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fold into these, add yet further dimensions. For example, farm animals
en
masse
will
bear certain overarching human constructions, and wild animals the same, which
contribute to our relationships with, and treatment of, them. Within these broad
groupings, differing types of animals will be conceptualised as sub-groups. Even
different species and families of animals such as birds, mammals and reptiles will
bear different ethical constructions, and other categories of grouping will cross-cut
these such as native or alien, predator or prey, and so on. In other words, our
constructions of individual animals depend on a complex overlaying of meanings and
interactions, which in turn are dominated largely by constructions of groups, types,
populations, and so on. The life spaces that these animals occupy hence map on to
distinct geographies of ethics.
The (re)emergence of the ethically visible individual non-human
other
I have already quoted Serpell's (1995) concern that nature conservationists—who
are seemingly concerned with the ethics of human—animal ethical relations—tend
to consider animals as populations or collectives, rather than as individuals. This
issue is in fact subject to a good deal of debate and tension within and between groups
relating to animal welfare and conservation (see Agar 1995). Some challenge the
conservationist orthodoxy that the welfare of individual animals is straightforwardly
subordinate to wider concerns of species and population welfare and conservation,
as in the zoo captive breeding programmes. Some now insist that it is the individual
animal which should be of ethical primacy. This then raises important issues about
the ethical prioritising of human-generated abstract notions of species and
populations above the corporeal beings which make up those populations. Here my
aim is to point out that these and other questions are deeply entangled in the spatial
materiality of the world. If such (un)ethical spatiality is inevitable, given the number
and diversity of human—animal transactions taking place in differing spatial
formations, it is still worth thinking about the ways in which animals can emerge
into individual ethical focus.
Although there has to be some caution concerning the romanticisation of pre-
modern nature—society relations, it does appear to be the case that some societies
have possessed a substantially different base relationship with non-human others.
This is a position which is often attributed to American Indian culture. Callicott
(1994), although expressing caution about a too simplistic rendering of such ideas,
does reveal that there may be some genuine grounds for these assumptions, and that
within some instances of these cultures there was a place for the
individual
non-human
other. Callicott (1994:129) refers to Martin's work on the culture of the Ojibwa
tribe, in which
[n]ature, as conceived by the traditional Ojibwa, was a congeries of societies.
Every animal, fish, and plant…functioned in a society that was parallel in all
