Guest Editors' Introduction: Through the Geographical Looking Glass: Space, Place, and Society-Animal Relations

Chris Philo
University of Glasgow

Jennifer Wolch 1
University of Southern California

As geographers interested in human-animal relations, a recent paper in Society & Animals immediately caught our eye on account of its main title, “Safe in Unsafe Places” (Gillespie, Leffler & Lerner, 1996). The study explores how human interactions in certain types of places are altered by the presence of dogs popularly perceived to be aggressive. Adopting a participant observation role as dog enthusiasts travelling around the country attending dog shows with their own Rottweiler dogs, the authors uncover a range of shifting relations involving people, dogs and spatial-temporal settings. For instance, spaces normally seen as threatening or "unsafe" (such as a beach late at night) became much safer with the Rottweilers present. Conversely, spaces normally assumed to be "safe" (such as a village during the day) suddenly became unsafe because the big dogs prompted unpredictable reactions from other humans and also from other animals (leading to the possibility of pre-emptive strikes against both the researchers and their dogs). The researchers offered the following conclusions:


Thus our experience of travel with dogs problematized our ordinary conceptualizations of safe and unsafe places, situations and times; of public and private space .... The taken-for-granted boundaries between social spheres in daily life are ordinarily borderlines we treat as if they were impermeable and unchanging .... Work and leisure; public and private; and, most relevant for this paper, safe and unsafe places, times, and people are seen as immutable antipodes. In fact, of course, they blur, harden, and shift in the give and take of everyday life. (Gillespie, Leffler & Lerner, 1996, pp. 179, 185-186)

In this special theme issue, we wish to expand upon such intriguing discussions about space, place, and human-animal relations. Specifically, our purpose is to introduce the work of academic geographers interested in animals to a wider readership beyond the discipline of geography itself, and demonstrate the value of a geographical perspective to research on society-animal relations. In order to place such work in proper context, this introduction has two main components. First, we outline the history and character of academic geographical interest in animals; and secondly, we discuss some of the basic concepts, notably "place" and "space," which geographers deploy when studying all manner of phenomena, animals included. Against this backdrop, we preview the specific contributions comprising this issue.


Geography and the Study of Animals

Although never prominent in the discipline, academic geographers have long shown some interest in nonhuman animals. A glance through recent geographical journals reveals papers on regional patterns of koala habitat in Australia (Bryan, 1997), hog farming in North Carolina (Furuseth, 1997), horse-breeding in the Hunter Valley, Australia (Robinson, 1996), late 19th century controversy over seal hunting in the Bering Sea (Castree, 1997), and tourist-wildlife interaction (Orams, 1996). This interest in animals is long-standing. Turn-of-the century geographical journals offered a not dissimilar range of topics, including papers on "the geography of mammals" (Sclater, 1894a, 1894b, 1895, 1896a, 1896b, 1897a, 1897b) as well as, oddly enough, pieces on aquatic plants and animals by Guppy (1893), bird migration by Eagle Clarke (1896) and the distribution and habits of whales by Möbius (1894)!

Moreover, an identifiable branch of the discipline known as "animal geography" dates at least from Newbigin’s 1913 text Animal Geography. Animal geography was also accorded a role in Hartshorne's classic 1939 survey The Nature of Geography, as one of the "systematic" subfields of physical geography (along with climate, soils, plants, topography, etc.) allied outside the field to the "systematic science" of zoology. According to Hartshorne, research from the various systematic physical and human geographic subfields allowed the elucidation of "areal differentiation" or regional geographies serving to distinguish different areas or regions of the earth’s surface.

Despite assessments of the status of animal geography from the 1940s through to the 1960s (Bennett, 1961; Cansdale, 1949; Davies, 1961; Stuart, 1954), by the 1970s animal geography had all but disappeared from the discipline. Recently, however, a new animal geography -– almost exclusively conceptualized as part of human rather than physical geography –- has appeared, and revived the subspeciality. In order to unpack the dynamics underlying this change in direction and subsequent reinvigoration, we distinguish between the two chief lines of research conducted over the years under the heading of animal geography: zoögeography and cultural animal geography.


Zoögeography

Writing in 1949 for a popular geographical magazine, Cansdale noted that:

One of the most fascinating aspects of natural history is animal geography -- the why and wherefore of animal distribution .... In the thrush family, for instance, why do the blackbird, the song thrush and the mistle thrush stay here [in Britain] for most of the time and nest in our gardens and coppices while the redwing and fieldfare go far north to breed? And why does the blackbird's close relative the ring ouzel lead a fully migratory life and make its summer home in the moors and fells? These are small, rather local questions in animal ecology, but there are other and much wider problems. (1949, p.108)

Animal geography was here cast as the study of animal distributions, asking about where different types of animals are to found, whether at local or continental scales, and the environmental correlates of these distributions. The majority of work referred to as animal geography has been of this sort, from Sclater (1894 et seq.), who sought to delimit the six main terrestrial regions of mammalian life, to recent papers published in the Journal of Biogeography. This work, based on conventional scientific research methods and models, was initially and remains strongly linked with the cognate scientific disciplines of zoology and (more widely) ecology and biology. Early on, for example, Clark asserted in a review of "geography and zoölogy" that "there must be a much closer correlation between biology and geography than has hitherto been suspected" (1927, p. 102), while Cansdale expressly regarded animal geography as "but one aspect of animal ecology" (1949, p. 109). Moreover many of the practitioners of this approach to animal geography would not warrant (or desire) the formal disciplinary designation of "geographer," since many of them arrived at their studies from disciplinary backgrounds outside of geography. Although they produced geographies “[m]ost zo(geographers were originally trained as systematic zoologists, paleontologists or ecologists” (Stuart, 1954, p. 443), leading Davies to reflect that “[a]nimal geography is perhaps the branch of geography least practiced by geographers, and the one they most cheerfully abandon to the systematic sciences” (1961, p.412). Even now, few geographers contribute zoögeographical studies to the Journal of Biogeography.

We argue that the natural-scientific bent of this zoögeographical version of animal geography conspired to leave it saying little about animal interactions with human society. Rather, it became embedded within a scientific physical geography looking to ascertain "natural" correlations and causations apart from the disturbances occasioned by human influence. This is not entirely the case; some earlier writings did reflect on “what all this complex distribution of animal life has meant and still means to [humans]” (Thomson, 1905, p. 118), and explored the relations between animals and humans in terms of "competition, conflict, domestication and biological control" (Cansdale, 1950, 1951a, 1951b, 1951c, 1951d, 1952). Similarly, in more recent biogeographical papers the human influence is occasionally assessed (Carter, 1997, p. 153). Nonetheless, the consideration given to society-animal relations in such work is patchy. The human dimension is introduced as an unwanted and alien intrusion, which remains wholly untheorized. At the same time the animals themselves tend to be regarded with a detached scientific eye as things utterly unlike humans. Cast as purely natural objects to be tracked, trapped, counted, mapped and modeled, they are assumed devoid of any "inner life," any form of experience, consciousness or sociability, which might be worth taking seriously.


Cultural Animal Geography

As late as the 1960s, zo(geography was “usually considered ... too remote from the central problems of human geography” (Davies, 1961, p. 412). An interest in animals has not always been totally divorced from the more human end of the discipline, however. Bennett offered the following observation:


The author wishes here to propose [another] approach to the study of animal geography, an approach that is certain to be a rewarding area of research for geographers even though they are equipped with only a modest background in the biological sciences. The proposed field could well be termed cultural animal geography, for it would encompass those aspects of animal geography which accumulate, analyze and systematize data relevant to the interactions of animals and human cultures. (1960, p.13; emphasis in original)

Bennett raised the possibility of research on human-animal interactions, demonstrating how humans have exerted an influence upon animal "numbers and distributions" and examining how animals respond to processes of domestication, practices of subsistence hunting and fishing, and also more indirect human impacts such as fire, war, and travel. He also argued for a focus on how animals influence dimensions of human life (destroying crops or carrying disease), and on their role as key elements of the natural environment which "determines" the character of a region’s human geography (the settlement, agriculture, and industry).

Bennett’s proposals effectively dovetailed with Sauer's approach to understanding the cultural landscape, set forth in Spades, Hearths and Herds (1952), which documented the role of animal domestication in the conversion of natural into cultural landscapes. Sauer’s Berkeley School of cultural geography, which dominated much of human geography during the first half of the 20th century, inspired such work as Isaac’s (1970) study of the geography of domestication and the Simoonses' (1968) research on the ceremonial uses of the ox in India. A noteworthy aspect of this approach has been its resistance to a simplistic economic explanation of society-animal relations, and the recognition of non-economic roles of animals in human societies (as companion animals or for use in religious ceremonies; Donkin, 1991, p. ix; Donkin, 1985, 1989). While this stress on the non-economic origins of animal domestication has itself been criticized (Rodrigues, 1992, p. 366), what matters here is the contemplation of an enlarged cultural realm in which animals are more than the "resources" studied by zo(geographers or the units of production investigated by agricultural geographers. This conceptual space opened the way for utilization of animals by human society to be scrutinized by geographers as something other than natural and unproblematic (Yarwood, Evans & Higginbottom, 1997, p. 17).

In recent years there has been a definite revival of interest in animal geography, one securely anchored in the orbit of human geography. This new turn has been inspired by the encounter between human geography and a range of new conceptual notions derived from political economy, social theory, cultural studies, feminism, post-colonial critique, psychoanalysis, and anthropology, as well as a partial retrieval of older Sauerian traditions. This "new" cultural animal geography reflects upon situations where people and animals coexist in particular sites and territories, and ponders the social interactions between the people and certain non-human groupings in the vicinity.

For example, Wolch, West and Gaines propose a "transspecies urban theory" alert to the realities of a city built to accommodate not only humans but also “a shadow population of non-humans spanning the phylogenetic scale” (1995, p. 736). It is this theoretical window which also informs Wolch, Gullo and Lassiter’s (1997) analysis of changing attitudes toward cougars in California. In a similar vein, Philo (1995) inquired into the plight of livestock animals directed by humans into the live meat markets and slaughterhouses of 19th century London. Such studies point to how particular human societies wish to exclude certain types of animals from their homes and neighborhoods (because they are regarded as "wild," "unclean," "unhygienic") while choosing to include other types of animals (because they are regarded as "tame," "clean," or "charismatic).

If Philo and Wolch stress the exclusions in their work, Tuan (1984) traces the inclusions -– embedded within inherently unequal and "paternalist" power relations -- entailed in the keeping of pets within the domestic milieux of human society. Such work also signals the more symbolic dimensions of the encounter between humans and animals. Animals in general (as well as specific species) often become coded as dirty and polluting, thus feeding a common impulse to exclude them from the realm of everyday human life. Such codings become intimately bound up in the identity politics of human groups, in that metaphors and images of animality, of the bestial and the savage, are often deployed by mainstream society to represent those regarded as marginal, misfit or deviant. Sibley develops this theme when considering the socio-spatial exclusions endured by "outsiders" such as European Gypsies and other ethnic minorities, and he writes that “[t]o dehumanize through claiming animal attributes for others is one way of legitimating exploitation and exclusion from civilized society” (1995, p. 27). Emel (1995) has excavated the cross currents running between representations of the wolf in the United States, ensnared in connotations of the wild, darkness or evil, and representations of "native Indians."

The chief claim we make at this point is that a new cultural animal geography has emerged within the discipline. This emergence is marked by a recent theme issue of the journal Society and Space (Wolch & Emel, 1995), by forthcoming books on animal geography (Wolch & Emel, 1998), and by the running of specialist sessions at professional geography conferences in both the United Kingdom and the US.


Some Basic Geographical Concepts and Animal Geography

What possibilities arise from adopting a geographical perspective in researching animals and society-animal relations? To address this question, we sketch the basic concepts which frame Anglo-American geographic research, and then suggest how they can illuminate the "animal question."


Space, Distribution and Location

Philosophers' perennial disagreements over the nature of space have led to different ways of understanding space within academic geography (Gregory, 1994; Sack, 1980; Pickles, 1985). For many geographers, however, space is a relative concept, referring to relations between phenomena distributed across a range of identifiably different locations. Such phenomena might be features of the natural world such as mountains and forests, or features of the human world such as settlements and factories. At base, the relations between these phenomena, spatial relations, are conceived of in terms of proximity and distance, direction of one from others, and connective travel routes. Such an understanding can lead to highly geometric conceptions of space and abstract notions of spatial relations, suggesting the existence of fundamental spatial laws governing the distribution and location of many different kinds of phenomena both natural and human. In the search to discover such spatial laws, some geographers have looked for quantifiable correlations between spatial patterns (on maps) displayed by different variables thought to be causally related (say, fertile land and rural settlement).

Such a spatial science approach to geographical inquiry became influential during the 1950s and 1960s in reaction to the regional geography of Hartshorne (Cloke, Philo & Sadler, 1991) but soon earned serious criticism from Marxist, feminist, and humanist geographers. Continuing to probe human spatial relations, but with a more qualitative eye, geographers have focused on how these relations are themselves indelibly embedded within a maze of economic, political, social, and cultural processes, forces, and structures (Gregory & Urry, 1985). Using various theoretical lenses, for example, spatial relations between wealthy "cores" and impoverished "peripheries" have been explained as manifestations of capitalism’s tendency to geographically uneven development (Smith, 1990). At the metropolitan scale, spatial relations between central cities and suburbs have been understood as structured in part by patriarchal gender divisions of urban space (McDowell, 1983). Even spatial relations between self and other, or us and them, have been seen as integral to how personal identities (situated "here") are built up in mirror-image to the often negative projections of attributes placed on others (over "there"; Sibley, 1995).

Animal geographers (especially zoögeographers) have often incorporated notions of space, spatial patterns, and spatial relations into the heart of their research, as revealed in maps of lairs, nests, flocks, herds, colonies and even migration tracks of particular species. Such mapping, frequently linked to quantitative techniques such as point pattern analysis, typically strive to correlate animal distributions with patterns of climatic variation, geologic formations, and vegetative cover, in a search for general zo(geographical laws of how animals (individuals and species) arrange themselves across the earth's surface.

Work undertaken by cultural animal geographers has focused on space, but not in the conventional scientific sense of searching for spatial laws. Indeed, of key concern are spatial relations between people and animals, thought of in terms of either exclusion or inclusion (managing physical distance between people and certain animals. At a macro-scale these relations effectively consign animals identified as wild to a wilderness beyond human civilization; their transgressions of the wilderness boundary –- a case of matter "out of place" (Cresswell, 1996) -– can lead to murderous reprisals from the human community (Emel, 1995; Wolch et al., 1995). Alternatively, these relations can entail the welcoming of animals conceived to be tame into the home, yard, and immediate residential neighborhood as companion animals. Curiously, should such animals escape to the wild and become feral, they are typically regarded as transgressive. Between these two extremes lie those animals regarded as domesticated, possessing utility as food and other products, which are allocated to such specialist locations as farms, fields, markets, and abattoirs where they are supposed to spend their days from birth to death. Such spatial relations are made more complex in many ways, not least by the agency of animals themselves.

It is one task of the new animal geography to explore the complex nexus of spatial relations between people and animals. The goal is to tease out the myriad economic, political, social, and cultural pressures shaping these relations with reference to both particular groupings of people and particular species of animals. Thus Anderson (1997) reassesses the traditional geographical interpretations of domestication and reinterprets some of this deeply entrenched pattern of human-animal relations through a political and socio-cultural lens. Looking at the geography of domestic animals in the late 20th century, Ufkes (1995) explains dramatic locational shifts in the US livestock sector on the basis of globalization-driven intensive farming and new levels of consumer demand for both lean meat and cheap meat (the latter associated with increasing income disparities). She also zeroes in on corporate efforts at harnessing biotechnology "to build a better pig -– leaner and faster growing. Such efforts to alter the interior geography of the animal body have devastating implications for animal well-being. Other researchers focus on deep-seated politico-religious conflicts around society-animal relations. Robbins (1998) explains how the ancient religious ideals of Hindu vegetarianism have become ideological weapons in an ongoing (and often violent) struggle over political control in Rajistan. Muslim livestock farmers and butchers in Rajistan, who have few alternatives to entering a globalizing meat industry, are caught in the middle of this Hindu-Muslim power struggle.

Employing both metaphoric and material conceptions of space, other cultural animal geographers seek to illuminate human-animal relations. One approach is to trace the pervasive but often hidden networks binding the animal shot in the wild, a science laboratory, a variety of corporate offices great and small, a high street retail outlet, a private kitchen and the like. Such research, inspired by Latour's actor-network theory (Whatmore, 1997; Whatmore & Thorne, 1998), deploys a strong sense of spatial relations while also illuminating the myriad documents and multiple devices which enable such relations to be traced across the globe. A further line of inquiry has narrowed the lens to more intimate spaces such as home, garden, and neighborhood park, asking about their roles in shaping society-animal relations. Wolch (1996) suggests that contemporary cities, which exclude so many animals from their midst, promote a profound emotional distanciation between people and animals that under-girds routine practices of extermination and habitat destruction. Recreating small-scale urban sites where people and animals might interact on a daily basis, forging what Wolch terms "zoöpolis," would enable residents to adopt "animal standpoints" and enter into interspecific networks of friendship capable of breaking down city-country dualisms so destructive of animal life-chances.


Place, Region and Landscape

A second geographical concept is place, deployed to capture the situated, material dimensions of space. The concept of place is not relative, but absolute: it describes the particularities of singular, unique, nameable settings where phenomena, natural and human, together create a distinctive assemblage which is clearly "this place" (Manchester, the Algarve, Los Vegas) rather than any other. Although notions of place have also been debated within academic geography (Duncan, 1994; Entrikin, 1991; Relph, 1976), the tradition of focusing on differences between places, and spotlighting place-specific features, has an even older pedigree than does the spatial tradition. Thus geographers have often paid special attention to the diverse elements which combine to create the visual impression of distinctiveness for a given place. One result is interest in the visible landscape as an object to be perceived, enjoyed, and analyzed.

As spatial science grew more dominant in the 1960s and 1970s, the analysis of place receded, regarded as merely descriptive and thus pre-scientific. By the 1980s, however, energized by trends in psychology, the philosophies of meaning and cultural studies, fresh ideas about the centrality of place to human experience, emotion, and ideology began to influence human geography (Ley & Samuels, 1978). Questions to do with place, region, and landscape have acquired new relevance to human geographers, stimulating research aimed at teasing out the meanings –- deeply existential and more overtly politicized, loving and antagonistic, shared and conflicting –- which people attach to places where they live, work, play, and travel. Linked to recent work on spatial relations, contemporary geographical studies show how place-based struggles, identities, and politics are integral to wider societal processes, forces, and structures (Agnew, 1987).

Animal geographers have often incorporated notions of place and related categories into their research. For instance, zoögeographers look in detail at the associations of particular animal species found in particular places of the world. Intriguingly, Davies (1961, p. 415) distinguished between ecology as the study of place -– those local mixes of environmental factors attracting given animal species to settle in given places –- and geography as the study of space. Quite a few zoögeographical studies do indeed concentrate on particular places, sometimes at the regional scale but more commonly focussing on smaller habitat patches. One example is Carter's (1997) recent inquiry into the wedge-tailed shearwaters of Heron Island, off the Australian coast, in which she also focuses on the very specific nest-site selections of these puffins (thus drawing attention to even smaller places on this island).

Work undertaken by cultural animal geographers has also given consideration to place. Several such studies emphasize how environmental, economic, political, social, and cultural contexts underlie place-specific society-animal relations and how they are negotiated and transformed over time. The argument is that these relations are differentially constituted in different places, forming a complex geography which can, in principle, be mapped out onto the places, regions, and landscapes spread across the earth's surface.

Especially illustrative of such work is Matless' (1994) detailed research on the "place" of animals in the Norfolk Broads, a series of shallow lakes with their linking rivers, in eastern England, often used for sailing, cruising, shooting, and bird watching. Drawing on the idea of a "moral geography," Matless investigates the constellations of ideas about how human life should be lived in relation to given environments, specific blueprints or codes for local conduct. He documents the cross-cutting "cultures of nature" -– some predicated on a violence and hunting, others on a preservationist approach "warranting quiet observation rather than loud killing" (1994, p.141). Both have decisively shaped local society-animal relations in the Broadlands for much of the present century.

Philo (1995) and Gullo, Lassiter and Wolch (1998), who set their studies in 19th century London and late 20th century southern California do not offer such a sustained place-centered account. Nonetheless, their findings are intimately wrapped up in the details of place. Philo’s place is a crazily congested Victorian commercial capital faced with the unsettling sights and sounds of live meat markets with their cursing drovers and stampeding bullocks. In contrast, Gullo et al. focus on an exploding American "exopolis" swiftly encroaching on nearby chaparral wildlands and pine-forested mountains, home to cougars, coyotes, and bears. Similarly, Proctor's (1998; Proctor & Pincetl, 1996) work on the controversy surrounding spotted owls and old growth forest is not only rooted in the actual landscape of the Pacific Northwest, complete with its declining timber regions, but also in the moral geography discursively created around the owl itself. In late 20th century Pacific Northwest, the owl symbolizes the sagacity of nature for some but the collapse of community for others (the latter used to legitimate killing individual owls). In her study of culture and nature at the Adelaide Zoo, Anderson explicitly states that “[i]f the zoo is a ‘space’, Adelaide Zoo is a ‘place’” (1995, p.280). By this, she indicates a parallel movement between advancing claims about zoos as pivotal sites in the cultural construction of nature, and also of colonial and ultimately national identity, and grounding particular claims in the historical-geographical specificity of the Adelaide enterprise.

Paralleling research on the more intimate spaces of society-animal relations, other cultural animal geographers have considered how small-scale places shape the emotional bonds between people and animals, influencing larger political spheres in which decisions about conservation and habitat protection are made. Michel (1998) highlights the case of volunteers working to rehabilitate golden eagles in the fast-shrinking chaparral wildlands of San Diego, California. Drawing upon feminist insights, Michel reveals how an alternative "politics of care" emerges from the daily practices of rehabilitation far removed from the public realm of land-use planning, so dominated by a technocratic discourse alienated from the realities of injured and dying eagles. This place-based politics of care is played out in local schools and other community institutions -- in the form of environmental education -– and serves to prompt new directions for environmental activism in general.


The Present Special Them Issue

The four articles that constitute this issue approach animal geographies at multiple spatial scales, viewed through several theoretical lenses, and with varying emphasis on animals as active subjects, elements of nature, and cultural symbols. Anderson reconsiders the geography of animal domestication, situating certain chapters of the domestication story in European political discourses about human uniqueness. Arguing that domestication cannot be fully understood by recourse to traditional cultural ecology frameworks that treat animals as natural resources, she draws upon theories of power and identity to make sense of this process. Ultimately, she contends that domestication concretized a dualistic model of human and animal in western cultures, with the case of the Adelaide Zoo highlighting how domestication underlies contradictory human-animal relations played out at various spatial scales and in particular geographic places.

The second paper deals specific domesticated animals and their changing relationship to people in rural Britain. Yarwood and Evans consider how recent and fundamental shifts in capitalist agricultural systems have stimulated rural decline and in response, efforts to reinvigorate the countryside economy through agrotourism. In this context, family farms have become theme parks and resorts, where old, rare, and endangered breeds of livestock are not only star attractions (and thus, increasingly, precious commodities) but also powerful -– and fungible -- symbols of cultural heritage. Strategies for the protection of rare breeds, along with the rise of agrotourism, have altered the spatial distribution of rare breeds and transformed the links between breeds, place, and culture.

Next, Thorne moves us down and around the globe to the Antipodes, with her analysis of the worldwide trade in kangaroo bodies. Justified by their historical construction as a "pest" species by rural farmers, along with a popular "spatial imaginary" or conception of kangaroos -– fecund and abundant –- roaming a vast, empty and uninterrupted national territory, tens of thousands of kangaroos are shot each year. This is despite increasing loss and fragmentation of kangaroo habitat, and the animal’s status as a powerful tourist attraction and symbol of Australian nationhood familiar worldwide. Drawing on Latour’s actor network theory, Thorne traces the set of complex relations that bind kangaroos to each other, and link their slaughter to a wide range of far-flung human actors and institutions. Ironically, the perceived abundance of kangaroos makes them a non-issue for conservationists, whose frameworks for wildlife protection only bestow value on the rare or endangered.

In the final contribution, Elder, Wolch and Emel consider how culture-specific human-animal relations or, simply, animal practices are molded by place and environment, and legitimated over time. They argue that as the "empire comes home" in the form of international migration to the west, and as cultural diversity increases under conditions of postmodernity, decontextualized "out-of-place" animal practices risk being interpreted as transgressions of the human-animal divide. Divergent animal practices and norms of cruelty and harm can thus trigger social conflict and racialization of subaltern groups. To counter such marginalization, Elder, Wolch and Emel recommend a "pratique sauvage" or radical democracy that encompasses not only subaltern people but animals too.

We hope that the readers of Society & Animals will agree that a geographical perspective can make important theoretical, empirical, and policy-relevant contributions to research on society-animal relations. It is in this spirit (rather than any sense of disciplinary imperialism) that the current theme issue has been assembled. We trust that in the articles which follow, readers will find much of intrinsic interest but also discover what a cultural animal geography can achieve.


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Note

1. Correspondence should be directed to Jennifer Wolch, Department of Geography, University of Southern California, University Park, Los Angeles, California 90089-0255.

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