196 CULTURENATURESsubverted regulations. Gaynor (1999: 13) argued
that productive animal exclusion constituted an
ideological attack on working-class practices,
privileging consumptive uses of animals (for
example, pets) favoured by the more affluent,
and advocated ‘re-animating the suburbs’
through promotion of backyard animal keeping,
community gardens and city farms.
In Hull, Griffiths et al. (2000) explored human
responses to feral cats in relation to ideas about
the proper order of urban places. Here feral cats
were a marginalized social grouping existing
within human society. Drawing on psychoana-
lytical studies, Griffiths et al. drew attention to
how wilder spaces, and the place of animals in
the city are uncertain and often contested.
Whereas some people saw wild places associated
with feral cats as sites of anxiety and aversion,
others viewed them as refuges for an otherwise
lost wild nature. Responses to feral cat colonies
among local residents were affected by their con-
structions of the built environment, rendering cat
spaces either discrepant or acceptable urban
features, and by ideas of feral cats as either legit-
imately wild or domestic ‘convicts on the loose’.
Feral colonies served both to fracture and to
cement social relationships between people;
allotment plot holders were suspicious of any
local council interest in the feral cat colony that
they supported, while other colonies engendered
conflict between cat protectors and those arguing
for their removal. Such studies show the com-
plexity of human–animal spatial orderings in
the city and the ambiguity of resident attitudes
toward nature and civilization as manifest
in place.
Tackling much larger felines, Gullo et al.
(1998) considered the changing relations
between people and mountain lions in California,
where cities encroach on cougar, coyote, bear and
golden eagle habitats. During the late twentieth
century, urbanization-driven increases in
human–cougar interactions along with scientific
discord over cougar ecology stimulated a rene-
gotiation of cougar population management. A
polarized public discourse around cougars
emerged, characterized by renewed advocacy of
trophy hunting by gun/hunting lobbyists, and
proposals from ecologists for wildlife reserves,
movement corridors and buffer zoning to protect
both people and cougars in the rapidly changing
metropolitan fringe. Media coverage revealed
and reinforced changes in public attitudes toward
cougars, whose character was reconstructed from
symbol of wilderness heritage to cold-blooded
serial killer, as fringe habitats become human-
dominated places. Seeking a more symmetrical
perspective, Gullo et al. also considered attitudestowards people among cougars, highlighting
cougar capacity for learning and behavioural
change. Both human and cougar attitudes present
difficulties for predator management but also
suggest potentials for coexistence through
mutual learning and behavioural modification –
an approach that could increasingly characterize
nature–culture relations in border landscapes.
Michel (1998) also considered the role of
animals in place formation, in the context of
southern California golden eagle endangerment
and conservation/rehabilitation. Urban growth
rhetoric, real estate interests and scientific envi-
ronmentalism shape eagle conservation politics
but so do community activists who contest
scientific eagle habitat conservation planning.
Activism among eagle rehabilitators and wildlife
educators, grounded in struggles to save injured
eagles and starving eagle chicks, and to nurture
responsibility and consideration for animals
among children, was thus imbued with gendered
notions of motherhood and family and an ethic
of care. Michel argued that eagle rehabilitation
and wildlife education for children constitute a
personal politics of both animal and human
social reproduction that asserts the agency of
wildlife in defining pathways to human–animal
coexistence and shared places.
Places are not only shaped by human inter-
actions with charismatic megafauna. Waley
(2000) traces the development of new ecological
thinking and how it led to new riparian land-
scapes in urban and suburban Japan.^10 European
ecological landscaping theory, adapted to the
Japanese context to design restored urban river
habitats, often prioritized animals linked to
threatened ways of life, such as rice farming, and
harnessed the rich symbolism of fireflies, drag-
onflies and fish. Yet such ecological landscaping
was feared as privileging animals over people, or
countering ‘traditional’ human–animal relations.
But the most vigorous opposition to river land-
scapes that encourage coexistence came from
powerful engineering and building construction
interests. The result, predicted Waley, would be
humanized urban streamscapes unable to support
riparian wildlife.
Trying to think prospectively about animals and
urban places, Wolch (1996) argued that
seeing animals as subjects suggests that creation of
a ‘zoöpolis’ – a place in which people and
animals coexist – might help re-establish networks
of care between people and animals. Despite per-
ceptions of city and country as binary opposites,
cities host a wide range of human–animal
interactions (Figure 9.5). By extending under-
standings of human relations with animals in the
city, Wolch intimated that the ideal of zoöpolis3029-ch09.qxd 03-10-02 10:48 AM Page 196