Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Another farmer…is so convinced that the Beast exists. He told
The
Independent
that 'you'll know when the Beast's there. There'll be no rabbits or
foxes about and the birds stop singing.'… And [a local builder] told reporters
that he'd had an eerie late night encounter with the Beast near the famous
Jamaica Inn.
(The case…' 1998)
As sources of fear and excitement, the large feral cat, panther or lynx glimpsed at
dusk is akin to the wolf in medieval Europe (Fumagalli 1994), an element of the
wild which threatened the precarious hold of settled society over nature (and which
has now returned to the fringes of the city in Spain, reforming this boundary
between the civil and the wild). The large feral animal, either seen or imagined 'out
there', represents both a loss, something now enjoyed only vicariously in TV wildlife
programmes, and a threat (to the boundaries of urban civilisation).
Those animals which transgress the boundary between civilisation and nature, or
between public and private, which do not stay in their allotted space, are commonly
sources of abjection, engendering feelings of discomfort or even nausea which we try
to distance from the self, the group and associated spaces (but which we can never
banish from the psyche). This is clearly the case with cockroaches and rats which
invade public and domestic space, emerging from where they 'belong', out of sight
on a stratum below civilised life, and eliding with other cultures in racist discourse
to symbolise racialised 'others' (Hoggett 1992; Sibley 1995). But larger animals, like
foxes, badgers and wild boar, may also be perceived as transgressive ('out of place')
and abject. Thus, while there may be a sense of a loss of contact with animal nature,
there is at the same time a sense that the boundary between urban civilisation and
animal nature has to be maintained, a fear of the merging of culture and nature. In
Britain, this concern is expressed in boundary maintenance and surveillance by
environmental health officers, animal welfare organisations and—in the case of
sightings of big cats, 'beasts' of Barnet, Brookman's Park, Bodmin and Barnsley,
even the Norfolk Gnasher—by the police.
Ideas about which animals belong and which do not belong in urban society
result in feral cats, like urban foxes, being regarded as highly transgressive and
ambiguous. The feral cat occupies a range of relationships with human populations,
from a proximal but non-tactile one to a distant relationship, collapsing in the
extreme into these fantastic images of a threatening animal 'other'. They may be
perceived as both inside and outside of urban society. This provides one starting-
point for understanding feral cat colonies as they vary across the city. The second is
a categorisation of urban 'cat spaces'.
Wild things in an ordered urban space
The urban environment is one where nature has been contained and transformed.
The city is subject to an ordering process which signals what can be included in
urban space and what does not belong, what Foucault referred to as epistemic
