The recent 'animal turn' in geography has contributed to a critical examination of the inseparable geographies of human and non-human animals, and has a clear ethical dimension. This paper is intended to explore these same ethical issues through a consideration of the historical geography of petkeeping as this relates to the death and commemoration of favourite household animals. The emergence of the pet cemetery, towards the end of the 19th century, is a significant step in itself, but this was only (...) one element in a radical reappraisal of the place of non-human animals in human sensibility and spirituality. For some bereaved pet-owners, the old question of the immortality of animal souls was retrieved and transformed, and sustained by a raft of unorthodox theological and spiritual speculation. The significance of this late Victorian and Edwardian response to non-human animals is assessed and treated as a problem of ethics, as a counterweight to the dominant anthropocentrism of past times and ours. (shrink)

Explorations of the boundaries between human culture and non-human nature have clear ethical dimensions. Developing both from philosophical arguments about the value of such boundaries and recent empirical work following the traffic across them, we seek to complement these discussions through a consideration of how these boundaries can be enacted by ourselves, as researchers, and the methods we employ. As part of an agenda seeking to reconsider organic agency within geographical narrative, we have been exploring different techniques for documenting the (...) ways in which such agencies are encountered. Specifically, we are interested in plants and the ways in which they might be researched in new ways by human geographers. Based on two particular pieces of research into human-plant dealings, our aim is one of exploring their lively presence as part of a performative environmental ethics enacted, in part, through the very practice of the research encounter. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the positioning of animals other than human in the texts and practices of two versions of small-scale food "self-sufficiency" in Britain. The paper discusses the writings of Cobbett and Seymour on self-sufficiency, suggesting that livestock animals are central, in a number of ways, to the constitution of these modes of self-sufficiency. First, animals are situated in both the texts and in the practicing of self-sufficiency regarded as essential parts of the economies and ecologies of small-scale food (...) production. Second, animals' parts in these authors' criticisms of wider social, economic and political conditions supplement their role in small-scale domestic food supply. Animals become associated with a morality of human behavior and lifestyle and are part of the broader social critiques that the writing and practicing of these modes of self-sufficiency imply. These historically and geographically specific versions of self-sufficiency are valuable in defining and enacting possible alternative modes of human-animal relation in the context of food production. (shrink)

This paper investigates consistency in applied moral philosophy with regard to the recent controversy over Makah whaling in the state of Washington. The first part presents both sides of the controversy. The second part examines the meaning of 'tradition' and distinguishes between 'new' and 'old' traditions. The third part explores what might constitute moral consistency for the Makah and what might constitute moral consistency for the larger community.

This paper makes a contribution to nonhuman animal studies by discussing the tensions in practices, discourses, and narratives of hunting in a settler postcolonial society. It aims to present a discussion of how the imperialist construct of the “exotic” is applied to nonhuman animals. The focus of the paper is on the different roles the exotic animal status plays in the hunting experience in New Zealand, and how other agencies also play a part in the construction of the hunting discourses (...) and personal narratives in relation to the exotic animal. The paper concludes that the exotic concept is closely linked to a celebration of New Zealand’s distinctiveness from their colonizer. Always a process of “Othering,” the exotic status not only impinges on the relationship established with the nonhuman animal prey, but also leads to an inconsistent discourse that implies a speciesist position, one which is nonetheless consistent with a dominionist performance. (shrink)