Geoscience Reference
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sauvage
(Elder
et al.
1998a, 1998b) which demands a new mode of human—animal
geographical coexistence. This will call upon us (humans) to desist fixing animals
rigidly into our spatial orderings, and instead will ask us to allow animals more
space: to grant them more room (even, say, for animals travelling to the
slaughterhouse in trucks),
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and to furnish them with more ecological resources
within human settlements (as in creating and leaving corridors of appropriate habitat
threading through cities, towns and villages). The ideal will be to open up spaces
wherein they can indeed exist and ignore us for most of the time, and which they
can occupy and convert into their own beastly places, as many animals are
co n ti nu a ll y seek in g t o d o ( even in t he bu st lin g cit y) . Us hu ma n s wil l be a r ou n d a s wel l,
facilitating where appropriate, maybe watching (if we are interested and concerned),
but always effacing ourselves and not doing harm. We should look to extend human
'courtesies' to animals, almost a sense of allowing them the decencies of life, space
and place that we (humans) would expect and want for ourselves and others, in a
manner that maybe does stem from a certain anthropomorphism (reflecting the
possibility that in certain respects animals are
not
so different from humans) but
which also objects to a crass anthropocentrism (one that only thinks about the world
in terms of what we humans see, want and take to be important). It is to imagine a
new animal geography on the sharp end of such issues, not 'ducking'.
Notes
1
We make a choice in advance to refer to non-human animals simply as 'animals',
dropping the 'non-human', while realising that such categories are in many senses
relational (and that on many counts humans
are
animals). We develop the notion of
what exactly is an animal later in this introductory essay.
2
'Space' and 'place' are basic concepts deployed by geographers, and considerable
philosophical and social-theoretical complexity now attaches to their usage. Rather
than review this complexity at the outset, however, we will allow our takes on these
two concepts to emerge as the essay progresses. In Philo and Wolch (1998:108-113),
an attempt
is
made to be more explicit about the meanings of 'space' and 'place' in
relation to animal geography both old and new.
3
Nothing is said in the report, however, about how 'indigenous' peoples in the region had
previously interacted with, or thought of, the gorillas.
4
Throughout this chapter terms such as 'we', 'us' and 'our' will be deployed to refer to
humans and 'our' human actions, possessions, and so on. Such terms should really be
placed in 'scare quotes' throughout, because one message of our essay is that the
implied baseline distinction between 'us' (humans) and 'them' (animals) should
not
be
taken as so self-evidently obvious. We have refrained from doing this, however, so as
to avoid making the text look more laden down with such quote marks than it is
already.
5
In a related piece, Deleuze (1988:132) writes that '[t]he superman, in accordance with
Rimbaud's formula, is the man who is even in charge of the animals (a code that can
capture the fragments from other codes…).' He also adds in an endnote, with
reference to the same letter from Rimbaud, that 'the future man is in charge not only
