cultural geographies 2014 hodgetts

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Methodologies for animals geographies: cultures, communication and genomics

Timothy HodgettsUniversity of Oxford, UK

Jamie LorimerUniversity of Oxford, UK

AbstractThe recent renaissance within animal geography has tended to focus on the spatial orderings of animals by humans, rather than on the lived geographies and experiences of animals themselves. We suggest that one reason for this imbalance is methodological a persistent commitment to human-centred methods somewhat at odds with the more-than-human aspirations of the sub-discipline. In this paper we review and critically assess methodological developments in three areas that we consider to be especially significant for developing animals geographies: (i) techniques for tracking the spatialities of animal culture; (ii) scientific and artistic engagements in inter-species communication; and (iii) geographic tools afforded by genetic analyses. In conclusion, we reflect on the promise and some of the challenges to developing these methods within (what is still largely known as) human geography.

Keywordsanimals geographies, ethology, genomics, inter-species communication, methods

Introduction

In one of the key publications that relaunched animal geography in the 1990s, Philo and Wilbert offered the useful distinction between two (frequently interwoven) concerns of animal geogra-phy.1 The first animal spaces describes the spatial ordering of animals by humans.

Corresponding author:Timothy Hodgetts, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QY, UK. Email: [email protected]

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2 cultural geographies

The second beastly places refers to the lived geographies and experiences of animals. In the former the concern is primarily with people, in the latter it is the animals themselves. In this paper we want to suggest that progress in these two strands has been unequal. Geographers now know a lot more about animal spaces; but relatively less about beastly places or what we here refer to as animals geographies. This formulation extends beyond the intimate intimations of beastly places to encompass a wider diversity of spatialities of animals existence; it seeks to pluralize the categories animal and geography to recognize the differences they subsume.

We propose that one of the reasons for this imbalance is methodological.2 Human geographers have become accomplished at researching the human in the human-animal encounter. We have at our disposal a sophisticated suite of methods for accessing human animal behaviour: in the past and present; of individuals and in aggregate; up close and at a distance; under different modes of political economy and in the form of representations, practices and even (increasingly) affects. These methods are informed by a further diversity of conceptual frameworks for analyzing the data they derive spanning the full gamut of popular critical theory. In contrast (and in spite of some notable exceptions that we discuss below), methodological innovation and development for researching animals geographies have been limited. When we try, we tend still to deploy human-centred methods to examine nonhuman phenomena. We currently lack the field skills, instruments, textbooks and training programmes for doing this type of research. This deficit, we would argue, is impeding progress in animals geographies.

Before addressing this deficit, it is perhaps worth briefly summarizing why animal geographers have become interested in developing methods for animals geographies. Why not just leave ani-mals geographies to biologists? At least three reasons strike us as significant. These help account for the diversity of animal geographies currently underway and the types of methods they require. First, that attending to the spatial behaviours of all animals (and other nonhumans) provides, what Lulka terms, a thicker sense of the Earth.3 Second, because animal geographers (and others) think that animals matter as political and ethical subjects and there is thus a need to comprehend and possibly improve their life experience. Chris Bear has argued that animal geographers have tended to neglect individual animals in favour of aggregations.4 The dynamics of populations of animal species trouble environmental geographers concerned with both biosecurity and biodiversity, while the status of breeds and herds figures prominently in work on domestic animals. Finally, a belief that attending to animals that are big like us5 might tell us something about us; it is for this reason of course that so many animals are used as human surrogates in laboratories. We would add that an engagement with animals geographies can also help address the spatial lacunae in animal science towards nonhuman experiences of humanized spaces, and thus start to remedy the anthropocen-trism common to many recent accounts of the Anthropocene.

Fortunately, methods for researching animals lives have been the subject of significant endeav-our elsewhere. Here we want to flag and critically assess the potential of methodological develop-ments in three areas that we consider to be especially significant for developing animals geographies. The first relates to technologies for the monitoring, tracking and analysis of the spatialities of animal behaviour. These are facilitating rigorous engagement with questions of animal cultures in zoology, ethology and conservation biology. Biogeographers have tended to focus on plants. The second concerns technological, scientific and artistic experiments with modes of intra- and inter-species communication. The final methods are from genomics and involve the use of molecular markers to track historic animal mobilities and to map microbial ecologies within and between animal bodies. Together these developments offer geographers new tools for addressing old questions and pose new questions in themselves, including a fundamental challenge to the coherence and utility of the category animal that organizes this sub-discipline. In conclusion we reflect on some of the opportu-nities and challenges to developing these methods within a (post-) human geography.


Hodgetts and Lorimer 3

Tracking animal cultures

Animal geographers have deployed ethological concepts and ethnographic methods to understand the animal worlds of fish, birds and mammals as they are sensed and represented by those seeking to count, hunt or herd them.6 They have deployed more-than-representational methods developed by cultural geographers to attune to practice, affect, skill, habit and multisensory knowledges not easily captured by talk and text based methods. The resulting multi-species ethnographies7 are important and form part of a wider blossoming of this type of work across animal studies. But they have largely been dependent upon the goodwill, expertise and field sites of scientists and other animal experts. Whilst this dependence may lead to interdisciplinary, collaborative and even sym-biotic practices of knowledge production,8 such approaches are constrained by their reliance on these gatekeepers, their modes of engagement and their styles of subsequent communication. Furthermore, the bias towards ethnographic methodologies involving participant observation of humans in their interactions with nonhumans; interviews with human subjects about their experi-ences with nonhumans; discourse analysis of human representations and mobilizations of nonhu-mans; and the like leads to the retention of a bias towards human sensings of nonhumans.9

Animal geographers are beginning to extend existing ethological methods to investigate animal cultures (including those involving humans) for what they tell us about animals cutting out the gatekeepers if needs be.10 A series of tools for this purpose have been developed within the field of ethology, often involving the direct observation of animal behaviour. Direct observation is in many ways analogous to human-ethnographic methodology, involving similar considerations and debates around the extent to which observation should be pre-structured (where specific predicted behav-iours are monitored and recorded) or flexible and open-ended (and the analysis thus more akin to grounded theory).11 However, they differ in that the directness of ethological animal observation affords a more sustained and material engagement with nonhuman lifeworlds and animal cultures than the mediated ethnographies outlined above. It is perhaps ironic that whilst ethologists show little hesitation in treating humans as just one more animal to investigate12 and now talk freely (if not equivocally) of animal cultures, researchers even within the more-than-human strands of the social sciences seem hesitant to engage in studying the cultures of nonhumans.

Ethological science has long been tightly wedded to a conceptual framework that explains behaviour in terms of either proximate (mechanism/development) or ultimate (adaptation/evolu-tion) causes.13 Animal observation under this dominant scientific paradigm requires the rigorous testing of a (preferably theory-derived) hypothesis, if possible through experimental means.14 Yet it is by no means obvious that such an epistemological route would be desirable within the approaches to investigating culture favoured by many social scientists. Alternatives exist. These include historical ethological studies that place a non-conformist emphasis on attitude, intent and purposeful action15 in animals and active engagements with a different strand of ethological theory (notably Deleuzes engagement with the work of Von Uexkull). Together these have inspired livelier accounts of animals within (more-than) human geography.16 Calls for a more integrative and flexible approach are growing within the pages of ethological journals as well.17 As Bateson puts it, through a wider consideration of the factors influencing animal behaviour, behavioural biologists should be able to retain a grasp of what it is to be an intact, freely moving animal.18

These nascent engagements by animal geographers with this direct method form part of a wider enthusiasm amongst social scientists keen to explore the possibilities afforded by experimenting with ethological modes of inquiry. For example, the cultural anthropologist Hoon Song utilizes direct observations of feral pigeons and their interactions with each other to draw conclusions about their (lack of) social structure, which hints at a particular form of human agency in altering their geographies.19 A similar use of direct ethological observation informs the multi-species



ethno-primatological work of Agustn Fuentes, in which the interactions of macaques and humans in Bali is witnessed in an account of their mutual ecological entanglement.20 Ethological method-ologies are also being embraced by psychologists keen to extend their insights beyond humanistic species barriers for example, in the work of Gay Bradshaw on post-traumatic shock and elephant breakdown.21

Field techniques frequently rely on detailed recording of animal movement and action. This is often assisted with the use of video technologies, operated either by a human camera technician, or by enrolling the animals themselves as camera crew, given the capacity video provides for extended and asynchronous review.22 Although not widespread, video methodologies are also increasingly advocated and used by cultural geographers.23 For those willing to shift their viewfinders there is significant potential for developing innovative approaches to exploring animals geographies despite the epistemological and practical challenges this will entail.24

A different methodological inspiration comes from a more classically biogeographic perspec-tive, and highlights the spatialities of animal cultures. Through the innovative use of tracking technologies, researchers particularly within the ethological and (conservation) biological sciences have been able to generate animal-cultural insights through monitoring animals use of space. As an example, through affixing tracking devices on dairy cows in Switzerland, a recent piece of ethological research monitored the movement and thus the associations of individual cows, allowing an insight into the (mostly) affiliative social relationships within the herd.25 These tracking technologies are often being used within formal conceptual frameworks that utilize soft-ware packages to map (and mathematize) the social networks they trace; for instance, among dol-phins and otters.26 Novel animal technologies also feature in recent artistic and media collaborations with scientists, such as enrolling pigeons as research assistants in monitoring air quality.27

Combined, these ethological and bio-geographical methodologies for observing and monitoring animals provide a powerful set of tools for geographers interested in mapping a wide range of animals geographies. They facilitate work that can interrogate nonhuman dimensions to the Anthropocene. For example, by mapping the ways in which animals are becoming urban or synur-bic;28 the processes by which animals can become native to new areas, including in relation to anthropogenic vectors of movement; and the actions by which animals establish territories and transgress human-demarcated boundaries, especially in relation to concerns about bio-security and biodiversity.29 In each of these research areas, it is the various geographies of animals their agen-cies, their behaviours, and in particular their place-making that is increasingly recognized as essential, in order to engage fully with the hybridity of discrete contexts and situations.

There are, of course, limits to the inferences that can be drawn from observing, tracking, moni-toring and measuring animals, their movements, and their associations. Investigating animals geographies their lived experiences and their social lives seems to demand something more; yet you cannot ask animals directly what their lifeworld is like. Or can you?

Interspecies communication

Intra- and inter-species communication is not as inaccessible to human researchers as some critics might suggest. The former has long been a focus of ethological research, and continues to be an important trend in contemporary work, particularly through the framework of functionally refer-ential communication or the ability to communicate information regarding ongoing external events or object.30 This communication tends to be aural, consisting of calls, barks, whoops, growls and the like; and researchers are able to develop a degree of understanding through inves-tigating the consistency of aural communications between individuals of an animal species in rela-tion to external events. Similar work within animal communication research targets inter-species



aural communication, such as that between domestic dogs and humans.31 Beyond the aural, inno-vative techniques have been developed to investigate olfactory communication between species, such as that between native and invasive mustelid species in England.32 Such multi-sensory inves-tigations help to offset the visual-bias of most observational methods, and provide more of an insight into the lived experiences of animals with a different sensory experience to our own.

Inter-species communication, and particularly animal-human, has also generated increasing interest from animal geographers (and other social scientists), who have engaged in a variety of ethnographic investigations of existing modes of human-animal communication, including: dog agility training; horse riding; livestock herding; animal welfare in captivity; elephant management; and angling.33 However, like work on animal cultures, this research is dependent on, and privileg-ing of, particular human knowledges and power relations. Here we want to flag and reflect on the methods behind some experiments that seek to open new spaces for interspecies communication on a more equal footing. These have been designed for a range of purposes including art, science, entertainment, animal welfare and human behaviour change. Interestingly, all of those we want to mention here focus on play as a reciprocal/equal form of interspecies interaction not sex, eating or violence. The study of play behaviour within species has long been a staple of ethological research, and such work has often looked to draw inferences about behaviour across species.34 More recent work across a variety of disciplines has expanded this interest in play to an interspecies scale.35

The experiments that will perhaps be most familiar to cultural geographers will be those under-taken by artists, seeking to include living and dead animals in their work.36 For example, Kira OReillys extended, public, gallery-based performance of interspecies communication entitled Falling Asleep with a Pig. This echoed Joseph Bueys famous performances with a coyote in the USA in the 1970s.37 A more foreign communicative relationship is enabled by Chris Woebken in his piece entitled Beetle Wrestler, which seeks to build what he terms an architecture of reciproc-ity with the worlds strongest animal.38 In a recent intervention entitled Playing with Pigs, Clemens Driessen and his collaborators are developing a computer-assisted game whereby humans and pigs can interact and play together online.39 In contrast to the previous artistic experiments, this mode of research is grounded in notions of interspecies exploratory learning that retains a focus on the animals themselves.

Moving beyond artistic encounters, technological advances in robotics and virtual simulation hold out a tantalizing possible future for re-scaled, embodied interspecies encounters. In a recent experimental combination of immersive virtual reality with teleoperator systems, an interdisci-plinary team facilitated an equal-scale encounter between humans and rats.40 The human subjects were immersed in a virtual reality environment, where their movements were monitored, and in turn drove the movement of a rat-shaped and -sized robotic device; the rat-robot was then placed next to a living rat, whose movements were translated into that of a human-sized avatar in the vir-tual environment. Thus levelled, it is claimed that the human and the rat were able to participate in a purportedly playful meeting of species that seems straight from the pages of science fiction. Such experiments in adjusting scale do little to shift power dynamics in interspecies communication. Nor does the lab maze create anything more than a novel environment for encounter. Yet the pros-pect of engaging with animal worlds in more embodied, interactive and exploratory ways opens new avenues for developing richer accounts of animal lifeworlds.

Genomics

For the final set of methods we wish to shift spaces and scales. Methodological developments in DNA sequencing have revolutionized modern science in the last 40 years, allowing biologists to



ask and answer new questions about the histories, geographies and fundamental constitution of animal life. While the development and political economy of these innovations and their conse-quences for human and nonhuman life have been subject to close and critical inspection by a range of social science scholarship,41 there has to date been relatively little engagement with these meth-ods in animal studies (let alone animal geography). Here we would like to foreground two sets of genomic methods that should be of interest to animal geographers. The first concerns the use of genetic markers to track contemporary and historic patterns of animal mobility. The second relates methods associated with the rise of metagenomics for mapping the microbial composition of ani-mals bodies.

There is a growing interest in conservation biology in the utility of methods from molecular biology for phylogeography, the sub-discipline of biogeography concerned with the principles and processes governing the geographical distribution of genealogical lineages.42 Attention has focused on mitochondrial DNA markers, which have proved to be especially well suited to tracing how, in the words of one of its main advocates conspecific individuals are genealogi-cally linked through shared ancestors.43 Here geography and genealogy can be interlinked to trace historical mobilities. For example, as one of us has reported in more detail elsewhere,44 recent work documenting the phylogeography of the Asian elephant has revealed traces of the long history of elephant trade (and subsequent escape) within the species range. This evidence of anthropogenic mobilities scrambled accepted taxonomies of sub-species identity and cata-lysed wider debates about priorities for the species conservation in an effort to recognize his-toric modes of interspecies companionship long documented by scholars in the humanities. The challenges posed to conservation biology by climate change also point to the utility of such methods. Mapping phylogeographic patterns can proffer important clues to previous species-population responses to changing climates, and thus point towards management priorities for the near future.45

While these methods affirm the coherence of the whole organism, recent developments in metagenomics the genomic analysis of DNA from assemblages of microorganisms46 have ena-bled biologists to explore the microbial composition of and connections between animals bodies. While there has long been an interest in the significance of animal microbial life most famously with the work of Lynn Margulis it has proved extremely difficult to cultivate (and thus identify) these organisms outside of the body. Metagenomic techniques circumvent this obstacle by map-ping all the genetic materials contained within any given sample. Developments in this field have been energized by the Human Microbiome Project (HMP), an international collection of scientific research projects seeking to identify and characterize the microorganisms living in or on the human body.47 There are at least two applications of these metagenomic methods that should be of interest to animal geographers.

The first is an emerging map of the composition and patterns of microbiodiversity within selected hotpots of the human body (nose, mouth, skin, vagina and gut). The results have been striking. It has been suggested that the total microbial cells found in association with human bodies may exceed the total number of human cells making up our bodies by a factor of 10-to-one; while the total number of genes associated with the human microbiome could exceed the total number of human genes by a factor of 100-to-one.48 Ontologically, humans (and other animals) are perhaps best understood as supra-organisms. The second application is to generate a more familiar map of spatial variations in the human microbiome across a diversity of human bodies. The predominant (and somewhat troubling) geographical sampling in these early studies (moving from the US to Amerindians in the Amazon) appears to be taken to represent temporal distance from modernity and its concomitant effects on the human microbiome.49 This research design seeks to test estab-lished hypotheses that changes in the human microbiome specifically the demise of certain old



friends are responsible for the dramatic increase in atopic and autoimmune conditions in western communities, as well as those in increasingly urban areas of the Global South.50

We anticipate that there is great scope for animal, more-than-human and health geographers to develop new research projects that deploy these methods. These could bring to bear more sophis-ticated geographical understandings to help explore and explain spatial variation in human micro-biomes. They could engage political ecology to examine the drivers of microbial change in relation to public health interventions, raw food cultures and other experiments in probiotic lifestyles.51 These could also develop established methods for citizen science drawn from STS to help source, analyse, interpret and even cultivate both samples and vernacular understandings of our internal ecologies.52 Finally, with an awareness of the risks involved, animals geographers could like a growing number of medical researchers and affected patients experiment with modes of thera-peutic microbial restoration, documenting through a combination of ethnographic and laboratory techniques the processes and experiences through which our bodies learn to be affected by our microbial kin.53 Such work would help flesh out Haraways appeal for modes of learning and train-ing in the contact zone54 and document new modes of inter- and intra-species communication.

Conclusions

In this short paper we have argued that the blossoming of animal geography into a vibrant and diverse sub-field of cultural geography has been uneven in relation to the aspirations of its found-ing figures. In its neglect of the lived geographies of animals the field still struggles to fulfill its promise of taking animals seriously as subjects and ecological agents. Here we have suggested that this failure is in part methodological and that we could benefit from engaging with and developing new methods for mapping animals geographies on offer elsewhere. We have identified three potential sources. These offer techniques for tracking the spatialities of animal culture, for research-ing inter-species communication and for developing microbiogeographies through genetic analy-sis. In conclusion we would like to briefly reflect on the promise of this work before flagging some obstacles.

As we outlined earlier, one of the reasons that geographers became interested in animals was to offer a richer description of what is going on in diverse places. Attending to animals was part of a wider interest in the more-than-human forms of agency that animate our multispecies and techno-logical ecologies. In different ways the methods sketched here assist this research agenda by open-ing up the category animal to recognize its multiplicity of forms of life and spatial practice. As Steve Hinchliffe suggests, thinking animal (and other) geographies as a multiple helps acknowl-edge intersections, absences, incommensurabilities and discordances within and between the mul-tiple ways and forms of being in the world.55 Animals geographies adhere to different topologies and comprise nonhuman mobilities, which frequently do not conform to the territories and net-works familiar to humans geographies.

Thinking the animal multiple topologically might help us attune to the biopolitics of governing animals. Configuring animals as individuals, as species, as cultures or as supra-organisms results in different and often incompatible outcomes for the organisms and ecologies involved. If one of the other motivations of animal geographers is to live well with nonhuman life, then these methods help us attune to the political and ethical implications of how and where such cuts are made. By working through the material specificities of our entangled worlds they help establish the signifi-cant forms of difference and the more-than-human values, knowledges and spatial practices that must be considered in recent appeals for a post-humanist cosmopolitics.56

As obstacles to this endeavour there remains an enduring (and understandable) tendency to view human subjects as the appropriate focus of (social) research. The humanist project is far



from complete. There is a hesitancy to challenge existing disciplinary boundaries, particularly the monopolistic grip of scientific epistemologies with regard to understanding animal behav-iour. Such divisions are institutionalized and policed through the familiar infrastructures for research and pedagogy. There is an antagonism or at least ambivalence amongst animal geogra-phers about subjecting animals to modes of captivity and forms of technological apparatus in lab and field that are associated with some of these forms of experimentation. And finally, important concerns remain about the problems posed by anthropomorphism at both conceptual and practi-cal levels.

Here there is a risk that our focus on methodologies for exploring beastly places, rather than animals spacings, is misinterpreted. We are not suggesting that these animals geographies are distinct, unrelated, separate, nonhuman realms whose singular essence needs elucidation by dis-passionate and objective observation; we do not wish to rebuild the nature/culture binary that has been so painstakingly disassembled in recent years. We agree with Lestel et al. when they suggest that we still need work that attempts to account for the shared lives that grow up between humans and animals. Simply studying the effect of the one on the other is not enough.57 Indeed, their approach to etho-ethnology has much to commend it in accounting for the ways in which humans and other animals live together in hybrid communities. Our aim here, however, is to consider tools that may facilitate a re-balancing of this research agenda, towards the lived experiences of nonhuman animals in these shared, relationally configured communities of life. This is a shift in perspective: nothing more, but also nothing less.

We would hope that none of the challenges considered above are insurmountable and many of the wider shifts we have mentioned in this paper hint at their declining significance. Certainly, the once taboo subject of anthropomorphism is now considered an ethical epistemological virtue amongst many for whom it would once have been anathema. Animal geographers will need to be brave, to continue to improvise and collaborate to fulfill the methodological promise we have offered, but with the wider animal turn in rude health the prospects look good.

Acknowledgements

This paper appears as part of a special edition on methodologies. We would like to thank Wendy Shaw for the invitation to participate that sparked the paper. These ideas were presented at a panel session at the AAG conference in Los Angeles in 2013. We would like to thank Julie Urbanik and Connie Johnston who organ-ized the panel and the other panelists and members of the audience who provided constructive comments.

Funding

Tim Hodgetts PhD research is funded by the ESRC.

Notes

1. C. Philo and C. Wilbert, Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations (London: Routledge, 2000).

2. Other speculative reasons for the relative neglect of animals geographies might include: i) the intra-disciplinary division of human and physical geography. Coupled with the latters focus on plants this has stymied such research; ii) inhospitable funding landscapes; iii) an unhelpful politics in early strands of critical environmental geography that suggested research on animals distracts from or even undermines concerns for marginal people. This resulted in a binary in which research was figured as either for ani-mals or people.

3. D. Lulka, The Residual Humanism of Hybridity: Retaining a Sense of the Earth, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34, 2009, pp. 37893.

4. C. Bear, Being Angelica? Exploring Individual Animal Geographies, Area, 43, 2011, pp. 297304.



5. M. Hird, The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution after Science Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

6. S. Hinchliffe, M. Kearnes, M. Degen and S. Whatmore, Urban Wild Things: A Cosmopolitical Experiment, Environment and Planning D-Society & Space, 23, 2005, pp. 64358; J. Lorimer and S. Whatmore, After the King of Beasts: Samuel Baker and the Embodied Historical Geographies of his Elephant Hunting in Mid-19th Century Ceylon, Journal of Historical Geography, 35, 2009, pp. 66889; C. Bear and S. Eden, Thinking Like a Fish? Engaging with Nonhuman Difference through Recreational Angling, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29, 2011, pp. 33652; H. Lorimer, Herding Memories of Humans and Animals, Environment and Planning D-Society & Space, 24, 2006, pp. 497518.

7. S.E. Kirksey and S. Helmreich, The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography, cultural anthropology, 25, 2010, pp. 54576.

8. For a compelling example see V. Mason and P. Hope, Echoes in the Dark: Technological Encounters with Bats, Journal of Rural Studies, 33, 2014, pp. 10718.

9. L. Head and J. Atchison, Cultural Ecology: Emerging Human-Plant Geographies, Progress in Human Geography, 33, 2009, pp. 23645.

10. H. Lorimer, Forces of Nature, Forms of Life: Calibrating Ethology and Phenomenology, in B. Anderson and P. Harrison (eds), Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography (Ashgate: London, 2010), pp. 5578; M. Barua, Volatile Ecologies: Towards a Material Politics of HumanAnimal Relations, Environment and Planning, onlinefirst, 2014.

11. D. Lestel, F. Brunois and F. Gaunet, Etho-ethnology and Ethno-ethology, Social Science Information, 45, 2006, pp. 15577.

12. J. Mareov, K. Antonn and D. Frynta, We all Appreciate the Same Animals: Cross-Cultural Comparison of Human Aesthetic Preferences for Snake Species in Papua New Guinea and Europe, Ethology, 115, 2009, pp. 297300; K. Powell, G. Roberts and D. Nettle, Eye Images Increase Charitable Donations: Evidence from an Opportunistic Field Experiment in a Supermarket, Ethology, 118, 2012, pp. 1096101.

13. N. Tinbergen, On Aims and Methods of Ethology, Zeitschrift fr Tierpsychologie, 20, 1963, pp. 41033; N. Davies, J. Krebs and S. West, An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

14. M. Taborsky, The Use of Theory in Behavioural Research, Ethology, 114, 2008, pp. 16.15. Lorimer, Forces of Nature, p. 64.16. D. Lulka, Stabilizing the Herd: Fixing the Identity of Nonhumans, Environment and Planning D-Society

& Space, 22, 2004, pp. 43963; H. Buller, One Slash of Light, Then Gone, Etudes rurales, 189, 2012, pp. 13953.

17. D. Papaj, An Introduction to Animal Behaviour: An Integrative Approach, Animal Behaviour, 84, 2012, pp. 127980.

18. P. Bateson, Behavioural Biology: The Past and a Future, Ethology, 118, 2012, p. 216.19. H. Song, Pigeon Trouble: Bestiary Biopolitics in a Deindustrialized America (Philadelphia: University

of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).20. A. Fuentes, Naturalcultural Encounters in Bali: Monkeys, Temples, Tourists, and Ethnoprimatology,

Cultural Anthropology, 25, 2010, pp. 60024. See also E. Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); M. Candea, I Fell in Love with Carlos the Meerkat: Engagement and Detachment in HumanAnimal Relations, American Ethnologist, 37, 2010, pp. 24158.

21. G. Bradshaw, A. Schore, J. Brown, J. Poole and C. Moss, Elephant Breakdown, Nature, 433, 2005, p. 807.

22. See, for example, L. Hopewell and L. Leaver, Evidence of Social Influences on Cache-Making by Grey Squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis), Ethology, 114, 2008, pp. 10618; M. Heithaus, L. Dill, G. Marshall and B. Buhleier, Habitat Use and Foraging Behavior of Tiger Sharks (Galeocerdo cuvier) in a Seagrass Ecosystem, Marine Biology, 140, 2002, pp. 23748.

23. B. Garrett, Videographic Geographies: Using Digital Video for Geographic Research, Progress in Human Geography, 35, 2011, pp. 52141.



24. J. Lorimer, Moving Image Methodologies for More-Than-Human Geographies, cultural geographies, 17, 2010, pp. 23758; K. Brown and R. Dilley, Ways of Knowing for Response-ability in More-Than-Human Encounters: The Role of Anticipatory Knowledges in Outdoor Access with Dogs, Area, 44, 2012, pp. 3745.

25. L. Gygax, G. Neisen and B. Wechsler, Socio-Spatial Relationships in Dairy Cows, Ethology, 116, 2010, pp. 1023. For a comaprative example amongst free ranging animals see E. Normand and C. Boesch, Sophisticated Euclidean Maps in Forest Chimpanzees, Animal Behaviour, 77, 2009, pp. 1195201.

26. M. Cantor, L. Wedekin, P. Guimares, F. Daura-Jorge, M. Rossi-Santos and P. Simes-Lopes, Disentangling Social Networks from Spatiotemporal Dynamics: The Temporal Structure of a Dolphin Society, Animal Behaviour, 84, 2012, pp. 64151; H. Hansen, D. McDonald, P. Groves, J. Maier and M. Ben-David, Social Networks and the Formation and Maintenance of River Otter Groups, Ethology, 115, 2009, pp. 38496.

27. B. da Costa, Pigeonblog, 2006, (1 May 2013); see also Natalie Jeremijenkos project using feral robotic dogs to monitor environmental pollution (1 May 2013).

28. R. Francis and M. Chadwick, What Makes a Species Synurbic?, Applied Geography, 32, 2012, pp. 51421.

29. S. Hinchliffe and N. Bingham, Securing Life: The Emerging Practices of Biosecurity, Environment and Planning A, 40, 2008, pp. 153451; H. Buller, Safe from the Wolf: Biosecurity, Biodiversity, and Competing Philosophies of Nature, Environment and Planning A, 40, 2008, pp. 158397.

30. S. Townsend and M. Manser, Functionally Referential Communication in Mammals: The Past, Present and the Future, Ethology, 119, 2013, p. 1.

31. A. Taylor, D. Reby and K. McComb, Context-Related Variation in the Vocal Growling Behaviour of the Domestic Dog (Canis familiaris), Ethology, 115, 2009, pp. 90515.

32. L. Harrington, A. Harrington and D. Macdonald, The Smell of New Competitors: The Response of American Mink (Mustela vison) to the Odours of Otter (Lutra lutra) and Polecat (M. putorius), Ethology, 115, 2009, pp. 4218. Communication within the chemical ecologies that link plants and insects is the-orized in an ecological vein in C. Hustak and N. Myers, Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters, differences, 23, 2012, pp. 74118.

33. D. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); A. Game, Riding: Embodying the Centaur, Body & Society, 7, 2001, pp. 112; Lorimer, Herding Memories; G. Davies, Caring for the Multiple and the Multitude: Assembling Animal Welfare and Enabling Ethical Critique, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30, 2012, pp. 62338; J. Lorimer, Touching Environmentalisms: The Place of Touch in the Fraught Biogeographies of Elephant Care, in M. Dodge and M. Patterson (eds), Touching Space, Placing Touch (Ashgate: Farnham, 2012), pp. 16990; S. Eden and C. Bear, Reading the River through Watercraft: Environmental Engagement through Knowledge and Practice in Freshwater Angling, cultural geographies, 18, 2011, pp. 297314.

34. F. Ciani, S. DallOlio, R. Stanyon and E. Palagi, Social Tolerance and Adult Play in Macaque Societies: A Comparison with Different Human Cultures, Animal Behaviour, 84, 2012, pp. 131322.

35. Haraway, When Species Meet.36. The wider role of the Artist | Animal is discussed by Steve Baker is his recent book with this title:

S. Baker, Artist | Animal (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). See also a special edition of the journal Antennae entitled Interspecies (Issue 13 Summer 2010).

37. J. Bueys, I Like America and America Likes Me (1974).38. See .39. C. Driessen, M. Bracke and M. Copier, Designing a Computer Game for Pigs to Explore and Redefine

the Interface between Animal Welfare, Science and Ethics, in C. Casabona, L. San Epifianio and A. Cirin (eds). Global Food Security: Ethical and Legal Challenges (Wageningen: Wageningen Academic Publishers, 2010), pp. 3238.

40. J-M. Normand, M. Sanchez-Vives, C. Waechter, E. Giannopoulos, B. Grosswindhager, B. Spanlang, C. Guger, G. Klinker, M. Srinivasan and M. Slater, Beaming into the Rat World: Enabling Real-Time Interaction Between Rat and Human Each at Their Own Scale, PLoS ONE, 7, 2012, e48331.



41. N. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); M. Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008); L. Holloway, C. Morris, B. Gilna and D. Gibbs, Biopower, Genetics and Livestock Breeding: (Re)constituting Animal Populations and Heterogeneous Biosocial Collectivities, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34, 2009, pp. 394407.

42. J. Avise, Phylogeography: The History and Formation of Species (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 3.

43. J. Avise, Phylogeography: Retrospect and Prospect, Journal of Biogeography, 36, 2009, p. 3.44. J. Lorimer, Elephants as Companion Species: The Lively Biogeographies of Asian Elephant Conservation

in Sri Lanka, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35, 2010, pp. 491506.45. See, for example, L. Daln, E. Fuglei, P. Hersteinsson, C. Kapel, J. Roth, G. Samelius, M. Tannerfeldt,

A. Angerbjrn, Population History and Genetic Structure of a Circumpolar Species: The Arctic Fox, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 84, 2005, pp. 7989.

46. J. Handelsman, Metagenomics: Application of Genomics to Uncultured Microorganisms, Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, 68, 2004, pp. 66985.

47. P. Turnbaugh, R. Ley, M. Hamady, C. Fraser-Liggett, R. Knight and J. Gordon, The Human Microbiome Project, Nature, 449, 2007, pp. 80410.

48. The Human Microbiome Project Consortium, Structure, Function and Diversity of the Healthy Human Microbiome, Nature, 486, 2012, pp. 20714.

49. T. Yatsunenko, F. Rey, M. Manary, I. Trehan, M. Dominguez-Bello, M. Contreras, M. Magris, G. Hidalgo, R. Baldassano, A. Anokhin, A. Heath, B. Warner, J. Reeder, J. Kuczynski, J. Caporaso, C. Lozupone, C. Lauber, J. Clemente, D. Knights, R. Knight and J. Gordon, Human Gut Microbiome Viewed Across Age and Geography, Nature, 486, 2012, pp. 2227.

50. M. Blaser and S. Falkow, What Are the Consequences of the Disappearing Human Microbiota?, Nature Reviews Microbiology, 7, 2009, pp. 88794.

51. H. Paxson, Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States, Cultural Anthropology, 23, 2008, pp. 1547.

52. See, for example, the belly button biodiversity, and human cheese projects, .

53. M. Velasquez-Manoff, An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases (New York: Scribner, 2012).

54. Haraway, When Species Meet, p. 205.55. S. Hinchliffe, Geographies of Nature: Societies, Environments, Ecologies (London: SAGE, 2007).56. Haraway, When Species Meet; Hinchliffe et al., Urban Wild Things.57. Lestel et al., Etho-ethnology, p. 156.

Author biographies

Timothy Hodgetts is a PhD student in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. His research explores contemporary cultures of wildlife conservation, with a particular focus on ter-restrial mammals in England and Wales.

Jamie Lorimer is a University Lecturer in the School of Geogrpahy and the Environment at the University of Oxford. He is also a tutorial fellow at Hertford College. His recent research has explored the emergence of rewilding as a new mode of wildlife conservation.


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