forage, etc.). Globalization of livestock production
has led to widespread rural decline, however,
resulting in the disappearance of many traditional
breeds.Yarwood and Evans (2000) considered
how recent shifts in capitalist agriculture
stimulated both rural decline and efforts to rein-
vigorate the countryside through agrotourism
and alter the rural landscape to preserve its rural
character. Thus family farms became theme
parks starring old, rare and endangered livestock
breeds, now powerful – and fungible – symbols
of cultural heritage. Strategies for rare breed pro-
tection, along with agrotourism, altered spatial
distributions of rare breeds and transformed the
links between breeds, place and culture.
Others, such as Ufkes (1995), investigated
how globalization-driven livestock sector
restructuring and polarized consumer demands
reshaped the US ‘heartland’. Here, large-scale
intensive farming emerged to meet worldwide
demand for cheap meat, along with boutique pro-
ducers targeting affluent consumers worried
about health and food safety. For pigs, new
meatpacking practices centred around lean meat
production and involved new genetics, feeding
regimes, facilities construction and management
practices ‘down on the farm’. Leaner hogs
spurred demand for an array of new, commercial
inputs designed to ‘build a better pig’ – with
devastating implications for animal welfare.
These shifts also profoundly altered rural Mid-
western places, as enormous packing plants were
sited close to large-scale hog raising facilities
and their smaller-scale contract producers, trans-
forming nearby towns as workers – mostly
immigrants – arrived to fill packing plant jobs.
Animal geographers also studied the role of
animals in the creation of smaller-scale places,
the zoo being a prime example. Stating that ‘If the
zoo is a “space’’, Adelaide Zoo is a “place”’,
Anderson (1995: 282) advanced general claims
about zoos as pivotal sites in the cultural con-
struction of nature, and also particular claims
about colonial and national identity in the
Adelaide Zoo as a landscape. With greater atten-
tion to the architectural features of place,
Gruffudd (2000) also tackled the London Zoo,
by examining early-twentieth-century debates
around Lubetkin’s modernist penguin pool and
gorilla house. Jumping little more than a century
ahead, Davies (2000) considered the creation of
the electronic or cyberzoo, through an ANT-
based analysis. Unlike traditional zoos that trade
in animal bodies, the electronic zoo – global in
reach – appropriates digital animal images, circu-
latesthem for production of movies and TV, and
thus derives an accelerated accumulation of
value from the recirculating images. Meanwhileresponsibility for animals as embodied subjects
is opaque and dispersed to nature parks and
reserves. Not insignificantly, the concentration
purely upon visual consumption of animals in
the electronic zoo also curtails both (the already
limited) human experience with animals and the
possibilities of animal agency. Animals, it would
seem, are perfectly caged in cyberspace zoos.
Animal geographers have also focused on
places characterized by the presence/absence of
animals, and on how human–animal interactions
can create distinctive landscapes and landscape
imagery. Emel’s (1995) work, discussed above,
documents how landscapes of the nineteenth-
century American West, once mythic and majes-
tic but also malevolent and threatening the
continent’s very civilization, were symbolized
and embodied by the active presence of wolves.
Philo (1995) and Howell (2000), in contrast,
focus on nineteenth-century London, revealing
the city as a place of crazily congested Victorian
commercial capital laced by the unsettling sights
and sounds of live meat markets, but also a
patchwork of stately bourgeois neighbourhoods
filled with urban domesticates (lap dogs and vir-
tuous women) standing cheek by jowl with rab-
bit warrens of the deviant and dangerous classes
symbolized by depraved dog-stealers. Philo’s
(1995) inquiry into the plight of livestock
animals sent to live meat markets and slaughter-
houses also showed how particular traditional
nature/culture dualisms led London to become a
landscape of exclusion for animals labelled as
‘wild’, ‘unclean’, ‘immoral’, ‘unhygienic’. Only
animals regarded as ‘tame’, ‘clean’, ‘moral’ or
‘aesthetic’ were allowed into the cultural fold,
and as Howell points out, then only for certain
classes and in some districts. Such dualisms, and
the interactions they engendered, promoted
mutually exclusive spaces and places for humans
and most animals.
The urban–wildlands border zones of metro-
politan regions remain stubbornly permeable to
both people and animals and, despite routine
exterminations, even inner cities host ‘a shadow
population of non-humans spanning the phyloge-
netic scale’, leading Wolch, et al. (1995: 736) to
propose a ‘transpecies urban theory’ alert to such
realities. Picking up on this, Gaynor (1999)
looked at productive animal keeping in Perth,
reviewing attempts by urban managers to
exclude chickens, goats and pigs – once
common in Australia’s urban backyards – from
residential areas in order to sanitize the city.
Working- and middle-class householders espe-
cially regarded animal keeping as legitimate;
despite public assertions of health and amenity
related negative externalities, they routinelyREANIMATING CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY 1953029-ch09.qxd 03-10-02 10:48 AM Page 195