Partial Encounters: Exploring More-Than-Human Entanglements in Berlin’s Animal Enclosures

First Category: Interactive Landscapes for Social Integration

The first group of animal enclosures comprises locations offering a closer experience with animals. Some of those scenarios attempt to recreate a rural living experience in the middle of the city. In Germany, the locations inside this group can often be identified under the labels Bauernhöfe (urban farms), Kinderbauernhöfe (children’s urban farms), and Tierhöfe (animal yards). Usually, their landscape includes barns and pens with goats, ponies, sheep, and, eventually, poultry walking around. Some playgrounds in Berlin called Abenteuerspielplätze (adventure playgrounds) also keep animals in captivity for people to interact with.

A particularity of this first improvised group is the type of human–animal engagement they promote: The places attempt to include their visitors, particularly kids, in different farmstead working routines by offering programs designed for schools, childcare centers, and families. Visitors can pet the animals as part of pedagogical activities focused on social integration and child and youth personal growth. They can also participate as volunteers taking care of them and their stables. Additionally, on special occasions, particularly on weekends, children are allowed to ride—always supervised by animal-keepers—those animals that can be ridden.

Talking about the Children’s Urban Farm in Görlitzer Park, it can be conceived as an interactive landscape with stables and barns that fosters an agrarian-like experience in an urban context by bringing people closer to domesticated and farmed animals through immersive participation. In that location, and under the direct surveillance of their parents and enclosure workers, children are eventually allowed to pet and feed—only with the food they can buy on the farm— certain animals like ducks and goats. Additionally, Saturdays at the Kinderbauernhof are exclusively for kids (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Kinderbauernhof in Görlitzer Park.

Following an animal welfarist approach (Hill and Broom 2009; Norton et al. 1995) that advocates a more humane treatment for animals involved in human productive activities, the practices above point out a second characteristic of those urban farm-like locations: The usage of animals as learning and entertainment tools. Despite animal welfare being a disputed term (Broom 2011), Kagan, Carter, and Allard (2015, S2) link this concept to practical caring actions related to “what is provided to animals [in terms of] access to food, water, and shelter, as well as to veterinary care.”

Although animal welfare advocacy is not written anywhere on the enclosures’ websites and is also not a discourse enclosure workers repeat, it certainly can be appreciated with different shades in the daily interactions of animals and people—keepers and visitors—and through how the enclosures are designed. As Mancini (2017, 59) has noticed, welfare is tied to two conditions that must be satisfied simultaneously: “That an animal is healthy and that they have what they want.” What an animal wants, according to Mancini (2017, 60), is the individual fulfillment of those two “interdependent conditions or requirements.”

In other words, captivity is not perceived as wrong if the captive animals are in good health, have constant access to food, and have their needs met. For example, animals who enjoy running should have enough space in their barns to move around. However, although this article does not align with an animal welfare perspective, it recognizes its importance as an analytical resource to reflect on the concept that visitors and animal enclosures have of farmed animals. After introducing the second category of animal enclosures, this issue of visitors’ perceptions of captivity and animal enclosures will be expanded.

Second Category: Living Exhibitions for Leisure and Education

Also structured under a welfarist perspective, the second group of animal enclosures is made of locations with more generic designations: Wildtiergehege (wildlife enclosures), Tierparks (Animal parks), and the one inspiring the broad concept that arranges all those urban spaces around this work: Tiergehege (Animal enclosures). What maintains those places together as an improvised collective is that within their domains, the human–animal interactions are more distant, mainly limited to people observing the animals. Despite being locations open to human visitors, captive animals are regularly kept in spaces where people cannot touch or ride them.

In the Tierpark Neukölln, distance is achieved by granting some animals more space in their enclosures and/or using a more restrictive enclosing infrastructure for human–animal physical contact. For example, the yard where donkeys, ponies, and eventually sheep spend time is surrounded by a double fence that limits their possible interaction with humans. There is just one small spot where people can be closer to the animals to possibly touch them. That place is in between the two fences. However, achieving any interaction is sometimes impossible due to the size of the stable and the few animals outside simultaneously, usually two or three (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Tierpark Neukölln.

Additionally, the condition of just observing animals is also linked to a double dynamic of hiding and showing. On the one hand, there is this situation where animals decide not to be in the open areas of their exhibitions but remain inside their cages. Also, as it continually happens, despite being outside, the animals are not interested in being petted or even staying near humans. Although some visitors try to attract them near to the fences by making noises, using sticks, or offering food —even when that is prohibited—nobody forces the animals to be near people.

On the other hand, human-managerial logic determines what species are displayed and which should stay in the shadows. In the Tierpark, some species are not exhibited regularly, and they can be appreciated only on special occasions: reptiles in birthday celebrations, for example. Another particularity of the Tierpark Neukölln that may help to understand the distance and type of relation between most animals and visitors is that since 2015, the location has centered its efforts on becoming an Ark park. It means to turn itself into an institution that advocates for the conservation of and education about endangered farmed breeds such as the German saddle pig (Deutsches Sattelschwein), the linen goose (Leinegans), or the Vorwerk chicken (Vorwerkhuhn).

Despite the structural and managerial particularities of each group of animal enclosures, mainly introduced through the descriptions of the Children’s Urban Farm in Görlitzer Park and the Tierpark Neukölln, in practice, each of those locations has its own operative logic. That logic is usually a combination of the two macro-categories but with different degrees of intensity in terms of captivity represented in the daily life of individual species. There are two ways of observing this phenomenon.

The first is about paying attention to the specific locations where those species live: their barns, stables, and cages. The following section will address that matter. The second way explores the encounters between animals and visitors in the enclosures, which is the main topic of this study. So, now that the animal enclosures have been unpacked, a spatial and operational “grammar of difference” (Rovisco 2010) can be appreciated. Specifically, it may be discovered by paying attention to the design, size, and organization of any scenario conceived to let people watch and pet animals.

The last subtitle of this section attempts to describe Berlin’s animal enclosures fully. It introduces one of their most crucial and notorious features: the captive keeping of animals. Additionally, it problematizes the approach to animal welfare regarding the conditions and ethical justifications for keeping farmed animals in captivity and visitors’ perceptions of animal captivity.

Animal Welfare and Visitor’s Perceptions of Animal Captivity

As previously stated, urban animal enclosures differ from traditional zoological gardens. The fact that animal enclosures keep domesticated animals rather than wild or exotic species is essential when discussing their ontology and role as urban scenarios for more-than-human exchange. However, it gives the impression that those locations have been discarded and ignored by contemporary discussions on the ethics behind animal captivity. There are two reasons why.

On the one hand, perhaps because those locations are not globally spread, there is a lack of academic studies from social sciences on animal enclosures as urban scenarios for multispecies exchange. The academic efforts to study animal captivity and human domination over other beings in the city have been focused on other spaces such as zoos, slaughterhouses, and circuses (Arcari et al. 2021; Böhm and Ullrich 2019; Todd and Hynes 2017; Yates 2009) or different types of beings: coyotes (Couturier 2013), elephants (Barua 2014), and dogs (Włodarczyk 2021).

On the other hand, as this subtitle expects to problematize, there is the assumption—as well as the resignation—that domesticated farmed animals belong to productive farms or scenarios like the ones this paper is about, and because of that, we should just talk about improving animals’ lives in captivity. Pierce and Bekoff (2018, 43) criticize animal welfare approaches in the context of animals in zoos because “instead of talking about freedom and captivity [they] seek to improve the lives of animals [. . .] by reducing sources of stress [. . .] and by adding ‘enrichments’ such as plastic toys or food puzzles to animals’ cages.”

According to them, rather than talking about enlightening animal conditions, a sort of “humane-washing” procedure (Pierce and Bekoff 2018, 43), we should address captivity as the real problem captive animals face. Notwithstanding, once this is translated to the context of urban animal enclosures, that ethical position starts to crack. The reason, however, is not theoretical but practical. It means nothing is wrong with discussing and advocating for other beings’ freedom—at the opposite—but where should a domesticated animal be? For Jones (2014, 92), a farmed animal would not survive independently, so there are only two options: “death or captivity.”

A similar position is shared around the visitors of the Tierpark and the Kinderbauernhof. As part of a statistical study on visitors’ perceptions regarding the conditions in which animals are kept in captivity, sixty individuals ranging from eight to fifty-two years old were interviewed. ⁴ The exercise was conducted on May 28th and June 4th, 2023, by approaching 15 people daily in each location. ⁵ Among other questions, visitors were asked where they think the animals in the urban enclosures should be. The possible answers were (1) in the enclosure, (2) in traditional farms, (3) in the countryside or their places of origin, or (4) in a different location they should specify.

At the Kinderbauernhof, 67% of the surveyed agreed that the children’s farm was the best place for the animals. A total of 10% thought the animals would be better on traditional farms, and 23% considered they should be either in their places of origin or in the countryside. At the Tierpark, 50% of the people believed animals should stay there, 13% agreed to put them on farms, and 37% concluded animals must be in the countryside or the places they came from. That strong support for animal enclosures is linked to the positive visitors’ perceptions of captive animals’ environments.

Rather than being conceived as a qualitative activity based on sorting animals’ captivity into good and bad degrees of imprisonment and to know what people think about the conditions of animals in the urban enclosures, visitors were asked to rate four aspects of animals’ daily lives. The two graphs below show the results per location, ranging from one to five. The aspects studied were mobility, space, amenities, and freedom (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Visitor’s Perceptions of Animal Captivit.

However, can captivity be measured? This is a controversial topic, but it can indeed be approached that way. Notwithstanding, it does not have to be done in terms of reference; it means cataloging and quantifying elements and situations. Instead, it may be achieved by paying attention to how captivity is “handled in practice” (Mol 2002, 5). The following section proposes an exercise based on attentiveness, exploring how captivity can be materialized.

Incompleteness

It is relevant to say that partial and situated descriptions offer a strongly bounded epistemological path shaped by meticulous attention to the particular. Although this approach is a central methodological movement for elaborating the (un)ethical geography proposed for this section, and as a first downside, what also makes this project incomplete are the animals that will not be included in this exercise.

Perhaps the main reason for discarding some animals and privileging others was the impossibility of studying their encounters and interactions with humans. For example, while doing fieldwork, the sheep (Waldschaf) in the Tierpark Neukölln were nowhere to be seen. Although the animals remained inside their stalls most of the time, eventually, one could hear them and read about their behavior and geographical distribution in some informative signs, but no further interaction was possible.

Another reason for excluding some animals from this work, like lamas in the Tierpark or ponies in the Kinderbaernhof, is tied to a methodological decision similar to what Krause (2021, 2) has proposed as “model cases.” Translating the idea of “model organisms” from biology into the social sciences, Krause suggests an epistemological movement of prioritizing the study of certain places, elements, and situations over others.

That preference is based on the possibility the first ones have to help analysts follow more accurate patterns and structures to understand better “more general categories in disproportionate ways” (Krause 2021). Following that proposal, the incompleteness shaping the topological descriptions below is also based on selecting certain animals based on two criteria: (1) Animals were located in scenarios where the levels of captivity were more evident or accessible to see, and (2) their encounters with people were regular or, at least, that human visitors were constantly trying to get some type of interaction or response from them.

Reductionism

Another argument for caring about how captivity is reproduced differently in the spaces where the animals live is to attempt to overcome what Jones (2000, 268) has pointed out: “animals are often seen as part of a collective but rarely as individuals.” Even so, the idea of individualizing animals as singularities, at least in the context of this work, is problematic not only operatively but also analytically speaking. The reason is that individualization can tend to be reductionist due to its lack of “consideration of the generative social and environmental context” (Jones 2000) of the captive animals.

It happened during the first stages of my fieldwork. It was perhaps the lack of a critical perspective or maybe the romanticization of that kind of places full of kids, families, and animals, but my initial observations were focused on two settings: (1) how particular captive animals were serving as ambassadors (Packer and Ballantyne 2010; Spooner et al. 2021), as teaching devices, to educate urban children about species and environments kids did not have access in their daily lives. (2) The moments where there was direct contact between humans and nonhumans. It means when a person touches, pets, or even feeds an animal. The rest of the situations were not considered relevant or interesting enough.

However, as the fieldwork passed, the perception regarding those animals and locations was also transformed in multiple ways. That change was achieved through a series of comparison exercises, this time paying attention to the differences and similarities between the farmed animals living in urban enclosures and those located in rural and urban productive scenarios. On the one side, as Buller (2013, 160) has argued, traditionally, farmed animals in productive rural and urban environments are mechanistically reduced “to a component within a multitudinous productive unit, to ‘meat on legs’, to ‘egg-layer’ to ‘walking bacon’” or perceived as labor force as well.

Meanwhile, in urban animal enclosures, captive animals are mainly conceived as entertainment tools “to perform for the pleasure of humans” (Urbanik 2012, 76) and as educational devices “to further understanding of either animals, products, human systems, or the environment” (Urbanik 2012). Still, neither the romanticized perspective that positively sees captive animals as representative agents of their species and nature nor the one that reduces them to educative and entertainment devices were enough to appreciate the complexity and shades of captivity.

Incomplete Cartography of Captivity

The two places this article is about are intricate patchwork quilts made of different levels of captivity materialized in the spaces animals live in and their daily routines and interactions. Those captivity degrees are exclusively linked to the condition of each species inhabiting the urban animal enclosure. In other words, those levels do not depend on the category of each location, regardless of whether it is an animal park, an urban farm, an adventure playground, or the whole individual place as if it were a single ontological and managerial unity.

At the children’s urban farm at Görlitzer Park, for instance, chickens are allowed to move freely around the entire farm, but mainly because they escape from the area they are supposed to be. Since they are frequently unsupervised, it is easy to see them sniffing and digging wherever they want: in other animal barns and stables, in the garbage, or around the children’s playground, one of the most popular locations of the whole farm.

Their freedom, however, is conditioned by the presence of humans. Chickens constantly look for places to hide and run away from people, even when humans are not interested in being near them. Although children can touch, pet, and even grab chickens, this activity usually occurs in a more controlled way. It means it is developed in a secure scenario where a farmkeeper directs the whole activity, takes care of the chickens’ mobility and security, and pays attention to how kids approach the animals.

Meanwhile, other birds inhabiting the Kinderbauernhof, such as ducks, geese, and guineafowls, give the impression of having less freedom of movement than the chickens exploring around the farm. They all—including the chickens—live together in a bounded but vast space bordered by a fence and a thin net. That location comprises a coop area, a little pond, and a broad terrain surrounding the water. The bright side of those confined birds is that they do not need to hide or run away from anyone. Human visitors can watch the animals, but no additional interaction is possible.

A little bit further, but in the same animal enclosure, bunnies live surrounded by metal bars inside an installation composed of a wooden house and a small terrain the animals use to dig holes and run around. Kids and families frequently visit this exhibition and attentively follow the bunnies moving from one place to another. Due to the metal bars surrounding the bunnies, petting the animals is impossible, which does not mean people have not tried to do it. The enclosure has signs warning visitors that the bunnies can bite hard and nobody should touch or feed them. Nevertheless, although this is not something happening regularly, occasionally, one can see people trying to reach the animals.

As the last example in the Kinderbauernhof, sheep are kept in a large stable bounded by wooden boards. Human visitors are allowed to feed and pet them, using the food the farm sells and without trespassing into the stable. Children are regularly the most interested in petting sheep. Some kids used to lean on and climb the fence to be near the sheep. However, despite children’s efforts, human–sheep interactions are not frequent. During my observations at the Kinderbauernhof, sheep seemed to prefer being alone—at least not with humans—and just meet people when they are offering the animals something to eat. They leave once the food is gone.

On the other hand, in the Tierpark Neukölln, some of the barriers between human visitors and captive animals are stricter. They not only limit human–animal interactions, but a few seriously affect the capacity various animals have to move around. Besides the apparent reason for a fence in a context like this—to prevent animals from escaping and keep people away from animals—some specific structures of captivity constrain even animals’ most basic behaviors and routines. Two tiny brown wooden houses on opposite sides in the Tierpark exemplify this situation.

The first house is shared by padovana chickens (Zwerg-Paduaner), those birds that look like they are wearing wigs, and frillback pigeons (Lockentaube), an interesting type whose main characteristic is their curly feathers. The second house hosts a collection of three pigeon breeds native to Berlin: the Berliner Kurze, the Berliner Langlatschige Tümmler, and the Schöneberger Streifige. The size and structure of those constructions are made for those watching the animals. However, the situation seems different for the birds inside.

Unlike other breeds of chickens inhabiting the Tierpark, such as the Vorwerk (Vorwerkhühner) and the Saxon (Sachsenhühner), living in bigger coops and having more freedom to move, Padovana chickens are limited to the small area inside the walls enclosing their house. They cannot run around looking for worms, insects, or stones. Their lives are constrained and less exciting than the rest of the chickens. The same situation occurs with the pigeons from both houses. They are condemned to spend their whole life staying on poles, sitting on artificial nets, and without any chance to fly.

Despite the efforts to keep animals safe from human visitors, people find ways to transgress the Tierpark rules and demarcations. For instance, it does not matter how many signs ask not to feed animals or how long and compact the fences are in the European fallow deer’s (Damhirsche) exhibition; some visitors find ways to give them food. Bread, pretzels, and apple slices were the products I saw people sharing with the animals.

However, regarding the geographies of captivity in urban animal enclosures, the most significant difference in terms of captivity is related to the human–animal disparity in terms of will and mobility. It does not matter how big a stable is or how much space a species has inside its cage. Animals are conditioned to live behind bars or fences and under surveillance. We can argue whether captivity is good or bad for farmed animals, what levels of captivity are desirable, and under which circumstances it is morally acceptable to have captive animals. Still, at the end of the day, this is just a human-centered discussion over other beings’ lives.

Interaction and Transformation

The study of the two animal enclosures as spaces created for humans to meet animals, which means understanding them as contact zones, has four main elements to analyze: (1) their interactive component, (2) their transformative outcome, (3) their organized structure, and (4) the types of encounters produced inside those spaces. The dynamic is to present those elements through a brief theoretical construction and finally merge them in an ethnographic exercise focused on human–animal encounters in the two animal enclosures.

As Böhm and Ullrich (2019, 5) highlight, interaction is a fundamental component in the human–animal contact zone since both parties should be “actively engaged in the encounter, and the agency is attributed to both of them. [Aditionally,] the processual, interactive event of the encounter transforms humans as well as animals and thereby forms something new.” In the same line, Todd and Hynes (2017, 730) conceive human–animal encounters as zones of transformation and rupture that should provoke “an event or difference in thought.”

Rupture is also an essential part of encounters in the contact zone. Approaching them from an anthropocentric perspective, Wilson (2017b, 25) conceives them as “events of relation” that bring us, humans, to scenarios of transformation by disturbing—surprising and shocking—us, humans, at the time we, as humans, encounter that “ultimate other” (Hobson-West 2007; Wolch and Emel 1995). The strong emphasis on the human side in the studies of human–animal encounters is an interesting remark that goes along the same line as how animals are conceived in urban animal enclosures: as learning devices and, in the case of this perspective, as elements that allow people to have a sort of transformative experience.

Wilson (2017b, 30) proposes some cases of encounters as spaces or events for human transformation: When, for instance, the encounter with animals is carried out in violent scenarios, such as in slaughterhouses, that experience may take us “to think differently.” Also, when animals serve as therapeutic devices that have “the potential to impact on human physiological states, loneliness, or morale.”

But is this transformative outcome—for humans or humans and animals—really happening in daily life in more-than-human interactions in those two locations? Well, yes and no. That fruitful ambiguity is tied to using contact zones as an analytical resource. As Wilson (2019, 15) argues, contact zones uncover and explore a tremendous complexity in terms of encounters and the assemblage of “different configurations and forms of power as they are reworked to different effects.” To unpack that assertion, let us explore two situations, one from the Kinderbauernhof and the other from the Tierpark.

A couple takes their five-year-old son to the Tierpark. That is a regular activity they have repeated almost twice a month during the past year. The kid, according to his parents, is currently obsessed with goats. But first, it was donkeys, then deer, and then something else they cannot recall. The family enters the animal enclosure together, and once inside, the parents move to a bench to talk and watch their phones while the boy runs toward the goat’s stable. The kid leans on the fence to see the animals. He points at one in particular—his favorite goat—and starts loudly calling the animal to be near him, but he fails. Still, despite the goats not paying attention to him, the child spent more than 45 minutes observing them until his parents called him to leave the place.

Carefully grabbing a chicken, an animal keeper shows the animal to a group of five kids around her. Three children seem excited and interested in touching the chicken. One looks scared of having the bird near, and the final kid appears like she does not care. The keeper bends down a little and brings the chicken closer to the children. Surprisingly, the situation changed. Two of the ones excited to have the animal near now seem to doubt whether to touch the bird or not. The scared kid, still visibly frightened, is the first to do it. We witnessed how he moved from a fearful attitude to a joyful mood, being comfortable with the presence and interaction with the animal. When his turn was over, two more children were brave enough to touch the bird. But the chicken, in a similar mood to the girl who does not care, looks disconnected, far away from what is happening.

Organization

The vignettes above display a type of more-than-human space whose main characteristic is that it has been planned. This planning can be seen in two interlaced levels. First, there is a structural one: the animal enclosure is designed as an open-access location to facilitate encounters between urban human visitors and different species of animals that we, as urban individuals, do not regularly see living or freely wandering in the city. By focusing on wild animals, that type of otherness has been problematized by Beardsworth and Bryman (2001, 85) as a form of embodiment that characterizes caged animals as “both ‘outside’ [urban] human society, and ‘inside’ [urban] human culture.”

The second one is tied to people planning to see—or take their children to observe and interact with—caged animals in urban enclosures. These types of two-level planned encounters with farmed animals are similar to what Wilson (2017a) describes as organized encounters. These encounters are self-explanatory events of relation, different from spontaneous and accidental forms of contact. Organized encounters often require “careful facilitation and management” (Wilson 2017a, 610) Wilson classifies them into three states. Some just imply conflict and disparity, while others are based on the conscious participation of both sides to seek mutual transformation. The final type is “more concerned with the pursuit of self-transformation and thus tends to be one-sided, involving the instrumentalization of one group or individual for the transformation of another” (Wilson 2017a, 611). The last type of organized encounters occurs in the Kinderbauernhof and the Tierpark, but they are not the only ones occurring there.

The unidirectionality of the last type of organized encounter is perhaps one of the most critical aspects in describing how animals are used as entertainment, educational tools, devices to improve people’s skills, and ambassadors of nature and their own species. However, despite all those encounters being organized, at least structurally speaking, there is room for improvisation. Take, for instance, this article’s initial vignette of a kid chasing a chicken, or the story of the chicken being exhibited by an animal keeper and what happened when the animal was brought near the children.

The unpredictability and inventiveness of organized encounters state that despite their planned structure, they are not staged scenarios. Neither visitors nor animals follow any script. Despite the warming signs and tight fences, people still try to touch bunnies at the Kinderbauernhof or feed animals at the Tierpark, and animals just do what they want in normal circumstances and without caring for people unless food is involved. Additionally, when we say an encounter is planned, it does not mean it is ethically organized. In more-than-human encounters in urban animal enclosures, captivity is still a complex issue that needs further discussion.

Entangled Presentation

Despite both having a planned nature, and being considered as partial, it is not the same type of engagement where a person runs after an animal as one where a person watches an animal behind a fence. In fact, according to Beardsworth and Bryman (2001), that second type of encounter should not be considered as such. They identify four modes of engagement people use when they face animals: (1) encounter, (2) representation, (3) presentation, and (4) quasification. Representation, the figurative portrayal of animals, and quasification, a mode of representation that caricatures animals intending to entertain the viewer, will not be further discussed here. Instead, this subtitle will focus on the other two ways.

Encounter is the most direct mode of engagement. “It entails the individual actually being in the physical presence of the unrestrained animal in its own environment, so it can be perceived via one or more of the senses” (Beardsworth and Bryman 2001, 85). Meanwhile, presentation is a mediated human–animal gathering. It “differs from representation in that perception of the animal is not mediated but is direct. However, it differs from encounter in that the animal is not unrestrained in a ‘natural’ setting but is held captive and it is presented for viewing by its captors” (Beardsworth and Bryman 2001, 86).

As shown in this document, both types of interactions are common forms of engagement with animals in urban animal enclosures. However, as Beardsworth and Bryman acknowledge, those ways of being with animals are often interlaced among them through an experiential structure of media sources. In the case of human–animal interactions in the two animal enclosures, that entanglement inevitably passes through the already explored ethical and spatial-infrastructural discussions on captivity. Where should farmed animals be?

If we agree with Jones (2014, 92) that the only available options for most of those animals ⁶ are “death or captivity,” urban enclosures should then ethically be considered those animals’ environment. The main reason is that domesticated animals cannot live outside independently, and some humans would seriously threaten them if they were released. Following those lines, seeing and petting farmed animals in urban enclosures could be viewed as a form of encounter, even if a restrictive infrastructure mediates it.

Conversely, it could be argued that the more-than-human engagements produced in urban animal enclosures are just presentations and that captive animals are no more than living elements inside dioramas or ambassadors of other realities. As human-made spaces to present and display animals, urban enclosures work on two levels: as scenarios to get urban people closer to non-urban beings and as institutions that reproduce colonialist discourses about animals as the “ultimate other” (Pedersen 2010).

What is interesting about urban animal enclosures is that both modes of engagement occur simultaneously in the daily interactions of humans and animals. On the one hand, captive animals live under human infrastructural and managerial logics. Their space is limited, their food, routines, and reproduction are controlled, and they are often used as educational and entertainment devices. On the other hand, people go to those places to have first-hand, organized contact with other beings, animals that they do not have access to in their daily lives.

Notwithstanding, that direct approach to animals in urban enclosures does not necessarily mean touching or petting them. Sometimes, it is about having the animals near but without further interaction. Grosso modo and it will be expanded below, those types of more-than-human modes of engagement happening in urban animal enclosures are what I call partial encounters.