Placing Animals: An Introduction to the Geography of Human–Animal Relations

Julie Urbanik. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012. xii and 191 pp., maps, photos, diagrams, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.00 paper (ISBN 978-1-4422-1185-8); $78.02 cloth (ISBN 978-1-4422-1184-1); $15.65 electronic (ISBN 978-1-4422-1186-5).

Julie Urbanik has authored a thought-provoking and innovative geography of human–animal relations for the twenty-first century. Placing Animals both reformulates animal geography and asserts its significance as an important but oft-neglected field. Whereas traditional animal geographies tended to focus on farming, including both sedentary animal husbandry and nomadic pastoralism, Urbanik takes us into a dominantly urban world, where most people experience animals primarily as food, leather, pets, photographs, film, and backyard wildlife. Their understandings of the animal world are more likely to be stimulated by cartoon animals, TV documentaries, pet care, zoos, and hunting trips, than by such mundane experiences as herding sheep, milking cows, collecting eggs in the chicken coop, or slaughtering and butchering animals for food.

Urbanik has written Placing Animals as a textbook, inviting the reader “to see and reflect on your own particular relationships with non-humans and why you have them,” “to see how human societies relate to the nonhuman world,” and “to consider animals from a geographic perspective” (p. xi). She focuses mainly on contemporary human–animal relations, primarily seen through U.S. eyes. In Chapter 1, she makes an interesting effort to locate the field within geography as a whole, and in Chapter 2 she goes on to outline a multistage history of the field within geography.

Urbanik begins her history with Herodotus in the fifth century BCE describing animals as “objects of historic geographic fascination” and then jumps rather abruptly to a three-stage model running from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries CE. Stage I, heavily influenced by Darwinian thought, is zoogeography and early- to mid-twentieth-century animal geography, based on the works of such authors as Newbigin, Hesse, and Vidal de la Blache. Stage II is mid- to late-twentieth-century “cultural animal geography,” based on Sauerian principles and building on classic works by Sauer himself, and by such authors as Cansdale and Bennett. Stage III, “the ‘new’ animal geography,” is presented as beginning in the late 1990s with innovative collections of essays edited by Wolch and Emel (1995, 1998), and by Philo and Wilbert (2000), and with the foundation of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Animal Geography Specialty Group in 1999 by Monica Ogra and Julie Urbanik.

Urbanik places the new animal geography within the emerging broader multidisciplinary field of Human–Animal Studies (HAS). She focuses heavily on the essence of geography viewed as “space, place, location, environment and landscape” and on the complex moral and ethical judgments that define which species of animals can be eaten; which can be pets; which can be spayed or neutered, selectively bred, cloned, or genetically modified; which should be exterminated; which can be hunted; and which should be protected. She explores the limits of kindness and cruelty, and how animals can be used by humans for food, work, experimentation, sport, entertainment, adventure, companionship, and even sexual gratification. The identity, rights, and treatment of different animals are viewed as socially constructed and subject to change through time and across space. No moral dictate of right and wrong is imposed, and Urbanik generally avoids judgmental statements. Cultural differences around the world are frequently discussed and illustrated with a wide range of examples.

In presenting “the new animal geography,” some of the emphases of other possible animal geographies are deliberately omitted. Thus, there is little discussion of evolutionary biology, ecology, anthropology, and the significance of pesticides and other chemicals. Hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomadism, transhumance, commercial fishing, and other traditional topics of the “old” animal geography are largely omitted, and insects and other invertebrates receive only passing mentions. In contrast, significant attention is given to confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and students are frequently prompted to consider their own diets and the arguments for and against meat-eating, factory farming, selective breeding, genetic engineering, and the widely different treatments given to different species of animals.

The sequence of subject areas covered in Placing Animals is very different from the one used in traditional animal geographies. Urbanik begins with the legal definition of animals and the emergence of the animal rights movement (Chapter 2), and she goes on to discuss pets and such loosely related topics as dog parks, dog fighting, and bestiality (Chapter 3). From the domestic sphere, she moves to “working animals,” ranging from guide and tracker dogs to draft animals, laboratory animals, zoo animals, and even dogs and monkeys fired into space (Chapter 4). The next step is to discuss farm animals (Chapter 5), and then to discuss wildlife (Chapter 6), leading into a brief closing chapter (Chapter 7) on the nature and practice of animal geography. This approach means that more intimate aspects of human–animal relations are discussed first, and discussions of major global issues like loss of biodiversity, changing land-use patterns, and climate change come toward the end of the book.

Placing Animals has many of the currently fashionable features of textbooks, notably a series of thought-provoking insets to the text: profiles of the tiger, the camel, the dog, the donkey, the pig, and the whale and dolphin. Each chapter ends with lists of Discussion Questions, Keywords/Concepts, Resources, References, and some exercises listed as “Practicing Animal Geography.” An eclectic variety of illustrations is provided, including twelve maps of frequencies by states of the United States, and by countries of the world. The world maps are problematical, especially those that attempt to portray production and consumption by countries (pp. 111–13), with production measured in tons per country and consumption measured in kilocalories per person per day. These two variables are combined into a single world map that reports no data for roughly half the countries of the world and that uses a projection that greatly exaggerates the size of the circumpolar areas. For pig production and consumption, for example, Russia, Canada, the United States, and Brazil all appear to be massively important, whereas China, the country with by far the largest pig production and consumption, seems less striking. Denmark, perhaps the country with the highest pigs to people ratio on earth, is nowhere to be found.

Placing Animals will appeal to students willing to debate ideas and confront a wide range of esoteric examples, drawn from across the world. It raises many moral and ethical questions that should take students outside their comfort zones, questions that are much better explored in small-group discussions or in debates and essays, rather than in large lecture halls and multiple-choice tests. It will introduce “the new animal geography” to students who never studied “the old animal geography.”

Researchers will find Placing Animals thought-provoking in the range of ideas and issues that it covers, but sometimes frustrating because, as a textbook, depth and detail are very limited on many topics. The lack of a consolidated list of references and the brevity of the book's index are particularly problematical.

Both new and old animal geographies are still fairly peripheral to geography as a whole, but their significance is growing rapidly. Rising per-person consumption of animal products by a growing world population leads to widespread deforestation, soil erosion, substantial emissions of methane and other greenhouse gases, freshwater shortages, reduced biodiversity, accelerated climate change, and a wide range of health hazards, including antibiotic resistance, heart disease, and such pandemic threats as mad cow disease, avian flu, and swine flu. In a world in which many rich countries spend more on their pets than most poor countries spend on their children, and in which many countries devote more farmland to producing livestock feed and biofuels than to crops for direct human consumption, it is time for animal geography to enter the mainstream!