ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that animal becoming and animal personhood are articulated in particular, affective, spatialised and embodied practices. These practices are differently materialised and socialised in the life narratives of individual animals, as well as sketched out in their instinctive species’ repertoires. Animals enact – animals are – affective spatial becomings. Thus geography, as the spatial science, has an intellectual, moral and political duty to reveal their lives. The chapter develops the excellent work already conducted within animal geography by stressing aspects of the affective, spatialised, embodied becomings of animals. To answer the still very challenging questions – how do we “hear animal voices” and “bring them into our accounts as others” – the author proposes paying very close attention to their embodied spatial narratives. Getting close to animals, and observing them attentively, can be done through scientific study, philosophy, literature, natural histories, artistic practice or paying close attention to the animals we live with. The chapter explores a series of themes: seeing animals as strange persons (who look back); the differences and continuities between humans and animals and re-thinking anthropomorphism; challenging ideas of “becoming animal”; questions of the open, ethics and welfare; and witnessing as a form of “knowing” animals.
