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moral status of animals'. This is needed because '[a]ll human activity, including
moral conflict, occurs at sites embedded in situations, making geographic context a
constitutive element of all ethical problems' (Lynn 1998a: 283). The significance of
this is that the rather bland universalised 'ideal typologies' of biocentrism and
ecocentrism are 'too rigid to adequately understand our earth' (Lynn 1998b:231). The
approach that I advocate here largely complements Lynn's geoethics, but there are
two additional elements: first, I aim to raise issues to do with individual and
collective relations, body-spaces and 'other' spaces which I feel merit consideration
within geographies of human—animal relations; and second, I feel that developing
an 'ethics of encounter', where all (always situated) encounters are considered to
have some form of ethical 'freight', departs from, or perhaps extends, the geoethics
position. This difference revolves around the Levinasian approach to ethics which is
set out below. In this view the 'ethical ground' of lived encounters precedes and
eludes formalised statements of ethics, even if they are 'geoethics' which are
attempting to 'drop the commitment to uniform transgeographic principles [and
instead to] approach moral problems with greater contextual sensitivity, allowing for
a greater play and reciprocity between principles and particulars' (Lynn 1998b:237).
The difference is subtle, but may be significant in certain ways. Geoethics represents
a powerful and cogent call for the spatial/contextual sensitisation of moral and
ethical thought, but the problem still remains of what lies outside of that focus,
however broadened. By adapting (or trying to adapt) Levinas's approach, all
practices or encounters can be seen as ethically charged, and it is beholden on us to
tune into this irreducible, rich ontology of ethical resonance, and from within that
to build moral practices, rather than trying to extend the 'circle of light' while never
being sure of what lies beyond it.
Heeding Whatmore (1997), this chapter is not intended as a straightforward
backing of those calling for the extension of individualist rights from the human to
the non-human realm. Rather I hope to show that the complex and often hidden
geographies of (un)ethical human—non-human relations need to be addressed as
part of a wider programme of envisioning how we might move 'forward', or at least
to somewhere (else). As Whitford (1991:14) points out, to envisage 'new social or
ethical forms' is to confine the future within the conceptualisations of the present.
The idea of the search for 'progress', or even moving towards utopia, is a case of
moving away from dystopia. 'What we want is to get away from here. Where we
hope to land…is a “there” which we thought of little and knew of even less'
(Bauman 1993:224). 'Where we are' now needs the closest scrutiny, and the
grimmest and brightest parts of it need clear narration.
Ethics as encounter
Proctor (1998) suggests that approaches to ethics can be divisible as descriptive,
normative and meta-ethics. In this chapter the focus moves between the former two
of these, but with the insertion of a further and fundamental view of ethics. This is
the notion derived from Levinas that ethics is first a matter of being, that the ethical
