ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three spaces of encounter: 'the personal', 'public health' and 'the ecological'. It evaluates material from public health discourse, media reports on environmental management, auto-ethnographic writings, scientific papers, a novel, the work of a naturalist from the turn of the nineteenth century, and of three late twentieth-century philosophers. Animal spaces focus on how animals are crucial to 'human' spaces and places – how our seemingly exclusively human social worlds are built on, through and with animal life and attend to the consequential spatial ordering of animals by people. Encountering ticks causes existing animal spaces to be folded along spatial and temporal lines. Ticks connect the here with the there, the now with the then, urban with rural, human with nonhuman, nature with culture, such that they fracture animal spaces. The indifferent animal is an animal that does not cease to be animal but escapes being animal to humanity's human.
