Animal geographies III: Species relations of power

I Introduction

What specific animal lives feature in animal geographies scholarship? Within what multispecies hierarchical networks are they enmeshed? What insights do animal geographers bring to illuminating species relations of power? To answer these questions, I invoke difference and inequality as central tenets of animal geographies to recognize how power relations operate to shape opportunities and constraints between and within nonhuman animal groups. This requires moving beyond the well-traversed dichotomy of ‘human vs. animal’ into explorations of how animals themselves are positioned relative to other animals. Such positioning (i.e. ‘animal vs. animal’) emerges through the inherent characteristics and behaviours of particular animals paired with their relational value, utility, and roles in human societies. Ultimately such species relations reflect the relative power held by various animal groups, as expressed in their various circumstances and experiences and mediated through human-animal dynamics. The notion of power highlighted in this report is that which is carried through into animal-animal positionalities and relations (i.e. between and within species) via their differential enmeshment in human systems of recognition, ordering, and production.

In my own work, I have drawn inspiration from Tuan’s (1984) notion that animals be viewed as a social group – defined through human systems of thought and ordering – bound up in a relationship with humans, generating conflicting power dynamics. I have further disaggregated the human vs. animal relationship to examine the ways in which various species – as distinct social groups – connect to broader animal-based networks and relations. To this end, focusing on chickens (Hovorka, 2012) and donkeys (Geiger and Hovorka, 2015) in Botswana reveals that their lives are rooted in their socio-cultural, politico-economical, spatial, and ecological positionality relative to cattle. Inherent and relational differences between these animal social groups are expressed hierarchically with chickens and donkeys often viewed by humans as ‘not cattle’ and thus ‘lesser than’. As a result, it may be argued that cattle live better lives than those of chickens or donkeys.

Dynamics among domesticated animals in Botswana must also be understood in terms of relations with wild animals. For example, depredation of cattle by predators such as African wild dogs (Fraser-Celin et al., 2017) reflects biologically-rooted dominance of one species over another (predator vs. prey) yet also reflects human privileging of one species realm over another (domesticated vs. wild) and one socio-economic realm over another (agriculture vs. conservation). Further, these various animal social groups are wrapped up with the positionality of various human social groups (here via gender, class, and race). I thus extend Tuan’s notion such that specific animal social groups are bound up in relationships with human social groups, as well as with other animal social groups, in ways that produce and reproduce species-based differences and inequalities.

Recognizing the breadth and complexity of species-based power relations is important as a means of recognizing that we live in a multispecies world. It is also important as a means of de-centring the human in theory and practice. Certainly we must acknowledge human power and control in shaping animal positionality within animal networks and hierarchies. At the same time, we must recognize that animals exert agency through their inherent charisma and relational engagements with various human and animal social groups. Here then humans and all-kinds-of-animals are inextricably linked within multifaceted, tentacular practices (see Haraway, 2016). Animal geographies offers scholarly tools through which to explore, unpack, and interrogate such multispecies hierarchical networks. The result is a holistic, in-depth view of species-based relations of power.

I begin this report with a brief overview of scholarship of those, including more-than-human geographers, exploring animal networks or webs of relations through multispecies ethnographies. I continue by highlighting scholarship of those animal geographers focusing specifically on animal hierarchies or relations of power among animal social groups. I conclude by identifying avenues for animal geographies to explore further the differences and inequalities both between and within nonhuman animal social groups so as to articulate more firmly species relations of power. This progress report serves as the final instalment of my trilogy highlighting the heterogeneity of animal geographies perspectives and approaches, and opportunities for building upon the robust scholarship on human-animal relations already in existence (also see Hovorka, 2016, 2017).

II Animal networks

Animal lives are shaped by the webs of relations of which they are a part. Importantly, these networks are comprised of multiple organisms – microbes, plants, animals, humans – entangled and co-evolving as independent yet thoroughly connected beings. Networks are further imbued with the particularities arising from various spatial contexts, be they material and/or discursive iterations of political, economic, social, cultural, and technological dynamics. Recognizing animals themselves as emergent through these widely-cast, beyond-only-human relations is a necessary step towards in-depth explorations of how differential animal circumstances and experiences are produced and reproduced.

Multispecies ethnographies have emerged from anthropology and cognate fields, including more-than-human geographies, to acknowledge the interconnectedness, agency, and inseparability of human and nonhuman life forms (Locke and Muenster, 2015). Grounded in posthumanism, and seeking empirical exploration rather than theoretical speculation (Smart, 2014), they challenge humanist epistemology and replace anthropocentric, dualist ontologies (i.e. nature/culture, human/nonhuman, subject/object) with relational perspectives. Initial iterations pushing beyond-the-human engage actor network perspectives, and consider ways in which nonhuman lives may be explored through more embodied and embedded means (e.g. Despret, 2013; Fuentes, and Kohn 2012; Ingold, 2013; Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010; Murdoch, 1997). Multispecies ethnographies contend that the entanglements between human and nonhuman life forms must be integrated theoretically into accounts of existence (Locke and Muenster, 2015). Importantly, this ethnographic research and writing is ‘attuned to life’s emergence within a shifting assemblage of agentive beings’ via relations of multiple organisms, including plants, viruses, humans and nonhuman animals (Ogden et al., 2013: 6). More-than-human geographers contribute to this body of scholarship by offering spatial and material aspects of natureculture hybrids, and highlighting nonhuman agency in the production of environmental relations (e.g. Bennett, 2010; Lorimer, 2012; Lulka, 2009; Panelli, 2010; Whatmore, 2002, 2006).

Multispecies ethnographies illuminate rich relational narratives focused on the intersection of humans with one particular nonhuman animal. Notable works include that on human-hyena relations in Ethiopia (Baynes-Rock, 2015), human-alligator relations in the Florida Everglades (Ogden, 2011), human-dingo relations in Australia (Rose, 2011), human-octopus relations in a California aquarium (Bear, 2011), human-macaque relations in Bali (Fuentes, 2010), and human-elephant relations in Asia (Locke, 2013). Multispecies ethnographies also attend more specifically to the webs of relations between humans and multiple nonhuman others with whom they share a landscape, habitat or ecosystem (Locke and Muenster, 2015). Empirical explorations highlight relational webs in marine contexts reflecting sea assemblages of scallops, dolphins, wind, water, fishing technologies, policymakers, and fishermen (Bear, 2013) or tuna-scallop-human connections (Probyn, 2014); in fungal contexts reflecting mycorrhizal relations between matsutake mushrooms and host trees (Choy et al., 2009) or fungi, trees, people, nematodes, beetles and weather (Faier, 2011); and in microbial contexts with human-animal-bacterial/viral entities mingling and evolving together (Greenhough, 2012; Lowe, 2010). More-than-human geographies contribute insightful assemblage-based case studies, including Sundberg’s (2011) examination of cats, desert thornscrub, and border security personnel in the southwestern USA and Lorimer’s (2010) exploration of bacteria and viruses linking elephants and humans in Sri Lanka. Del Casino (2016) reviews the relations between bugs (insects, viruses, bacteria, parasites) and humans via management strategies, molecular interventions, and biosocial relations. These case studies extend studies of the nonhuman and bring micro-organisms, plants, and technologies into the study of human-animal relations (Smart and Smart, 2012). Ontologically and epistemologically, they centre nonhuman entities, emphasize relational encounters between humans and nonhumans, and investigate the more-than-human world in embodied and embedded ways.

III Animal hierarchies

This emergent and burgeoning scholarship on multispecies networks offers an opportunity to recognize ‘relational webs shot through with power’ (Rocheleau and Roth, 2007: 434) and to explore fully the differential and inequitable circumstances and experiences of nonhuman animals. While we and others have always been networked (Haraway, 1991), we and others have also always been ordered. Hierarchies of position and connectivity – rather than a ‘flat’ topology – produce the haves and have-nots of relational webs. Thus networks must incorporate a wide range of species relationships grounded in power alongside, power from beneath, and power in-spite-of (Rocheleau and Roth, 2007). Entrenched hierarchies are a defining feature of not only animal relations with humans but also of animal relations with other animals in and of themselves, and as mediated through human-animal relations.

A hierarchical model of animals has governed western thought since Aristotle’s notion that nature is ordered on a vertical scale extending from lifeless things to human beings (Kalof and Fitzgerald, 2007). The History of Animals proposes a ‘great chain of being’ (scala naturae) reflecting the existence of fixed categories of species with humans at the top and insects at the bottom (Aristotle 1837 cited in Kalof and Fitzgerald, 2007). Hierarchical order here is determined by natural abilities. Only humans and animals are capable of conscious experience, thus plants are deemed inferior and serve the needs of humans and animals; only humans are capable of rational thought while animals rely on instinct, so animals are deemed inferior and serve the needs of humans. While scholars have critiqued this biologically-determined hierarchical view on logical, moral and scientific grounds, it has long been used to justify discounting the interests of animals (Kalof and Fitzgerald, 2007).

Key contemporary works in animal studies scholarship and animal geographies explicitly articulate ideas of hierarchies. Sociologists Arnold Arluke and Clinton Sanders (1996) conceptualize animal hierarchies through their ‘sociozoologic scale’, which ranks species according to how well they ‘fit in’ and play the roles they are expected to play in human society. They argue that human societies rank people and animals on a ladder of worth; how well animals seem to know their place and stay in it will determine their position on the social ladder. Systems of social control perpetuate the rankings whereby those who land at the bottom can be justifiably exploited and oppressed while those at the top of are seen as naturally privileged. On the sociozoological scale, humans are at the top (although different groups of humans are differentially ranked) followed by the ‘best animals’ including pets (easily tamed, eager to learn, following human ways) and those animal in labs or on farms (who may not desire their instrumental role but can do little about it). ‘Bad animals’ are ranked lower on the ladder: these animals may be ‘freaks’ that confuse their place, ‘vermin’ that stray from their place, or ‘demons’ that reject their place. Since these creatures are perceived as both symbolic and real threats to the social order, they may be killed. The sociozoological scale is a type of story that humans – with the help of animals – tell themselves and each other about the meaning of place in modern societies (Arluke and Sanders, 1996).

Animal geographers exploring animal hierarchies offer insights into the nuances of species-based rankings. They detail specifically how animal positionalities are produced and reproduced through biological and social order. Irus Braverman (2017), for example, coins and invokes a ‘zoometric scale’ to compare the relative worth of living entities beyond the broadly-pitched human vs. animal divide. Zoometrics invites careful account of how differentiation and hierarchization along human-animal lines measure value in specific situations; this biopolitical ranking illuminates the relative valorisation among humans and among animals, as well as the infiltrations across these two categories. Braverman’s case study of Gaza exposes the nuanced, multispecies interplay between various humans and between various animals. Animal hierarchies in this case rank companion animals before zoo animals before farm animals; more specifically, hierarchies classify dogs as more worthy than insects and trees, zebras as more worthy than donkeys, and lions as more worthy than chickens. Braverman goes on to illustrate how zoometrics works through various institutions (e.g. prisons, hospitals, homes), spatial arrangements (e.g. nature reserves, cities, bodies), and events (e.g. war, peace, the Anthropocene, the dinner table) to produce and reproduce ‘biopolitical worthiness’ that occurs along and within the animal-human divide.

Jamie Lorimer (2007), as another example, engages the notion of nonhuman charisma to account for the differential agency of species, as well as to develop an appreciation of nonhuman difference. Charisma helps explain how and why some animals appeal to humans while other animals do not, as embedded within and mobilized through broader assemblages of environmental politics, knowledge, and practice. Said differently, charisma helps explain how species-based hierarchical webs produce and reproduce animal differences and inequalities as mediated by human-animal relations. Lorimer offers a three-part typology of nonhuman charisma as both essential property and relational dynamic. First, ecological charisma highlights animal behaviours and properties that allows animals’ ready identification and differentiation from other animals by humans. The ecological affordances of different species intersect more or less easily with those humans in a particular context. Second, aesthetic charisma highlights how distinguishing behaviours or properties of an animal trigger particular emotions or interpretations when encountered (in)directly by humans. Third, corporeal charisma highlights emotions or interpretations stimulated by different animals in their practical interactions with humans. Ultimately, charisma works to differentiate one animal social group from another according to human hierarchical rankings of nonhuman value, utility, and aesthetic. It illuminates how animal positionality is produced within and through privileging (or not) of animals’ innate characteristics and relational qualities with both material and discursive impacts on animal lives.

IV Animal difference and inequality

Drawing attention to animal networks and hierarchies brings us to issues of animal positionality, in particular expressions of species-based difference and inequality. Animal lives are shaped by their power relative to other animals, as enmeshed with human relations and orderings in hierarchical networks. Thus human-animal relations necessarily shape the haves and have-nots of animal social groups (i.e. animal-animal relations). Ultimately, animal differences and inequalities are central to understanding and explaining how multispecies hierarchical networks operate, conditioning the lives of animals and the humans associated with them.

Animal geographers have long drawn attention to how different animals have access to and interact with different humans and spatial contexts. They have not investigated how these dynamics occur in relation to other animals to produce and reproduce species-based differences and inequalities. They have more tacitly explored species relations of power, revealing that being a particular animal matters in terms of what relationships you have with particular humans, what opportunities and constraints are offered through such relations, and how these differences and inequalities are (re)produced relative to the positionality of other animals. Indeed animal geographers have more to offer in developing a broader theoretical articulation of species relations of power that stretches beyond the human (all humans) vs. animal (all animals) dichotomy into multispecies webs of relations that are hierarchically ordered and illuminate distinctions between various animal social groups (as they do various human social groups). This is particularly the case given animal geographies entry into realms of animal agency, subjectivity and worldviews. While the previous two sections demonstrate animal geographers’ contributions to animal networks and animal hierarchies, here I highlight two areas that offer springboards into illuminating animal differences and inequalities more explicitly and fully.

First, animal geographers draw attention to between-species differences and inequalities. Case studies in this vein tend to feature direct conflict between animal social groups, especially in terms of domesticated versus wild animals who transgress one another’s allocated spaces or cause friction among human communities. For example, Alexander and Quinn (2011) explore documented urban coyote attacks on dogs and cats in Canada and note food conditioning, public education, and human behaviour modifications as a means of facilitating coexistence among species. Here human preferences for and care of companion animals come into direct conflict with free-roaming animals. Jampel (2016) considers the expansion of cattle raising (dairy production) in the context of not only shifting livelihood opportunities for smallholder farmers in the Ecuadorian Andes, but also in light of cattle vulnerabilities to bear attacks in the region. Here human-bear conflict is in essence cattle-bear conflict as mediated by humans. Vaccaro and Beltran (2009) detail government privileging of recently reintroduced or regenerated wild animals, expressed in terms of conflict with domesticated animals on ranches in the Pyrenees. Here animals privileged by one human social group differ from those of other social groups (i.e. ranchers/domesticated animals, government/wild animals). Finally, Dempsey (2010) recounts how the grizzly bear was selected as a focal species in British Columbia based on its biological positionality as an indicator of broader ecosystem health; human privileging of grizzly bears brings with it policies and resources that other species do not directly receive (although they may benefit indirectly). These studies demonstrate how some animals are valued more than others as expressed through different and often inequitable attention, resources, and policies focused on particular animals’ rights, needs, and wellbeing. They point to privileging and othering of species in conflict scenarios albeit while focusing on human-wildlife conflict rather than conflict between domesticated animals and wild animals in and of themselves as mediated through human relations.

Second, animal geographers draw attention to within-species differences and inequalities. In other words, not all individuals within an animal social group are valued the same, have access to the same opportunities, or are positioned equally relative to their peers. Birke (2003) explores how rats of all kinds are entwined with human history, yet distinct rat groupings have emerged that are privileged and othered according to their spatial context, roles, and perceived value to humans. Specifically, ‘wild rats’, believed to carry filth and disease while residing in gutters, have been transformed by humans into ‘lab rats’, believed to be a valuable scientific apparatus (through standardized breeding, isolation and handling protocols). What it means to be a ‘rat’ in one context (which offers particular opportunities and constraints for rat lives) is vastly different from being a ‘rat’ in another context. Gillespie (2014) considers how being a dairy cow differs vastly from being a dairy bull in industrial agriculture, and how these gendered differences and inequalities are maintained and reproduced to ensure efficient, profit-driven production as part of the global political economy. The lives of dairy cows involve mundane, routinized forms of violence in artificial insemination rooms, maternity pens, milking stalls, slaughter houses, and auctions; the lives of male calves feature in small crates for veal production while select dairy bulls feature in breeding facilities for their reproductive capacity. Again then, what it means to be a dairy animal differs according to gender, which in turn impacts the spaces they access, the roles they play, the value they have, and their health and wellbeing. Finally, Whatmore and Thorne (2000) offer insights on how being a particular animal does not necessarily mean that all individuals take on the same form and modalities. They explore different kinds of elephants and the multiple ways in which they are on the move and act within global wildlife conservation realms, noting that elephants appear as virtual bodies circulating in computer programs and internet sites as digitized data or portraits, as well as real situated bodies in place that may be encountered in zoo enclosures or game reserves. Here then animal differences come not necessarily as a function of human labelling or social dynamics, but also as a function of the medium (numbers, profiles, bodies) that animals within a particular species may be positioned through. All of these examples express animal difference ultimately in terms of animal inequalities (e.g. livestock lesser than wild animals, lab rats rather than wild rats, bulls rather than cows, elephant statistics compared to live bodies). They ultimately unpack the category ‘animal’ and offer ways to disaggregate the lives of animals in meaningful and significant ways.

V Conclusion

We live in a multispecies world that is networked and hierarchical, generating different and inequitable relations, circumstances, and experiences among all those involved. Humans constantly make decisions based on which animal matters more relative to another animal in a particular context. At the same time, charisma, social order, and relational webs present animals to humans in particular ways that are interpreted through human-based systems of recognition, ordering, and production. This has real impacts for animals in and of themselves. More often than not, when animal geographers highlight interspecies relations or multispecies engagements, we rarely talk about more than one animal (in relation to humans). We can push further in terms of exploring animal lives within multispecies hierarchical networks and the implications for individual animals or animal groups. This will assist animal geographers to interrogate and challenge the dominant social orders that maintain human-animal and animal-animal hierarchies, and draw much needed attention to the differential and inequitable lives of animals. Finally, explorations into multispecies hierarchical networks raise questions about the possibility of disentangling animal geographies from the human given that animal-animal relations are mediated through the lives of humans. How might we push further our scholarship ontologically and epistemologically so that we can fully know, understand, and appreciate the lives of animals?