Essay - Island Magazine 117

Around the same time as the errant rabbit was being cosseted in the city centre a dog named Bob was gaining infamy in the nearby suburb of Balmain. Bob had chosen to behave in an unseemly manner in a dog-walking area of Birchgrove. He disgraced himself by chasing a cat. The cat escaped unscathed and appeared none the worse for its adventure. Its guardian, however, was not so easily appeased and following complaints lodged with Leichhardt Council, Bob’s human companion was charged with owning a dangerous dog. He refused to accept this epithet but compromised by pleading guilty to ‘owning a dog which chased an animal, being a cat’. A six-month good behaviour bond and approximately $10,000 in solicitor’s fees saw the end of the matter.

Meanwhile in the Royal Botanic Gardens the numbers of grey-headed flying foxes had been increasing at a rate that alarmed the Botanic Gardens Trust. Numbers of flying foxes have been recorded in the Gardens since 1858 when, as George Bennett noted in his Gatherings of a Naturalist in Australasia, ‘a number of these animals were observed suspended from the topmost branches of the lofty trees’.1 In 1900 a visitation of thousands of flying foxes was reported as a plague and local sportsmen were called upon to shoot large numbers of them. In 1916 and 1920 small numbers of flying foxes again visited the Gardens and then, after an absence of sixty-eight years, they returned, and by 1992 their numbers had grown to 3,200, then to 5,000. By 2002 they numbered 7,300.

The grey-headed flying fox plays an important role in maintaining the ecosystem of coastal eucalypt forests. It is one of the few species that pollinate the flowers and spread the seeds of these trees. However, as these coastal trees have been cleared and replaced by urban sprawl, hungry bats have headed for orchards and places where food is more readily available. Unfortunately, in selecting the Palm Grove of the Botanic Gardens they unwittingly chose a collection of trees that are of great heritage significance to humans. Many of these trees were collected and planted by colonial explorers and botanists. According to botanist Professor David Mabberley, the Palm Grove is one of the world’s greatest tree collections. The bats took up residence in a kauri tree, the centrepiece of the grove, and subsequently killed it. At least thirteen other trees have died and twenty-five are permanently damaged. Something, said the Botanic Trust, had to be done.

These wayward antics on the part of city-dwelling animals belie an understanding of cities as spaces either entirely under human control or exclusively the domain of humans. The old distinction between the city as the site of human habitation and the country as a residence for ‘wild’ animals is no longer sustainable. Nor is it viable to read animal presence in the city as consisting of particular species settled in discrete habitats. Urban life is not static. It moves constantly, coming and going, settling, moving on, returning. The city is not simply a passive backdrop to sentient activity. Humans and other animals are altered by their city life and the relationships they form within them. Although the city may be thought of as a conglomerate of steel and concrete, it can just as viably be understood as a combination of shelters and those sheltering. This broadening of the definition to include both ‘flesh and stone’ enables a rethinking of how nature, culture and subjectivity are embodied in landscape and leads to new understandings of the role animals as well as humans might play in place-making. Rather than being understood as wholly the productions of human culture, cities can be investigated as living entities, including an acknowledgment of the interactions between humans and animals.

This newly emerging environmental approach holds a possibility of radically altering how we see cities, how we design them, and how we behave in them. Because this approach is concerned with interconnections as well as disparities between living creatures it brings with it a need to think about the moral conundrums we face when living in cities and acknowledging non-human animals within them. This does not imply that all ways of seeing, constructing and behaving are entirely up to humans. Animals are not ‘matter out of place’ in the city and their presence inevitably raises those problematic spectres of power and agency. Who makes the decisions that matter? Can Sakuratei survive on human charity in the CBD? Should Bob the dog have the freedom to express his antifeline sentiments without falling foul of the legal system? Do the flying foxes have the right to seek out food prized by humans when those same humans have removed their usual food source? The unsettling question remains as to how much agency animals actually possess when it comes to survival in the city. Or what level of resistance they can mount against human domination. If agency and resistance are accepted as viable non-human animal behaviour, does that carry a suggestion of a human expectation of other attributes in animals such as moral responsibility?

Such an outlook is not without precedent. Early recorded laws in Britain implicitly invested animals with human responsibilities. Throughout Europe they were, for example, tried and sentenced for crimes ‘against humanity’. While we no longer try animals in court nor seriously believe that animals are capable of intention to commit a crime, the examples of Sakuratei, Bob and the flying foxes illustrate that ‘good’ behaviour is often necessary to ensure a continued existence. What degree of difference, we might ask, is there between the powers of medieval criminal law and present-day bureaucratic regulations whereby animals can be executed silently, invisibly and without advocates for such ‘crimes’ as ‘homelessness’, ‘aggression’ or ‘destruction of property’?

A t the heart of all these questions is the central dilemma of how animal difference can survive and flourish within the orbit of humanity. A brief look at the history of Western society’s human/ animal relations reveals how unresolved this issue remains. To date, where animals have been included in understandings of the city they have rarely been seen as having agency or subjectivity. Rather, they are described as ‘inferior beings’ permitted to remain because they have either utilitarian or entertainment value or pet status. In general they are confined in zoos, wildlife parks or within the boundaries of private property. Indigenous animals such as possums may be tolerated as part of the urban ecosystem but are frequently ‘moved on’ when their activities become a nuisance to humans. When feral animals appear without permission and behave in ways that displease humans they are usually termed ‘scavengers’ or ‘pests’.

Domination, domestication and eradication have been the common solutions since ancient times and appear to be tied up with the binary division between city and country. In Western society this division can be traced back to the classical era when the polis, the walled city, was defined over and against ‘the wild’ that existed beyond its orbit. Nonhuman animals were confined to the ‘wild’ as they were understood to be lacking in culture, a moral order, and the ability to rise above their instinctual nature. Human ‘superiority’ and progress were also founded on an understanding of the need to control the metaphorical ‘beast within’ with its lowly instinctual urges and to move forward to greater and greater rationality. Conversely, the literal ‘beast without’ had to be either relegated to an irredeemable status in nature or domesticated and brought within the moral order of civility. Either way surviving independently as an animal in contact with humans was a difficult business.

Domesticated animals were subjected to ‘improving’ methods so they no longer lived wholly in a ‘state of nature’ but were elevated in status and gained access to the polis. By the eighteenth century it was widely believed that domestication was good for animals; it civilised them and increased their numbers. It was also seen as essential for the advance of humanity. In the nineteenth century this inequality had settled into a conception of animals as the property of owners who were responsible for their behaviour. Harriet Ritvo claims this change was the result of a developing human ability to control a threatening nature. In The Animal Estate she writes that ‘once nature ceased to be a constant antagonist, it could be viewed with affection and even as the scales tipped to the human side, with nostalgia. Thus sentimental attachment to individual pets and the lower creation in general – a stock attribute of the Victorians – became widespread in the first half of the nineteenth century.’2

The reverse side of this humanitarianism was that people acquired a greater sense of power with which they could manipulate and control animals. Not only did this give rise to extensive breeding programs but the large numbers of animals, such as dogs, which had worked in cities turning spits, pulling carts and entertaining humans by baiting bulls and bears since Renaissance times, was by the nineteenth century greater than at any previous time.

In settler societies such as Australia these conflicting attitudes were complicated by the range and types of animals present – indigenous as well as domesticated and feral introduced animals. When the First Fleet set sail for Australia, it brought with it a mixed bag of attitudes towards animals, including nostalgia, sentimentality, abuse and usury. It also carried actual dogs, cats and rabbits among the domesticated animals considered necessary to establish a new life in the colony. Governor Phillip, for example, brought his greyhounds with him and the Reverend Johnson was accompanied by his two cats. There was also among the lists of domesticated farm animals a record of an unspecified number of puppies and kittens. Although these may have been intended as working dogs and mousers, pets do appear to have been significant in the civilising mission. These imported animals became part of the newly established antipodean polis while the indigenous animals were confined to a rhetorical niche in which ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘inefficient’ monotremes and ‘untameable’ dingoes were all regarded as less amenable to domestication than ‘superior’ European mammals.

Such neat categories were soon challenged by the animals themselves. Eric Rolls in They All Ran Wild provides a detailed account of the ways in which cattle, sheep, goats, camels and other introduced species defected from their domestic status. Although the domesticated rabbits brought by the First Fleet to provide early settlers with meat did not breed significantly, when Thomas Austin introduced twenty-four wild rabbits for sporting hunters in 1859 their numbers exploded within a very short period. The foxes which were introduced shortly after to control the rabbits also went feral.

Supposedly docile pets also proved capable of insurgency. When introduced cats refused to comply with human demands, the director of the Zoological Gardens in Sydney wrote in 1912, ‘Australia is having another wild animal added to its fauna from a rather unexpected quarter in the form of our common house cat. Of course so long as our beloved pussies consent to stay at home and play the part of animated mousetraps we have no fault to find with them, but when they throw off our authority and start an independent existence in the bush it behoves us to look to their antecedents and see if any special precautions are necessary under the new arrangement.’3

It was discovered, on the other hand, that the apparently untameable dingo formed affectionate relationships with Aboriginal ‘owners’ and early writers such as Lumboltz in northern Queensland remarked that ‘its master never strikes but merely threatens it. He caresses it like a child, eats fleas off it and then kisses it on the snout.’4 Writing during the same period, RB Smyth maintained that the Aborigines ‘are very kind to their dogs, and indeed nothing more offends a blackman than to speak harshly to his dogs. If anyone gave a blackman’s dog a blow, he would incur bitter enmity.’5

Clearly humans have often been mistaken or misguided in their understanding of animal proclivities. Animals, on the other hand, have exhibited an uncanny ability to undermine human demands. Equally clearly animals are not ‘dumb brutes’ simply acting and reacting instinctually to external stimuli. It is the reappraisal of this situation in recent years that has given rise to attempts to revise the human perception of the city and replace ideas of the metropolis with what Jennifer Wolch has called a zoöpolis – a place of habitation for both people and animals. This reinvention of the city is, of course, easier said than done. Living together, understanding another’s point of view is rarely easy. How, we might ask, is it possible to see the city from the animal’s point of view, or more precisely from the point of view of many different animals? For the animal/human divide not only subsumed all humans into an undifferentiated category, it has also denied all diversity among other species. How can this new relationship be theorised and what would this mean for the future construction of urban landscapes and possible alterations to existing ones?

Various metaphors for a new relationship have been proposed, none of which has proved to be wholly satisfactory. Underlying all these metaphors, however, is an important reinterpretation of agency which has moved away from an emphasis on rational choices and is now understood as ‘an effect generated in multiple and unpredictable ways from a network of interactions between human, animal and environmental factors’.6 The usefulness of this approach is that not only does it attempt to consider the city from the animal’s perspective but it also brings together a range of discourses including environmentalism, sustainable development, ecological science, animal welfare, and property rights. It provides a space in which to develop a city ecology that takes account of the political discourses that impinge on efforts to restore and conserve habitat and manage wildlife populations. In other words, it is concerned with equal rights of citizens, where the notion of citizen is extended to include animals. Unfortunately, the old cliché that some are more equal than others inevitably springs to mind.

Do species that may endanger human life have an equal right to dwell undisturbed within the city limits? How are economic factors that favour humans, such as the construction industry’s desire for space in the city, reconciled with habitat demands of other species? How can parkland be redesigned to give equal consideration to animal and human needs? Timid nocturnal animals need a quiet environment with a rich plant biota. This is in direct contrast to the simplified block planting of single plant species popular with landscape designers. Human demand for easy access to parkland inevitably means more cars and more noise and pollution while fear of crime or desire for flood-lit playing fields leads to the installation of bright lights. There are other equally troubling questions that resist resolution. For example, waterways within the city may comply with legislation for human needs but may be quite unsuitable for some water-dwelling species. These questions do not even begin to consider how animals might be included in decision-making.

However, citizenship is an entangled, contested state of being that does not necessarily support mainstream or government initiatives. It does not always accept decrees from on high. It may, in fact, oppose them through grass-roots affiliations and activism. Citizens may behave in ‘minor’ ways to destabilise the larger powers that be. In this sense a metaphor of citizen is useful as it gestures towards the possibility of animals and human activists working together as citizens to make a more-than-human city a viable alternative.

A metaphor of kinship is an alternative approach that draws more on a perspective of intimate relationships than on the formal concept of citizenship. It is based on the assumption that people know and maintain connections with their kin whom they respect, care for, and regard as friends. Unfortunately, even when this is true a kinship metaphor tends to subsume the animal within the human. ‘Pets’ which are regarded as kin are often protected and treated as if they were children. Real species-specific needs may then be ignored and sexual expression, among other attributes, may be suppressed. It is not possible to address here the complexity of arguments for and against human control of companion-animal sexuality, or the culling and introduction of contraception into nondomestic animal populations. There are, however, many other difficulties that animals encounter, when protected as if they were infants, which are unnecessarily restrictive. In general, a metaphor of kinship tends to elide the differences between animals and humans to the detriment of the animals.

To date, the metaphor of neighbourliness has proved to be the most promising. Neighbours live in shelters side by side. Whether human or animal, neighbours are beings who make their home in the city. Individual neighbours may be replaced by new ones but they are always embedded in social relations within a built environment. Wellbeing depends upon both these factors. Neighbours are literally near-dwellers and it is this nearness rather than levels of culture, technological expertise or language that enables the term to accommodate animals. Being a good neighbour requires a degree of moral and civic responsibility without the dependencies inherent in the kin metaphor. Implicitly it gestures towards generosity and sharing. Those who share their lives with companion animals are well aware of the give and take, the mutual influencing in the relationship. It is not impossible to extend this sense of neighbourliness to wildlife and, rather than removing or eliminating animals, allow them to continue living in their chosen environment.

Of course some neighbours are described by others as ‘neighbours from hell’ and such a title is all too likely to be attached to those animals regarded as pests. In such a situation animal agency and resistance can appear to be merely a romanticisation that obscures the fact that animals can only survive if human responses to them are more accepting and include them within discourses of environmental justice and ethics. Ultimately all our existing metaphors are inadequate in some way or another. They err on the side of the human in that they are derived from human social configurations. And those we might borrow from the animal kingdom – pack, flock, mob, herd, swarm, brood, shoal, and so on – possess negative connotations. It seems we need new names and new metaphors to envisage a new city.

O ne final possibility is to look at the fundamental aspects of corporeal existence. We all, for instance, need food to survive. Domestic and companion animals remain in the city because they have relationships with humans that include a ready supply of food. Feral and indigenous animals are attracted to cities because they provide abundant sources of food. In this sense human and animal city dwellers are ‘at table together’. This, in fact, is the definition of commensalism, a symbiotic relationship between two species in which one species benefits and the other neither benefits nor harms. It is a relationship that does not consist of predator/prey or parasite/host but is an association between individuals of different species in which they share food and live together, and one partner benefits while the other is not harmed. It is neither dominating nor exploitative.

This is one possible model for human/animal relations in the city whereby human generosity invites the other to join in a convivial relationship. It repudiates a view of the world as existing purely for human advancement and encourages maintaining or creating spaces in which animals can continue to live. The grey-headed flying foxes in Sydney’s Botanic Gardens provide an example. Having been listed as an endangered species, the flying foxes have what appears to be a secure future. Some have been moved to more appropriate quarters while those that remain in the Botanic Gardens have formed a tourist attraction. They survive comfortably alongside humans who undertake not to harm them in any intentional way. Companion animals do not necessarily fare so well. Bob the dog cannot claim to be an endangered species and must continue to behave in ways that humans find acceptable to ensure his continued existence. And what of that city slicker rabbit Sakuratei? Well, sadly the life of cherry blossom is fleeting. The dangers of homelessness and dependency on charity are all too well-known to those humans who fall by the wayside. And animals, even those with impeccable manners, are far from immune.

1 Bennett, George, Gatherings of a Naturalist in Australia, www.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au/welcome-tobgt/royal-botanic-garden-features/wildlife/flying-foxes.
2 Ritvo, Harriet, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age, Harvard University Press, 1989, p 3.
3 Director of the Zoological gardens, Sydney, quoted in AS Le Souef, The Wild Animals of Australia, George G Harrap, 1926, p 385.
4 Lumboltz, C, Among Cannibals, John Murray, 1889, p 179.
5 Symth, RB, The Aborigines of Victoria, (2 vols), J Ferres, 1878, Vol 1, p 147.
6 Wolch, Jennifer, ‘Zoöpolis’, in The Spaces of Postmodernity: Readings in Human Geography, Michael J Dear and Steven Flusty (eds), Blackwell Publishing, 2001, pp 200-207.

LORRAINE SHANNON has a PhD in postcolonial literature from Trinity College, Dublin, and has taught at various universities in Ireland and Australia. Three years ago she returned to student life and is completing a nontraditional PhD in nature writing at the University of Technology, Sydney.

ISSUE NO. 117

WINTER 2009