Mainland 1927:84)
Echoing what we said earlier about the dangers of concentrating solely on how
human societies imagine or represent animals, we now wish to consider ways in
which animals, as embodied, 'meaty'
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beings, often end up evading the places to
which humans seek to allot them, whether the basket in the kitchen, the garden, the
paddock, the field, the cage or whatever. Such evasions can occur at an individual
level, when a pet wanders from the house into the surrounding streets, or at a
societal level, when relatively large numbers of animals, say coypus, escape from fur
farms (see Matless, this volume). Another example comes to mind: that of
Cholmondeley the chimpanzee, who, in 1951, reputedly escaped from London
Zoo, boarded a Number 53 bus and jumped upon a woman passenger (Vevers 1976:
97). In Cresswell's (1996) terms, Cholmondeley became 'out of place', transgressing
the taken-for-granted (human) notions (or
doxa
) about what sort of beings should
properly be present in a Number 53 bus driving through the streets of London.
Indeed, Cholmondeley transgressed a number of spatial boundaries widely accepted
by the human occupants of London: not just that which separates animals in cages
from the public, but also those which separate the zoo from the immediate locality,
which designate a bus as something for travelling on with a purpose (we wonder
whether it was popularly entertained whether Cholmondeley had purposefully
entered the bus to effect his get-away), and which frown upon buses as sites for
jumping on people (whether or not with some sexual motive).
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It is possible to
identify many appealing examples of such trangressions—Philo (1995) lists a few
associated with livestock animals in nineteenth-century London—but the key lesson
is that in such cases, as in many more mundane ones, it is animals themselves who
inject what might be termed their own agency into the scene, thereby transgressing,
perhaps even resisting, the human placements of them. It might be said that in so
doing the animals begin to forge their own 'other spaces', countering the proper
places stipulated for them by humans, thus creating their own 'beastly places'
reflective of their own 'beastly' ways, ends, doings, joys and sufferings. Many
