ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the slippery boundaries between pet and vermin, by the zooming in on the process of emplaced "verminizing" of human and non-human actors in the context of urban animal hoarding. It highlights the diversity in which more-than-human urban relations are formed, regulated and experienced. For early behavioral and social scientists studying crowding in the 1950s and 1960s, the focus was set mainly on problematic features of being confined to a limited space: stress, poor health, immorality, and more. Crowding, as developed here, is about the spatial formation of a collective in a certain social setting, transforming experiences and identities through formative action, and transgressing categories and individuals. The promises of crowding in zoocities lie not so much in peaceful reconciliation, but in the potential ruptures and leakages that the agonistic heterogeneity poses to the ideals of hegemonic purity.
