Wild Animals in (Im)Proper Places in the Heterotopic Zoo

By Fenna Veenstra

Introduction

This paper sets up an interdisciplinary dialogue on the process of the conceptual placing of wild animals, using the zoo as a case study. Connecting the fields of animal law with animal geography, it explores how animals are placed in abstract and material spaces, which creates imaginary notions of where animals belong. We think of animals usually in terms of a domesticated-wild distinction, which seems to have very little hold outside of the imagination, where humans and animals, wild or not, live much more interrelated lives. I will open up this oppositional framework using Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s notion of liminal animals. These are the animals who do not fit the description of either wild or domesticated and which are thus seen as out of place, not belonging. To this I will add the suggestion that we need to further distinguish between invisible liminal animals (animals we are indifferent to) and those who become visible because they disturb the human order of things (animals whose presence we consider illegitimate). We classify the latter animals as pests or vermin. The zoo will be considered as a site in which three different categorizations of ‘wild’ animals come together: animals who are part of the collection, liminal animals, and pests. These are considered, respectively, ‘in place,’ ‘in-between,’ and ‘out of place’. I will rely on pest management manuals from the disciplines of zoological medicine and of pest control technology to illustrate how the very existence of zoos creates a rather paradoxical situation: they are designed to accommodate a wide variety of wild animals, but in so doing they create food and shelter opportunities for non-collection wild animals which are then deemed unwelcome. The paradox of the zoo will be explored using Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia. I will note how the emergence of zoos integrated wild animals into the fabric of society, even if it was in oppositional terms, and suggest that the fifth principle of heterotopia, that of opening and closing, can be used to illustrate how the zoo distinguishes between belonging and not-belonging wild animals. Finally, I will suggest that the need for factoring in pest control in zoos might indicate that, from the perspective of the nonhuman visitors, the zoo is not a heterotopic site at all, and I will explore what this might mean and how we can approach questions of liminality and heterotopia from a nonhuman perspective.

Animals in (im)proper places

According to Cary Wolfe, “framing decides what we recognize and what we don’t, what counts and what doesn’t; and it also determines the consequences of falling outside of that frame” (2012, 6). In Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame, Wolfe illustrates how the human-animal distinction is used in the nonhuman domain as well as in the human domain. This being placed outside of the frame (whether by human characteristics such as gender or race, or by species characteristics) means one is threatened with a “non-criminal putting to death” (Wolfe quoting Derrida, 8). To kill is only a crime, then, when it concerns those who fall inside the frame, when it concerns those who belong. Wolfe notes how biopolitical thought illuminates that the human/animal distinction is a discursive one; depending on the way the wind blows, humans, too, can be considered ‘animal’, and thus killable. Yet, given this focus on “animalization,” Wolfe argues it is ironic that “the main line of biopolitical thought has had little or nothing to say about how this logic affects nonhumans” (10). Because, it turns out, this logic works the other way around as well: “nonhuman animals are currently framed at opposite extremes in relation to moral standing and legal protection” (11). He notes the difference in how Great Apes stand before the law in comparison with, say factory animals. Animals, then, are ‘framed’ like humans are, and, according to the same discursive logic, able to fall in the frame or out of it, the latter with a consequence of killability.

This logic of belonging (that follows from ‘framing’) echoes some of the notions Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert discussed a decade earlier in the discourse of animal geography. In Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations (2000), they explore “the geographical conception of place in relation to animals” (6). They argue there are two main types of conceptual placing. The first is “the place which a particular animal, a given species of animal or even non-human animals in general can be said to possess in human classifications or orderings of the world” (ibid.). According to these classifications (for example, Linnaeus’s Systema naturae), we fix animals in “a series of abstract spaces” (ibid.). These, they argue, have very little to do with the actual places in which the animals in question live. The second type is largely imaginative as well, but relates to actual, material spaces. Philo and Wilbert refer to Said’s ‘imaginative geography,’ to argue that “many human discourses contain within them a definite imaginative geography serving to position ‘them’ (animals) relative to ‘us’ (humans) in a fashion that links a conceptual ‘othering’ … to a geographical ‘othering’” (10). This means that conceptually, we distinguish animals from ourselves through certain characteristics and based on that we fix them in places other than the ones we inhabit. This can create a rather complex spatial structure, in which we place some animals in proximity to us, while others are removed from us: “Thus, zones of human settlement (‘the city’) are envisaged as the province of pets or ‘companion animals’ …, zones of agricultural activity (‘the countryside’) are envisaged as the province of livestock animals …, and zones of unoccupied lands beyond the margins of settlement and agriculture (‘the wilderness’) are envisaged as the province of wild animals” (11).

The emergence of zoos in Europe and North America is marked by Philo and Wilbert as an important historical moment in human-animal relations, because it brought wild animals into the city, into a space in which they, conceptually, do not belong. In our imaginative geography, the zoo is a space “specifically put aside for wild animals no longer ‘in the wild’, thereby leading many people to ‘naturalise’ the zoo in the sense of accepting it unproblematically as an appropriate location for many animals” (12).^[1] The zoo as a proper place for wild animals in our imaginative geography expresses “the dual conceptual and material placements of animals” (12-3). This refers back to Wolfe’s conception of the human-animal relation as a discursive understanding, prone to making odd exceptions.

While the animals in the zoo are placed there by humans (in the process framing them as belonging there), something interesting happens when other animals transgress these initial human placements on their own accords. When rats move into the city sewers or when zoo animals escape, for example, Philo and Wilbert argue they succeed in creating their own worlds, their own categories of belonging, their own beastly spaces. The moment they do, I would argue, they fall out of our imaginative framework and, consequently, they become killable. Philo and Wilbert start to talk about ‘resistance’ and ‘agency’ on the part of the animals here, arguing that the animals seek out these beastly places to get on with their own lives “without reference to us” (19). This turns their understanding of these transgressive animals into those who inhabit only the marginal spaces of cities where humans would rather not set foot themselves, such as the aforementioned rats in the sewer.^[2] Departing, as Wilbert and Philo do, from a notion of fundamental interrelation of humans and animals–“Humans are always, and have always been, enmeshed in social relations with animals” (3)–this seems somewhat contradictory. Not in the least because it implies that animals with ‘agency’ also want to distinguish between what is theirs and what is ours, in a similar fashion as people do.

Donaldson and Kymlicka put forward a more nuanced understanding of this category of transgressing animals in Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. They set out to create a theory of animal rights based on citizenship in human rights theory. People are framed as belonging or not based on notions of territory, of place. While Wolfe, rightfully, argues that people can be non-criminally put to death in some scenarios, notions of citizenship and belonging protect us from this vulnerability. Donaldson and Kymlicka make the case that we should create a similarly extensive framework for animals, extending, for example, co-citizenship to certain animals and denizenship to others, which would be decided on a case by case basis. They point out that in our conceptualizations of animals, we often tend to distinguish only between domesticated animals and wild animals. This, however, “ignores the vast numbers of wild animals who live amongst us, even in the heart of the city” (210), ranging from pigeons to mice. Adding to this “suburban animals,” such as deer and foxes, they say “it becomes clear that we are not dealing with a few anomalous species here, but rather a large variety of non-domesticated species who have adapted to life amongst humans” (ibid.). This extends Philo and Wilbert’s understanding of the in-between animal to include animals which we do not actively marginalize (cf. squirrels in the park versus rats in the sewers) and which live among us, instead of only in marginalized places. These liminal animals, or ‘limimals’ as I like to call them, are largely invisible to us, Donaldson and Kymlicka argue. When we think of animals, they do not exist. And, as we have seen, falling outside of frameworks has consequences: “The invisibility of liminal animals does not just lead to indifference or neglect. Much worse, it often leads to a de-legitimization of their very presence” (211). Since we consider animals only as wild or domesticated, liminal animals are considered ‘out of place’ when they move into human territory. “And as a result, whenever conflicts arise with humans, we feel entitled to get rid of them, either by mass trapping/relocation or even through mass extermination campaigns” (211). This is when limimals become classified as invasive species, pests, or vermin.^[3]

For my purposes, this shift in perception is rather important, but it is glossed over by Donaldson and Kymlicka. They move on to say that “the very idea of liminal animals … is seen by many people as illegitimate, and as an affront to our conception of space” (211), but it is important to highlight that the first consequence they noted (before delegitimization) was, in fact, ‘indifference’. At one point, limimals are undisturbed, even when they freely roam about in human territory (think again of the squirrels in the park or pigeons in the plaza), and they are indeed, in a way, invisible. The exact moment they become ‘visible’ is when they are seen to be disturbing something, some human order of things (when those same pigeons cover the same plaza in poop for example or when a squirrel bites you and gives you rabies). This is when we start to consider them “an affront to our conception of space,” because we see them only in the light of their negative characteristics. Within the category of liminal animals, we can discern those who are tolerated because they are invisible, and those who are de-legitimatized because they are visible. Once visible, they are named: pests, vermin, invasive animals, etcetera. While these are elusive terms (see footnote 3), it is clear that these names are given to animals who are considered out of place, uncontrollable, harmful, and far too populous.

The paradox of pests in the zoo

The zoo encapsulates all the scenes of wild animals whom we consider either in place, out of place or in-between, and it does so within one single space. We have the zoo animals, which are, arguably (with Philo and Wilbert), in place. We find, again, the pigeons and squirrels roaming about freely, these are neither in place nor definitively out, but in-between. And then there are the pests, very much out of place. Every zoo has pests, which makes a lot of sense since every zoo is made to accomodate an entire range of animals. As Jennifer Langan notes in a chapter on pest management in a 2011 handbook on zoological medicine, “[p]ests, including insects, rodents, nuisance birds, and certain mammals, are common in zoos because of the ready availability of food, water, and shelter” (51). Every zoo needs to have a pest control plan, because this is “a critical aspect of preventive medicine at zoological parks” (ibid.). Pest control is legitimized, or even naturalized, because of a host of reasons: These animals “may be vectors or reservoirs of disease that may adversely affect zoo animals and guests” (ibid.) and they may degrade zoo structures or taint zoo aesthetics. On top of this, they cost zoos a lot of money, because they can do damage to facilities, they can endanger the specimen animals, they can introduce diseases and they eat the food that is meant for the zoo animals (Langan). What pest control focuses on is keeping the zoo specimen animals healthy, keeping the public happy, and keeping the buildings from falling apart. Limimals are allowed as long as these factors are ensured. Once one is compromised by limimal presence, they disturb the order of things and become classified as pests.

Donaldson and Kymlicka note how “urban space is defined precisely in opposition to what is wild and natural” (21). The zoo seems different in this respect in that it creates natural habitats for zoo specimens, but it does so according to a logic that is hardly wild or natural. It gathers together habitats from all over the world in one single space and divides it up into a set of distinct spaces. Just like regular urban design, zoo design gives very little consideration to limimals and, strangely, also not that much thought to pests. In the journal Pest Control Technology, an article on the specific concerns of zoo pest control notes: “To enhance the zoo experience for visitors, exhibits are often developed with native habitat themes. The materials used in construction of these displays typically involve natural items like wood, rock, plants and soil. These materials provide numerous harborage sites for various pests” (Pest Control Technology, 2015). It is explained how both public and non-public areas have severe “construction-design issues” which significantly complicate pest management. Displays in public areas use a variety of natural materials which create an entire range of living environments for numerous non-collection animals. The nonpublic areas, such as the animal enclosures and behind-the-scenes spaces, are a pest paradise as well: “Hollow-block concrete walls are a common construction material that can provide voids for pests. Cage supports may be hollow metal or wood, providing voids or preferred substrates for pests like German cockroaches.” They note how the location of most zoos in park areas “may provide a constant influx of new pests,” because wildlife such as “raccoons, foxes, feral cats, dogs and even deer may enter zoos.” We can see how the zoo would attract unwanted animals, but this manual also notes how zoos actively bring pests in. Where new animals will often be quarantined before entering, zoos “rarely have facilities for the quarantine of plants” (used in exhibits), which often harbor a host of insect life.^[4] When taking all this into account, the zoo becomes a paradox; it is a place which considers only certain wild animals as properly in place, but by its very design it generates a variety of spaces for other wild animals, which then need to be managed as being out of place.

The manual notes how zookeepers may react adversely to aggressive elimination measures: “Keepers may … be sensitive to the humane treatment of pests during the control process [because they] take the guardianship of animals very seriously.” Interestingly, this sense of caring can thus be seen to extend to animals which are not in the collection of the zoo at present. The manual notes how “establishing thresholds of acceptable pest population sizes … is useful. The zoo staff may elect to tolerate certain numbers of nuisance pests in certain areas rather than implement control.” Disturbance, it seems, is tolerated up to a certain point. Even among limimals who are visible because they disturb and are thus classified as pests, we can see there is yet another distinction to be made: those who are considered a mere ‘nuisance’ and those who are considered a direct threat.

Foucault’s heterotopia

The zoo we have encountered in this paper is one which captures different imaginations of where wild animals belong. As a space, it forces us to confront the distinction of domesticated-wild, because it is not in any way absolute, but rather discursive and thus prone to change, depending on input. Sarah Whatmore argues, in Hybrid Geographies, that our imagined notions of ‘wilderness’ are usually quite utopic. We figure wilderness as “the transcendent sign and site of the radical otherness of a nature without a past; an immaculate space defiled by any taint of human presence” (2002, 13). Imagining it as such, the ‘wild’ does not entangle itself with human life. Whatmore argues that Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (as opposed to utopia) is much more fruitful to use when critically engaging with ‘the wild,’ because it “forces us to confront… volatile exteriorizations as places of our own making, configured in relation to interiorized sites of knowledge, imagination and desire” (ibid.). Whatmore’s cue to reconfigure wilderness along heterotopic terms seems warranted, but it might be useful to specify the space of the wild less broadly (because considering all of wilderness as one place out there still sounds rather utopic). The zoo seems a perfect place to start. In our imaginations, we consider the zoo a place to (safely) encounter wildlife, and in reality we now see how the zoo harbors three categories of wild animals in one localized space.

Before looking at the zoo and its animals through the lens of heterotopia, I will take some time to explore Foucault’s concept (using the 1986 Diacritics article, translated by Jay Moskowiec and titled “Of Other Spaces”). ‘Heterotopia’ is inspired by the medical^[5] term of the same name and the word is derived from the Greek words heteros (other) and topos (place). According to Foucault, heterotopias are spaces that, in contrast to utopias, “do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society” (24, my emphasis). While they are created by societal impulses, heterotopias are ‘other’ spaces, “counter-sites” that are “absolutely different from all the sites they reflect and speak about” (ibid.). Foucault argued that heterotopic spaces function according to six principles, which help explain what kind of spaces heterotopias are.

Firstly, while heterotopias are constituted by (“probably,” Foucault says) all cultures in the world, there is “no universal form of heterotopias” (ibid.) Helpfully, Foucault distinguishes between two main categories: crisis heterotopias and heterotopias of deviation. The first category are privileged, sacred, or forbidden spaces which are reserved for individuals who are, according to societal norms, “in a state of crisis” (ibid.). Obviously, this would vary throughout the world, but Foucault offers the examples of “adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, the elderly, etc” (ibid.). Funnily enough, these heterotopias of crisis are themselves in a state of crisis, since they “are disappearing today and are being replaced by … heterotopias of deviation” (25) (Here, I cannot help but wonder if it makes sense to speak of two categories if the one actually replaces the other). This second category of heterotopias harbors individuals displaying deviant behavior. Examples are: psychiatric hospitals, prisons, and retirement homes. The second principle is that “each heterotopia has a precise and determined function” (ibid.) which is reflective of the society from which they spring. This function can change over time (Foucault gives the example of the cemetery here). Thirdly, heterotopic spaces can “juxtapos[e] in a single real space several spaces” (ibid.). Foucault exemplifies this through the theater stage and the gardens of the Orient, where the first brings a series of different worlds onto one space, while this type of garden brings together a representation of four different parts of the world, creating a microcosm. (Interestingly, but perhaps unimportantly, both these examples are “rectangular” spaces.) The fourth principle is that heterotopias are “linked to slices in time” (26). Foucault once again uses the example of the cemetery, arguing that this is where people “arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time” (ibid.) (ie. death). Perhaps because this seems like kind of a discussion stopper, Foucault takes some time to explain other types of heterotopias linked to slices of time, as well: In some, time accumulates, like in libraries and museums, and in others time is transitory, like festivals or temporary fairgrounds. The fifth principle determines that heterotopic spaces always “presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (ibid.). They are not easily accessible but require permission to enter through a ticket, a gesture, or some kind of ritual. Examples are the “hamman of the Moslems” or “Scandinavian saunas” (ibid.) and Foucault highlight some other ‘famous’ (a word he seems to enjoy) examples of bedrooms meant for transitory guests on farms in South America and American motel rooms. Lastly, heterotopias “have a function in relation to all the space that remains” (27). Here, once again, a distinction is to be made, although Foucault refers to it as this principle functioning “between two extreme poles” (ibid.). It is either a space of illusion which exposes real, normal spaces as even more illusory–again, we get a ‘famous’ example: “those brothels of which we are now deprived” (ibid.) (an example which leaves many a scholar puzzled, so how famous is this really?)–or it is a space of compensation, which is “as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill-constructed, and jumbled” (ibid.). Foucault offers up the Puritan societies of the English as an example, as well as “those extraordinary Jesuit colonies … founded in South America” (ibid.), in which “existence was regulated at every turn” (ibid.). Foucault closes with the ship as the “heterotopia par excellence” (ibid., italics in text), “a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself” (ibid.), adding that, as such, it has been “the greatest reserve of the imagination” (ibid.). While the ship example is mentioned briefly and seems flawed and unfinished (for instance, Foucault’s insistence that a ship exists by itself seems to contradict both the second and the sixth principle), it does make me wonder if the capacity for stirring the imagination should, in fact, be another principle of heterotopia.

The zoo as heterotopia

Foucault himself already offers his reader the idea that “our modern zoological gardens” (26) are successors to the ancient Persian gardens, which are heterotopias. While Foucault stops there, one can see how each different zoo enclosure carries an exotic specimen (and exhibition cues) representing the place from whence the animal originates. One single zoo can encompass every corner of the world into one space, like a microcosm. According to Jody Berland in Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures, the zoo brings “entities formerly separated by distance … into new relations of proximity to one another. The spaces that are juxtaposed are incompatible–you would not, for example, see polar bears and elephants living in proximity to each other except at the zoo” (20). This refers to the third principle, but the zoo is heterotopic in other ways as well: It is a counter-site in which a deviation (ie. animality) to the ‘human’ norm can exist within the fabric of society (first principle); it has a certain societal function which can change over time (second principle), although, perhaps the zoo’s function is not “precise and determined,” as Foucault wants them, since it ever-oscillates between one of science, conservation, education, and entertainment; the zoo is an archive, in a sense, of living entities, related to slices in time, since the zoo accumulates time through species conservation and breeding programs (fourth principle); to enter a zoo, one requires permission (fifth principle), which is true both for nonhuman (limimal and collection) and human animals, although the shape of that permission varies; and the zoo is, I would argue, a heterotopic space of compensation (sixth principle), where animal existence is regulated and isolated to such a degree that it bears no resemblance to their ‘real’ ways of being.

The coming into existence of zoos was a key historical moment, because it can be argued it was the moment in which ‘modern’ societies implicitly admitted that wild animals are part of the fabric of society. Even if this meant wild animals were depicted as heterotopic (ie. abnormal) tissue in an otherwise properly functioning societal body, they are still part of it, and their presence does not disturb the order of things. As a tangible expression of our attitude towards (some) wild animals, the zoo as heterotopia presents us with an image of human-animal interrelation. The wildness of animals in the zoo is thus as much ‘in place’ as madness of people is in psychiatric institutes, both of which are frowned upon (or cause severe outrage) when roaming freely through the streets, but are considered properly located when enclosed in their designated spaces. As with heterotopic tissue in a body, they can co-exist in such a way that its presence does not compromise the normal functionality of the totality. If it did, it would be invasive tissue, which heterotopias are specifically not. This makes it all the more interesting that within the heterotopic space that is the zoo, some wild animals are, in fact, considered invasive. In the zoo, space is created within society for wild animals, but with specific intent. Leaving aside the particulars of this intent (science, conservation, education, entertainment), what we find is a collection of categorized animals. Keeping the comparison going with madness, one cannot just go run about the property of a psychiatric institute when you are ‘mad,’ you need to be referred, registered, assigned a treatment plan. You need to be archived, in a way. The answer to the question of why some wild animals do not belong in a zoo seems rather straightforward, then: they are simply not part of the collection.

This does not, however, fully explain the tolerance for limimals or nuisance animals. Interestingly, Foucault’s fifth principle of heterotopias can be said to denote the accessibility of the zoo for humans (the public), but for animals too. The fifth principle refers to how heterotopias “always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (26). To get into a heterotopic space “one must have certain permission” (ibid.). The South American guest bedrooms are designed so that visitors can enter the house, but in no way reach the central family room. The visitor is “absolutely the guest in transit, … not really the invited guest” (ibid.). In the zoo, the public is visiting according to the heterotopic site’s logic of opening and closing. They can come in, the zoo is penetrable, but they cannot reach the animals. The public is in transit.^[6] The presence of limimals is tolerated in the zoo, then, because these animals follow a transitory logic as well, which leaves the zoo’s heterotopic system of opening and closing intact. Even when limimals become nuisance pests they are still tolerated, since they are not a direct threat, as we have seen. Relocation or extermination only comes in when there is a risk of bodily harm (to the collection or the humans), when the buildings are degraded, or when there is an economic cost. When none of this is damaged, the zoo’s metaphorical family room remains uncompromised. Using the concept of heterotopia, threats can thus be said to arise when the logic of penetration does not co-occur with that of isolation.

The nonhuman perspective on heterotopia

However, unlike other heterotopic sites such as psychiatric institutes or South American guest rooms, however, zoos need to factor in pest control. In other words, they expect the threat of uncontrolled invasion. This could be an indication that, from the perspective of wild animals, the zoo is not a heterotopic site at all. Obviously, the concept of heterotopia is one which presupposes that certain counter-spaces are created by human cultural impulses, disregarding the nonhuman contribution or presence in these spaces entirely. One could argue that the concept is in need of a redefinition which incorporates nonhuman ‘other’ places. But this might needlessly reaffirm a divide between the human and the nonhuman. Considering Foucault argues that heterotopias are spaces “formed in the very founding of society” (24), and considering the fundamental interrelation of human and animals which Wolfe, Donaldson and Kymlicka, Philo and Wilbert, and Whatmore take as a starting point, it might make more sense to think that those spaces formed in the founding of society can be considered a product of this interrelation. As such, all heterotopias would be both human and nonhuman and different from the (also both nonhuman and human) sites they reflect and refer to. Specifically taking into account the context of the zoo, another direction to take is to (try and) focus on the perspectives of the three categories of wild animals that are present in the zoo. Do zoo specimen animals consider themselves as outsiders to the human culture in which they are placed, but nevertheless a part of it? Can one compare this to how prisoners or psychiatric clients perceive themselves with regards to their place in society? And what about both the visible and nonvisible limimals, the ones we deem (fully or partially) out of place? It would be tempting to think that these animals do not consider themselves transitory visitors, the way the heterotopic zoo categorizes them; the fact that they sometimes stay and move into places that are not ‘theirs’ would point to this. As Philo and Wilbert did, one might view their presence as an attempt to create their own (beastly) spaces. They noted that these are created without reference to us, and perhaps this can be understood, in this context, not as seeking out spaces that are undisturbed by people (rats in sewers), but as creating those spaces (‘their’ spaces) without taking note of the human categorizations which created, what we understand as, the zoo (‘our’ space). Turning this question of the heterotopic zoo and the nonhuman perspective around once more, we find another direction: If we take as a starting point a fundamental interrelation of the human and nonhuman world and look at the concept of heterotopia accordingly, incorporating the, specifically, limimal perspective, then we could argue that the insufficient functioning of the zoo’s system of opening and closing (as a heterotopic sixth principle) with regard to some of its nonhuman visitors means the zoo is actually not a heterotopia. Similarly, of course, if one starts to think from the perspective of limimals one might easily question their status as liminal entities; the fact that they have the potential to overstay their welcome in the zoo might, indeed, indicate something about the heterotopic structure of the zoo, but it might also mean that these animals do not consider themselves as transitory or liminal, since they go about their day without reference to this categorization. While these are perhaps merely thought-experiments, looking at the zoo through a heterotopic lens while incorporating the nonhuman perspective has the potential to completely overthrow theoretical understandings we might take for granted.

Conclusion

Earlier in this paper, we found that the concept of heterotopia was useful to explore the system (the set of rules) the zoo uses to categorize different wild animals according to place, but it ended up being not that different from the way the rest of society conceptualizes and places animals. This might be because, according to Foucault, heterotopias are spaces in which the culture from which they arise is “simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (24). Visiting the zoo is a break from the everyday experience of life, but it is not a radical break. It still fits within our imaginative geography of where animals belong and, also, where we belong. The zoo as heterotopia is a rather fragile structure of imagined geographical belonging; it only requires one zoo animal escape or one human falling into a predator enclosure to be severely disturbed, to cause “moral panics” (Philo and Wilbert, 21). The zoo specimens are obviously animals, but clearly categorized and put there by human efforts. The limimals, on the other hand, occupy the space according to a different logic. I have tried to illustrate how the zoo is a heterotopic space, specifically through its fifth principle of opening and closing, and have found that, in looking at this space from a limimal perspective, this principle does not seem to apply all that much. Unlike other heterotopic sites such as psychiatric institutes or South American guest rooms, zoos need to factor in pest control, which means they expect the threat of uncontrolled invasion, because the zoo is a place in which non-specimen animals can thrive. It is exactly the limimals, the not belonging animals, who are able to alter our understanding of the space of the zoo as we know it. Thus, while the zoo still provides a localized example of human-animal interrelation which is, at the same time and in the same place, an example of “the jarring juxtapositions … of how nonhuman animals are currently framed at opposite extremes” (Wolfe, 11), we also find that it is a space in which some animals can actually go against human framing and placing, without specifically having to break out of their human-appointed enclosures (the way zoo specimens do). Following these animals, we find one way to incorporate the nonhuman perspective into our view of the world, which, instantly, shifts the way we know things. Indeed, with Whatmore, we find it “forces us to confront… volatile exteriorizations as places of our own making, configured in relation to interiorized sites of knowledge, imagination and desire” (13).

Notes

^[1] They complicate the part about this being ‘unproblematic,’ noting how zoos “are often highly contested places … where what has developed into a tripartite relation between science, entertainment and education has always been uneasy” (12). They admit that there are many critics who would deem zoo animals ‘out of place’ in the zoo and would argue that they ‘belong’ in the wild. The zoo as a notion, however, is unproblematic in its familiarity to most people, concerning a place which carries a collection of wild and exotic animals which people can come to see.

^[2] Interestingly, Philo and Wilbert leave the escaped zoo animals behind for their discussion of beastly places. While this somewhat flaws their argument, one could imagine it is because these particular escapees tend to not live very long once they move outside of their confinement (and are unable to find a space in which they can live, as Philo and Wilbert say, without reference to people). Even more, for zoo animals, transgressing human placement means they are instantly killable. For more on resistance and killability in zoo animals see, for instance, Jason Hribal’s Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance (2010).

^[3] It is surprisingly difficult to clearly distinguish these terms from each other. The Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘invasive’ as: “moving into all areas of something and difficult to stop,” adding that “[a]n invasive organism is one that has arrived in a place from somewhere else and has a harmful effect on that place.” A ‘pest,’ then, is “an insect or small animal that is harmful or damages crops,” while ‘vermin’ are “small animals and insects that can be harmful and are difficult to control when they appear in large numbers.” All of these are harmful in some way, but invasive animals are defined by their coming from elsewhere. Pests and vermin seem to both concern small animals, with the former being defined more by the harm they do, while the latter come in large uncontrollable numbers. However, pest control companies usually make other distinctions: One pest control company (Richmond Sugar Land Houston BUGCO) identifies pests as insects, while vermin are wild mammals. They highlight this difference in order to tell people not to call them when they are troubled by larger mammals such as squirrels and foxes (these are the responsibility of local animal control departments). Their company, however, does deal with smaller mammals such as mice and rats. I, personally, have seen rats who were either substantially larger than squirrels or roughly the same size, so this puzzles me. While this topic would warrant some further inquiry, it seems this is rather beyond the scope of this paper, and thus, for now, I will use the terms interchangeably.

^[4] They note how “[p]ests like red imported fire ants, Caribbean crazy ants and ghost ants have made their way into zoos on horticultural nursery stock. Other examples of pests imported into zoo and aquarium buildings on landscaping materials include wood-boring beetles, carpenter ants, fire ants, ghost ants and ornamental plant pests like scales and aphids that may then support ant development and survival.”

^[5] In medicine, heterotopia refers to tissue which grows, in a body, in a different place than usual. It is not harmful in any way, just dislocated (Johnson 2006). One can consider heterotopia as something which naturally belongs in a bodily system, but which, only because of its odd location, seems to not belong. It nevertheless co-exists without complications with the bodily tissues that actually are growing in their proper places.

^[6] This might also contribute to the lamentation that one cannot really encounter a wild animal in the zoo. One could argue this has very little to do with the state of captivity of the animals, as something which supposedly reduces their wildness, but more with the heterotopic logic of zoo design. If the public were able to bypass the system of opening and closing and end up in the domain of a zoo specimen, they might indeed all of a sudden find themselves really encountering a wild animal and possibly not live to tell it.

Works cited

Berland, Jody. “Hard and Soft Menageries.” In Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures, 17-46. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019.

Donaldson, Sue & Will Kymlicka. Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Moskowiec. Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22-27.

Hribal, Jason. Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance. Oakland: AK Press/ Counterpunch, 2010.

Johnson, Peter. “Unravelling Foucault’s ‘different spaces.’” History of the Human Sciences 19.4 (2006): 75-90.

Langan, Jennifer. “Integrated Pest Management.” In Fowler’s Zoo and Wild Animal Medicine: Current Therapy. Missouri: Elsevier Saunders, 2012. 51-59.

“Pest Management in Zoos and Aquariums.” Pest Control Technology (2015). Web. Accessed 6 April 2020. <https://www.pctonline.com/article/pest-management-in–zoos-and-aquariums/>

Philo, Chris & Chris Wilbert. “Animal spaces, beastly places: An introduction.” In Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations. London: Routledge, 2000. 1-36.

Whatmore, Sarah. Hybrid Geographies: Natures Cultures Spaces. London: Sage Publications, 2002.

Wolfe, Cary. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.