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'out of place' include cougars in California suburbs (Gullo
et al.
1998), or feral cats
in the Australian landscape, or once domesticated animals such as dogs and cats
which have become free-living in urban settings (Griffiths, Poulter and Sibley, this
volume). Such constructions are at once about animals, humans, spaces and places,
and about how meanings and practices form in complex arrangements of tension
and compression between these elements. The spatially articulated ethics of
encounter with which I am concerned here are in part driven by these imaginative
placements and displacements of animals within different spaces.
Other bodies
Many animals and other non-human others are in the unfortunate position of being
ethically invisible as individuals, while being only too visible as bodies comprising
economic resources of some kind or another. This is a particularly pressing issue
because, as Emel and Wolch (1998:3) point out, '[g]lobalization has augmented
dramatically the circulation of animal bodies (whole and in parts).' This has ethical
fall-out, particularly when contrasted with an individualised human ethics where the
body, as the vehicle for the 'Cartesian individual' (Whatmore 1997:38), effectively
forms the ethical territory. Thus bodies are the medium to which ethical
consideration either sticks or falls away, and which ethically charge, or otherwise,
the spaces that the bodies concerned are occupying. Where the individual, the
person, is the ethical unit, this ethics becomes spatially articulated: the space that is
the body of the person is defined, and the spaces within which that body operates
also become ethically defined. Not only in theory is the body itself an ethical
territory, but the space around it also becomes so. Torture is therefore deemed
unethical, as are more prosaic abuses of individuals through the environment in
which they operate. But, if the individual body is
not
the ethical unit coming under
ethical consideration but rather some collective of abstracted bodies (such as factory-
farmed pigs), then the ethical impulse is not articulated in association with the
spaces of the body and the spaces
around
the body. Consequently, the ethics here
remain in the realm of the abstract, if they survive at all, and leave these spaces as
ethical blanks. Without the presence of the ethically visible body to ground the
ethical practices within these spaces, whatever ethical consideration there may be
becomes generalised and dissipated via convention, markets, legislation, discourse
and practice, often generating a tendency of downgrading towards lowest common
denominators. Thus, the bodies of laboratory animals, Thorne's (1998) kangaroos,
Emel's (1995) wolves and factory-farmed pigs are all opened up to unethical
practice. Taking such an approach may enable a connection with emerging
geographies of 'the body' which, although (re)considering the corporeal, do so
almost exclusively in terms of the human body (see Pile and Thrift 1995). If 'space
and [human] embodiment is an interdisciplinary problematic attracting the
attention of geographers as well as many others' (Longhurst 1997:496), then it
needs little imagination to realise—in the light of the encounters which non-human
bodies undergo—the expanded scope of the geographies of ethics, spaces and non-
