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Oikos and Domus: On constructive co-

habitation with other creatures
a
Ralph Acampora
a
Department of Philosophy, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY,
USA
Published online: 19 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Ralph Acampora (2004): Oikos and Domus: On constructive co-habitation with
other creatures, Philosophy & Geography, 7:2, 219-235

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 PHILOSOPHY & GEOGRAPHY, VOL. 7, NO. 2, AUGUST 2004

ARTICLE

Oikos and Domus: On Constructive

Co-Habitation with Other Creatures

RALPH ACAMPORA
Department of Philosophy, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, USA
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Abstract Semi-urban ecotones exist on the periphery and in the midst of many human
population centers. This article addresses the need for and nature of an ethos appropriate to
inter-species contact in such zones. It first examines the historical and contemporary intellectual
resources available for developing this kind of ethic, then surveys the range of possible
relationships between humans and other animals, and finally investigates the morality of
multi-species neighborhoods as a promising model. Discussion of these themes has the effect, in
conclusion, of dismantling notorious dualisms traditionally associated with the geographic
imagination (city/wild, human/animal, nature/culture).

To inhabit the world is not to dominate or renounce it, but to play in it, learn
from it, care for it, and realize the beauty of its meanings.1

Introduction
Although an ideology of civilizing progress has held sway for most of modernity in the
West, consolidating theoretically through the Enlightenment and practically through the
industrial and technological revolutions, a small yet strong set of voices in modern
Western philosophy has challenged the progressivist project of civilization. From
Rousseau and Nietzsche to Heidegger and Foucault, civility/urbanity is tantamount to
domesticity or technicism, which itself is viewed as disease, disaster, or danger. Much
of the late-modern movement against anthropocentrism, for instance environmentalism
and animal advocacy, in its suspicion of urbanization and domestication, participates in
and extends this minoritarian tradition of skepsis (e.g., deep ecology and animal
liberation critiques of city or captivity and celebrations of wildness or freedom).
Through the present discussion I propose to examine more closely the tendency to
disparage or demonize domestication, especially as it bears on our relations with
different forms of (chiefly animal) life.2 Beyond any Rousseauvian appeal to noble
savagery as well as the Heideggerian option of dwelling-without-dominating by letting-
be (Gelassenheit), yet without succumbing to a Foucauldian pessimism about the
ISSN 1090-3771 print/ISSN 1472-7242 online/04/020219-17 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1090377042000285426
 220 R. ACAMPORA

production of power in any communal setting or relationship, I want to see if an

engagement-without-exploitation approach to living with other animals (and internal
animality) makes any sense. Might it be possible and desirable, in other words, to
cultivate an inter-species oikos that is not already (nor becomes) an oppressive domus?
This question has particular purchase in the contexts of spreading exurban geography
and what we might call the reinhabitation of cities by plucky wildlife.3 Such contexts
present us with morally problematic situations that cry for a reassessment and fine-tun-
ing of our cross-species ethos. In turn, these latter endeavors will require structural
awareness of pertinent spatial institutions and decolonization efforts.4
The first figure I will take up in prosecuting the investigation outlined above is
Nietzsche, whose work is subtler than his still-current caricature seems to suggest.
Elsewhere I have characterized Nietzsches thought-praxis as a ferine mode of philoso-
phizing, meaning that his project emphasizes the animal nature of humanity and values
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an intermediate mode of it between wildness and domesticity.5 Because it is not wholly

wild, feral philosophys paradoxical cultivation of transcendence can court confusion
with the domesticative disease infecting civilization (as seen by Nietzsche). There is,
however, a distinction that may be drawn between the residential and the carceral. I
think it is Nietzsches hope that the house of culture to be built by his free spirits of the
future will not be like the jail cell of European Christendom. Construction of a cultural
home, in other words, does not have to be oppressively domestic. Rather than repressing
wild animality, it might be flexible enough to let the animal in us emerge and return
occasionally to the wilderness.6 Beyond this point, furthermore, there is an aspect of
Nietzsche that positively affirms what could be called training without taming.7
Indeed, the (Nietzschean) philosophers cultural advent and pedagogical practice is
described in terms of discipline and cultivation.8 More broadly, Nietzsche is clear that
an important part of any spiritual growth is a going-under that requires taking on
burdens of pain and involves deep distress. In Beyond Good and Evil, he asks rhetorically:
That tension in the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its
shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring,
persevering, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been
granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatnesswas it not
granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?9
This kind of phenomenon echoes the disciplinary virtues described in Zarathustras
Three Metamorphoses.10 It is also tied to what Nietzsche calls breeding, something
that he explicitly discriminates from taming and extols for its vivifying potency:
There is no worse confusion than the confusion of breeding with tam-
ing: Breeding as I understand it, is a means of storing up the tremendous
forces of mankind so that the generations can build upon the work of their
forefathersnot only outwardly, but inwardly, organically growing out of them
and becoming something stronger.11
How, then, can this sort of training be distinguished from the domestication process
Nietzsche so often excoriates? One way would be to lean on structural and qualitative
distinctions drawn between modes of being and differing applications thereof.12 For
Nietzsche the Christian form of domestication uproots our biological make-up and
supplants it with a life-denigrating orientation (disposition or being-mode), whereas the
cultivation he promotes would train (harbor and apply) certain organic drives in a
life-enhancing direction or vector.13 In terms of Nietzsches animal imaginary, the beast
 OIKOS AND DOMUS 221

of burden outranks the herd animal because working as the former can serve a genuinely
culture-building function, and thus breeds a vital nobility or dignity that the latter lacks
and even counteracts through its debilitating regime of civilization.
So far, this Nietzschean perspective would seem to treat, in the first instance at
least, only our relations to the animal nature within human being. What about our
relationships with nonhuman animals? Could something like Nietzsches approach work
here too, or would it break down under transference to interspecific situations? Unfor-
tunately, the conspecific precedent (among different groups of humans) is not promising,
for the proto-historical training project that Nietzsche speculates was performed by
masters upon subordinates was thoroughly brutalizing. Daniel Conway describes it:
The[se] beasts of prey practice their artistry [of discipline] most powerfully
in the preferred medium of other human beings. In bringing order and purpose
to a formerly formless populace, the[y] breathe life into an otherwise moribund
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mass of humanity. Nietzsche thus refers to them, approvingly, as artists of

violence 14
It is difficult not to find this imagery abhorrent, Conway remarks concisely and thus
clouds the prospect of utilizing Nietzsches influence for our present purposes.15
However, perhaps we can still take some Nietzschean inspiration from and for the
idea of training-without-taming, even if Nietzsche himself did not develop a detailed
(and morally digestible) account of its praxis. If we wish to proceed on this basis in order
to resume our original query about relations with other organisms, then the first thing
we have to clear away is the false dilemma that too often straitjackets discussions of what
may constitute a viable inter-species ethos. We should not, that is, limit our choices
dualistically to either a leave-them-alone attitude or a thoroughly hands-on posture.
After all, in the light of the past generations bioethical and environmental theorizing
and practice, neither species-apartheid nor arrogant humanism looks very promising.
Fortunately, however, there are many other options available between these poles.

Intimations of Belonging
To appreciate the range of possibilities, we have to break out from the spell of the
notorious nature-culture dichotomy. For it is this dualism, along with a puritanical
wilderness spin on the notion of nature, that draws many people into the conceptual trap
of assigning other animals to one or the other pole, and consequently to adopt or
endorse either quietistic or imperious stances toward nonhuman life forms. One strategy
for dissolving the root polarity is to collapse culture into nature (a la sociobiology or
evolutionary psychology) or nature into culture (as per post-naturalism).16 I will take
a different path, that of charting a conceptual spectrum, because I think some differen-
tiation is worth preserving even after the dilemma at hand is dissolved. In other words,
I agree with the categorial logic of Albert Borgmann when he states that a distinction
is helpful if it provides orientation and a continuum, firmly anchored at its extremes,
does this as well as a dichotomy.17 Once we get the relevant continuum articulated
here, I would add, we will be in a better position to orientate ourselves ethically with
respect to other inhabitants of the global biosphere and our local ecosystems.
Between the poles of pristine wilderness eternally untouched by artifice and a world
completely created by design of external agency, what is the spectrum of human
presence in or with its environment? How shall we account for the degrees of interpen-
etration between cultural and natural effects? Let us start just inside the wilderness
 222 R. ACAMPORA

extremity because, strangely, the truly wild would be beyond not only the tangible touch
but also the cognitive grasp of humans. Since the truly wild is unknown and unknow-
able by definition, it should be bypassed in silence. Discovery, therefore, is the initial
mode of presencing: we become aware of the natural, at first sensorily, then perceptively,
and ultimately in terms of knowledge (whether through familiar acquaintance or by
scientific comprehension). This mode may already shade into another, more intensive
phase of presence. For in coming to know a natural object, we often literally make
contact with it. When examining a rock, for instance, observation may include outright
handling.
The next pair of grades are best described by comparison with each other as well
as to prior phases. Intervention involves more than mere contact, but can be dis-
tinguished from influence at least stipulatively and perhaps even etymologically: whereas
the former connotes a negative aspect of interference or interruption, the latter has a
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more positively active connotation of producing change or alteration in a natural process

or state. Examples might be found in various human interactions with rivers: a dam
intervenes in the natural watercourse, and sewer outflow influences the content of the
water by changing its composition.
Lastly, there are two more levels of intensity at which human presencing may
operate. Once the shapings and promptings of intervention and influence have effected
phenomena of control or mastery, we have entered the grade of domination. A paradigm
illustration is the institution of pet keeping, especially where this involves obedience
training. At its utmost, dominion would in principle extend toward total determination
of a natural entitys behavior. It is doubtful whether such mastery is ever actually
attained, but as the degree of human control rises and approaches the asymptote of
dictatorial power we become more apt to speak of a being or occurrence as artificial.
However, one last threshold remains, namely, that of constitution or construction. At this
point we make or invent the phenomena at hand. Paragons include the composition of
artwork, the development of language and rituals, and the manufacture of tools and
machinery. Arguably, future if not present products of biotechnology and genetic
engineering might be classified in this category, though I rather doubt it, in light of Mark
Sagoffs persuasive argument that current examples qualify at least legally more as
occasions of altered being than as newly designed artifacts.18 The limit-case of the scale
we are mapping is, of course, complete creation ex nihilo (e.g., world-genesis depending
on your cosmogony, and perhaps ideation depending on your philosophy of mind).
So much, then, by way of charting a continuum of human presence in environment.
Where along this spectrum of presencingbetween the extremes of absolute distance
(nature totally beyond culture) and pseudo-divine artistry (nature wholly produced by
culture) might we best find cues for an engagement-without-exploitation model in our
relationships with other forms of life? Discovery and contact are risky because relying on
those modes exclusively could reify other organisms by treating them as if they were
inert objects or mere things. Think of how the currently ascendant mode of discovery,
that is modern science, presupposes a subject-object dyad wherein the latter is almost
always conceived as being-in-itself or what-it-is (i.e., lacking self-transcending proper-
ties). In Heideggerian parlance, such a method would assign animate others to the status
of being present-at-hand, whereas what we are seeking is a vision of co-presence or
Mitsein. Near the other pole, however, construction or determination go too far in that
their consistent application to biotic beings occludes access to alterity, as is amply
evidenced by the other-denying tendencies at work in the already established order of
domination (whereby organic integrity is compromised in the process of being
 OIKOS AND DOMUS 223

transmogrified or enframed into resources for consumption or standing reserve).

There is, in other words, an unfortunate if understandable tendency for the constructor
to so impress his stamp upon the constructed as to see himself reflected back in the
construction.19
Dominions darker side notwithstanding, the principle has also harbored a kinder
aspect of benign despotism. In environmental ethics generally, the paradigm of steward-
ship is a good example of this. With specific regard to animal ethics, kinship, often
implicitly parenting, is the relevant model. Stewardship has been criticized for maintain-
ing the air and apparatus of hegemony in that it presupposes a structure of subordina-
tion between guardian and the object of custody. While this does not necessitate
oppression, it all too often amounts to that. Likewise, (at least parental) kinship as a
metaphor-to-live-by can be charged with encouraging homocentric patronage rather
than biocentric respect.20 Although animal advocates such as Jim Mason have champi-
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oned the kinship model, its ambivalence as an ethical guide for inter-species relations
has been acutely demonstrated by the phenomenological geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan.21
The problem, in brief, is that living out the kinship metaphor tends to induce a
mothering or paternalistic sense of caring whence, a condescension borne of protective-
ness creeps into the relation. Thus, in Tuans words, Affection mitigates domination,
making it softer and more acceptable, but affection itself is possible only in relationships
of inequality. It is the warm and superior feeling one has toward things one can care for
and patronize.22 This is easy to see if we reflect for a moment on the most popular
enactment of interspecific kinship, namely when pet-keepers relate to their charges as
members of the family. Belittling is frequently a by-product of the very endearment
built into such relationships. Moreover, as one anthropologist has recently noted,
treating pets as diminutive anthropoids leads keepers to suppress the kept animals
nature and repress their own human animality through physical and psychological
means of eliminating or muting alimentary, olfactory, and sexual vitality.23 Ironically,
the kinship model often ends up concealing rather than celebrating continuity between
human and other animals.
So far, then, my attempt to rehabilitate a life-affirming notion of discipline in
cross-species concourse has not met with much success. There is another thinker,
though, whose work may be of greater help to us. Vicki Hearne regularly handled
animals such as dogs and horses, and, following Stanley Cavells synthesis of literature
and philosophy as a model, she wrote up her training experience in terms of language
games, a late Wittgensteinian notion that explains linguistic meaning by focusing on
behavioral context and cultural analysis instead of appealing to mentalistic intentions.
Her main thesis in the book, Adams Task, is that it makes sense to speak of some
nonhuman animals as genuine persons who actively participate in a transpecific social
space that can be rightly designated a moral cosmos. Indicative of this assertion are the
various inter-species work narratives told by Hearne, accounts that intelligibly use such
ethically charged concept-words as autonomy, trustworthy, responsibility, commitment,
collaboration, character, dignity, pride, virtue, happiness, excellence, and nobility. These
stories lead her to a number of fruitful insights, one of the most refreshing of which is
her conclusion that interspecific relationships can have their own authenticity: a working
canine-hominid partnership, for example, is not an incomplete version of something
else. It is a complete dog-human relationship.24
Hearne can make this statement without committing herself to any Disneyesque
thesis about fancifully humanoid behavior of dogs. Indeed, she remarks that, because
our structure of belief is overwhelmingly ocular while dogs is predominantly olfactory,
 224 R. ACAMPORA

we inhabit worlds with radically different principles of phenomenology. Hearne

continues in species-integrating fashion: We do talk to dogs about scent, and some
people do it quite well.25 She goes on to relate parables of cross-species perception and
understanding, which show that, though there are deep phenomenological differences
between distinct kinds of animal, these do not constitute an absolute existential divide.
For instance, they do not hermeneutically preclude communicative interrelationships.
An example is the somatological conversation about wind-awareness that develops
between a human handler and a tracking dog as they sensorily check and balance, trust
and lead each other toward their common goal.26 What happens in such working
situations is that genuine animal partners of humans (e.g., dogs and horses) become
kinesthetically legible and vice versa.27 It is the reciprocal understanding implicit in
this sort of collaborative conversancy that makes talk of inter-species partnership
sensible. A somatico-discursive respect is operative between dog or horse and handler or
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rider, and this means that their work is properly described as a joint venture.
Here we catch sight of a training-without-taming prospect, one which claims to
foster the fulfillment of animal others flourishing rather than oppressing or perverting
it. Unfortunately, the approach is not without its problems, not the least of which is its
association with literal domestication, meaning selective breeding of the genetic sort, not
the spiritual or intellectual cultivation of Nietzsches discussed before. And, as Tuan
reminds us, this domestication means domination: the two words have the same root
sense of mastery over another beingof bringing it into ones house or domain.28
It looks like we shall have to abandon the domination model altogether, which
leaves us with the phases of human presencing identified earlier as intervention and
influence. Here, at last, I have an illustration I think is worth holding onto. It is the case
of a scientists relationship with an exceptionally sensitive, feral dog called Safi. Barbara
Smuts is a professor of psychology and anthropology at the University of Michigan who
works in the field of comparative zoology, chiefly with baboons and dolphins. She and
Safi share a kind of relation that differs from the typical mode of pet keeping or work
training.29 They both intervene in and mutually influence each others ensemble of
behavior. In this regard, they exemplify the naturalist John Livingstons comment that
healthy interspecific relationships are marked by the habituation of two-way trust and
compliance: Everyone who enjoys the close and constant company of non-humans
knows that there are certain reciprocal expectations involved [observed] without
either coercion or conscience.30 How does this work in the case at hand? When Smuts
and Safi disagree about a prohibition or preference, for instance, they negotiate their
terms for proceedingSafi having learned to respond appropriately to a sufficient
number of English phrases and Smuts having learned to do the same in reply to various
of Safis communicative gestures or postures. Smuts characterizes the relationship as
personable, where personhood or personality refers not to some property of an individ-
ual but rather to a mode of being in relation to others marked by reciprocal surrender
to the dictates of intersubjectivity: I use the word surrender intentionally, for relating
to others (human or nonhuman) in this way requires giving up control over them and
how they relate to us. Because Safi has considerable autonomy, she freely chooses
many aspects of how she will relate to me.31
Is theirs still de facto a relation of lopsided dependency and consequent patronage,
if scientist and dog live in the same household? Smuts holds otherwise:

Although [Safi] depends on me to provide certain necessities, like food and

water, this dependence is contingent not inherent; if I lived in the world of wild
 OIKOS AND DOMUS 225

dogs, I would depend on her for food and protection and much more.32 She
is not my child; she is not my servant; she is not even my companion, in the
sense of existing to keep me company. I wish for her what I wish for all of my
friends: maximum freedom of expression, maximum well-being.33

This is a declaration of interspecific engagement and belonging that honors a relational

space or force that Tuan has called power as creative attention.34 Learning and
teaching the arts of neighborly living associated with this kind of power would aid greatly
in forging a mode of constructive co-habitation with other creatures.

Togetherness: Surveying Forms of Relationship35

Before deepening our exploration of animal community, I will situate the discussion in
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terms of the possible forms of inter-species relationship. The reticence of Western

philosophy to view other animals as even potential associates is due to the belief that
interspecific relationships lack reciprocity or mutuality. Consequently, since these traits
are often taken to be central to morality, it should not come as a surprise that
Westerners frequently have intellectual difficulty including nonhumans into their circle
of ethical considerability or compassion. To challenge the received skepticism in these
regards, I would like to consider alternative testimony about animal sociability and its
moral significance. To appreciate such testimony, however, we need to first entertain the
use and abuse of anthropomorphism. A generation ago, the charge of anthropomor-
phism could be used in a univocally negative sense to criticize a position deserving that
appellation. Yet, today, it is has become more respectable to make judicious usage of
various anthropomorphic figures of speech. Certainly, it is no longer the case that merely
labeling some stance anthropomorphic is sufficient to critique it negatively. There are
at least two good reasons why this change is happening: we have finally recognized that
the negative charge of anthropomorphism tacitly presumes that we know what humanity
is and that no other life forms are similar to human beings. The first presumption is false
by ignorance, and the second is false by contrary knowledge. Hence, it is now necessary
to show how an alleged anthropomorphism is illegitimately used if the allegation is
meant to criticize at all.36 The upshot of this development, for us, may be traced as
follows: when I adduce evidence of cross-species association that might appear to
anthropomorphize nonhumans (or, conversely, zoomorphize humans), it will be with
the intention of illuminating the relevant relationship. Such evidence has to be judged
on its capacity to count toward that purpose, not on its merely seeming or even being
transmorphic in nature.
One form of togetherness by which associates can be ethically bonded is exemplified
in Hearnes account of partnership with working animals. Another is that of neighbor-
hood, which we will investigate in greater depth later. Here I would like simply to make
a few introductory and cautionary remarks about the concept. The (Biblical) paragon of
neighbor in the Western tradition of ethical thought is a fellow human being. Stretching
this traditional intuition, philosopher John Llewelyn asks: Is it conceivable that my
neighbor might be a non-human animal?37 In responding to that query, however,
Llewelyn follows Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the other can be an other in respect
of whom or which I have responsibilities only on condition of its having a face.38
Notwithstanding Llewelyns attempt to open up Levinas homo-exclusive portrayal of
face-to-face encounter, I think insisting on a broadened notion of face misses the mark.
Concentration on the face tends to reinstate an anthropocentrist gaze that takes the eyes
 226 R. ACAMPORA

or seeks ocularity as the reflective surface of a morally weighty soul denied to other
animals. If we are to rehabilitate the notion of neighborhood for animal ethics and
ecophilosophy, then this kind of drawback will have to be transcended or circumvented.
A third form of relating, namely fellowship, might enable us to broaden our corporal
attention and moral imagination, and to become aware of whole-body encounters and
their ethical significance. For instance, Barry Lopez relates a story about a pair of feral
wolves with whom he and his wife spent some time. Once, after having their lupine sleep
disturbed by the human couples prying flashlight, the wolves immediately began to
push [Sandy] around, slamming against her with their bodies and soft-biting her arms
and legs. Our intuitive feeling was that they were angry. It is almost as if the
animals were warning you of the limits of friendship.39 This scenario takes place in the
dark of night, where the visual possibility of face-to-face conversation is accordingly
diminished, but where body-to-body communication can still occur. With respect to the
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interspecific fellowship here intimated, the bodily display of its limitation would seem to
prove the moral constitution of its scope. After all, the wolves could but dontdo real
violence to repay annoyance.
Humans and wolves do not partake in truly friendly fellowship, at least not in the
Aristotelian sense according to which friends ideally should live together in the same
household. Lopez admits this: Wolves dont belong living [in close quarters] with
people.40 Yet recognizing a certain lived space for wilderness inviolability does not
disbar attempting neighborly association with wild or feral animals. Any virtuous
endeavor in this direction will, however, honor the neighborhood that is the wild itself:
We are going to have to get out into the woods. Lopez writes, We are going to have
to pay more attention to free-ranging as opposed to penned animals, which will require
an unfamiliar patience.41 In pursuing such a endeavor, we must take care not to efface
the distance of other animals differentiation:
The appreciation of the separate realities enjoyed by other organisms is not
only no threat to our own reality, but the root of a fundamental joy. I learned
from River that I was a human being and that he was a wolf and that we were
different. I valued him as a creature, but he did not have to be what I imagined
he was. It is with this freedom from dogma, I think, that the meaning of the
words the celebration of life becomes clear.42
In addition to the forms of relationship discussed above - partnership, neighborhood,
and fellowship - and beyond their rise in cross-specific analogues of society or com-
munity, there are other experiences of relation and metaphors for transpecific together-
ness.43 In order to chart context, but without belaboring the present survey, I believe it
would be helpful to identify some of them.44 The friendship of personal or household
companions is a prominent form of interspecific pairing. As we have seen, the example
of pet-keeping is morally ambiguous, for some would claim that the kept does not
necessarily have its best interests furthered by the keeper, that the keeping can be very
much like slave-holding. Even in the best circumstances, this argument holds, the
situation is something of a patronizing guardianship. There is also the sexual intimacy
of mateship, and by this I do not have in mind the problematic unnatural perversion
of bestiality. Rather, I mean to refer to those instances of cross-species coupling within
comparatively close taxonomic proximity, where inter-breeding is actually possible
(for example between a wolf and coyote). The metaphor of extended family is
sometimes used to express the real kinship we share with our animal cousins through
evolutionary ancestry, especially other primates. Finally, all organisms are bodily embed-
 OIKOS AND DOMUS 227

ded in the material interdependency of ecosystemic coexistence: this is a structural

relationship that holds regardless of intentionality patterns. One recognizes genetic and
ecological ties of interconnection through scientific knowledge of, or folk familiarity
with, natural history and bioregional affairs.

Investigations of Multi-Species Neighborhood

Having sympathetically surveyed such forms of relationship as we have just seen, I am
not advocating social or communal intimacy with any and all animal life. Even after
associating with those feral wolves over an extended and exhilarating period of time, we
saw that Lopez had to admit that wolves dont belong living [too closely] with
people.45 My position is that we already live with or next to a great number and
diversity of animals. Given that interspecific relations and encounters will only rise as
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urbanization increases and ecological restoration proceeds, we need an ethos of com-

passionate yet respectful engagement in order to cultivate salutary forms of cross-species
community. Moreover, humanitys biophilic tendencies need nourishing, but they go
lacking in much of contemporary post-industrial/hyper-technical civilization. As one set
of social scientists has put it,
the portrayal of wild animals in nature movies and on television, and the
proliferation of theme parks, zoos, and other controlled displays of the wild,
have increasingly mediated the human experience of animal life. Such urban
simulacra may herald the loss of intimate contact between humans and wild
animals which since the Pleistocene have shaped human development, intelli-
gence, and identity.46
How then to proceed? Reaching back to Smuts story about Safi, we realize that it is
perhaps most useful as a paradigm for interspecies etiquette in shared living quarters,
but we must also recognize that human and other animals very often live near or next
to rather than under the same roof witheach other. The allusion here to roofs is not
accidental, for we must take stock of the different modes of residency relevant to the
problem of cross-species belonging or oikos. What one anthropologist has said of
specifically human society I hold is the case for generically animal community, namely
that the real on-the-ground-cohabiting-group is defined first and foremost residen-
tially.47 Given this insight, we will have to account for the significance of the built
environment simply because housing is a pervasive feature of todays human (and
animal) life world.48 Aesthetically and politically, architecture changes the natural
environment not necessarily into something unnatural, but nonetheless into something
different from a pre-architectural landscape: settlement and domestic architecture
impose conditions on living that provide a basic spatial structure [which] has to be
associated with the development of a universal aspect of social structure in domesticated
societies: the development of the role and status of neighbor.49
I would like to suggest that the category of neighbor, properly understood, is one of
the more helpful ethical concepts for our purposes, because it avoids the paternalism to
which the kin-metaphor is subject (at least in interspecific contexts) and yet retains a
crucial element of moral responsibility that drops out when we reduce animals to the
status of pests. The discourse of neighborhood is also better than that of citizenship,
another model often invoked or implied in environmental and animal ethics,50 because
it maintains a sense of intimacy lacking from the abstract terminology of res publica.
However useful for strictly humanistic contexts, such terminology is ultimately mis-
 228 R. ACAMPORA

placed in most cross-species arenas. What we and the great majority of other animals are
to each other is not so much citizens-of-the-world as fellow inhabitants-of-the-earth.
The ones we encounter in habitual proximity are our neighbors, literally near-dwellers.
This relation holds across the spectrum of natural and cultural environments, including
even cities. As philosopher Diane Michelfelder claims, Wildlife that inhabit and have
found a home in urban settings are our nonhuman neighbors. As a result we have a
moral obligation to respond to them accordingly and treat them as the neighbors that
they are.51
Immediately the objector will cry, Equivocation! Youre looking to smuggle an
ethical sense of normative neighborliness into a geographically descriptive termnatural
fallacy, natural fallacy! And, true enough, I do believe that there is moral mileage in the
relation designated by that term. But I cannot appeal for it to the mainstream religious
traditions of Western monotheism, because the orthodox scriptural usages of neighbor
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do not readily encompass nonhuman creatures.52 I might, however, have recourse to the
revaluations of ontotheological tradition that certain contemporary Continental philoso-
phers have forged of late. These latter interpretations are ethically intriguing, if not
sufficiently promising. Interrogating Levinas on the issue of which other creatures can
be ones neighbor, Llewelyn learns that the answer turns on whether in the eyes of the
animal we can discern a recognition, however obscure, of his [the animals] own
mortality, though such a discovery appears doubtful (at least to Levinas, that is).53
Following a Heideggerian course, David Krell goes somewhat further: in a veterinarians
hospital room, alongside a canine companion suffering life-threatening injury, he reports
that:
I found myself thinking of Heidegger, of his distinction between human Sterben
and animal Verenden. [The dogs] head and paw seemed as immanently and
imminently capable of one as the other; her eye, now almost focusing in and
out of shock, did not accuse; her bruised body unspeakably beautiful still. I
felt very close to our own mortality.54
Still, this sort of testimony is as tentative as it is evocative, and so it may be best to look
elsewhere for the normativity of neighborliness.
As with any norm, the moral import of being a neighbor is hardly amenable to
strictly rational grounding (logicism in ethics notwithstanding). We cannot simply read
off duties from brute nearness. Nonetheless, for social beings such as humans, those
who live near us regularly awaken compassion and are accorded at least a modicum of
respect in virtue of their proximity. If we are prepared to recognize this, then it will
prove difficult to non-arbitrarily delimit neighborly norms at the boundary of the species
Homo sapiens. We must acknowledge that it is not human sapience but rather proximal
residence that qualifies somebody as a neighbor, and that this qualification can be met
at least by other animals (if not plants, though this latter case is an extension I will not
consider here). After all, we would not ethically discount a less intelligent human. On
pain of speciesism, then, we should not negate the neighborly status of any organism
capable of residing and who does in fact dwell in our midst. Nor should we make light
of the communal aspect of such situations as we are considering. As phenomenologist
H. Peter Steeves puts it, the fact that we share a place and have a specific piece of land
[or territory] in common is a strong indication of a concrete common Good.55 In this
way, then, a multispecific neighborhood, akin to what Mary Midgley has called the
mixed community,56 can indeed be constituted.
It should be noted that on this account all those who share an ecological or social
 OIKOS AND DOMUS 229

space are included in the relevant sense of neighborhood, yet of course only those who
are moral agents are bound by the obligations of neighborliness. Of these obligations,
which are pertinent to the present context of interspecies cohabitation? Probably the
most salient would deal with allowance for shared territory, as with an ever-rising tide
of human population many other animals tend to get crowded out of their former
habitats. Twisting the milieu further, a considerable part of this problem is due to
the effects of domesticated ruminants and ungulates intensively reared as part of
industrialized animal husbandry operations. Referring to these ubiquitous human
satellites [as] the wrecking crew, Livingston remarks that they are an enormous drain
on the natural productivity of the land that must subsidize them [a]nd they
(sheep and cattle, for example) take up spacelots of itremoving vital and irreplace-
able habitat for countless wild plant and animal communities thus dispossessed.57
Moreover, behind rural zones of agriculture and pastoralism, the resulting and
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reinforcing growth of cities breeds significant levels of direct human-versus-native

animal strife as competition for sheer living-room becomes pronounced. The ethical
point to be made here is, in the words of animal ethicist Clare Palmer, if we are to be
good neighbors, then in existing urban areas, and especially in newly urbanizing areas,
spaces should be maintained, or created, to allow otherwise displaced wild animals to
continue to live.58
Examples of efforts in this direction include preservation of refuges, provision for
corridors, and adjustments of behavior and attitudes to deal with greater frequency of
cross-species encounter. Such measures may be particularly difficult for those people
who have been acculturated into systems of what amounts to species-apartheid, for
instance automatic eradication responses instituted by public and private programs of
so-called pest-control.59 On this point, Michelfelder has suggested instead living with
urban wildlife populations, accepting, accommodating, and encouraging their inte-
gration into city life, rather than translocating them or even eliminating them, given that
they already call the city their home.60 Of course self-defense prerogatives are duly
applicable, but where cohabitation does not pose a serious risk to life or health other
organisms living in our vicinity ought to be viewed as neighbors even when they present
nuisances.
At this juncture, an extended illustration of constructive cohabitation in an urban
context may be useful. Like most cities, Anchorage is a magnet for educational services,
and so it features several institutions of higher learning, one of which is a branch of the
University of Alaska. Unlike many cities, Anchorage has an especially blurry boundary
between wild and urban settings, with moose and other large mammals making regular
appearances that augment the typical assortment of birds and other small creatures one
might expect to find within the city proper. A stream runs through the campus of
UA-Anchorage, and some local beavers have invested their energies in creating a lodge
at a bend in the waterway that lies just next to that most coveted piece of academic real
estate, a parking lot. The beavers dam causes ponding to occur, which is of course what
it is built for, and so there is a surplus of water at this spot sufficient to flood the
stream-banks. Sometimes, when it rains, or when snow melts upstream, there is enough
overspill to wash into and through the parking lot. Thus a human/beaver conflict of
interest arises, above and beyond the antipathy to rodents in general that many people
often harbor.
What to do? To its credit and the disappointment of hunters, trappers, and traders,
the campus community resisted calls to exterminate or relocate the den-dwellers.
Instead, great creativity was used in devising a scheme of coexistence that might benefit
 230 R. ACAMPORA

both the animals and the institution most of the time.61 It was decided that this situation
could actually become quite an educational experience: biology and ecology students,
under faculty supervision, could learn about beavers habitats up close, in the field, and
right on campus. Obviously, something would still have to be done about the ponding:
left unchecked, it could eventually raise a lake that would submerge parking space and
transform the closest human edifice into an island.62 So, when the water backs up too
much, workers from the physical plant take apart enough of the dam to reestablish free
flow. And then the beavers set about rebuilding, thus joining a continual cycle of
deconstruction and reconstruction.63 It is important not to dilute the significance of this
act by mistaking the scenario as an ordinary case of commensal behavior. Besides the
fact that the beavers and humans do not actually share food or shelter, there are other
differences as well. According to one expert, in commensalism the animal actively
penetrates the human environment and conquers it as new habitat, frequently against
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human ideas and wishes.64 In the state of affairs just described, not only is it unclear
who has entered whose territory (Alaskan bush and city not being well demarcated in
the first place), but the humans involved have opted to permit or protect if not promote
the arrangement.65
This marvelous exercise of moral imagination is an excellent example of
constructive cohabitation with wild animals, just as Smuts story was in regard to
carrying on a cross-species household.66 It harbors no pretense of utopian perfection
or ease. Both sides bear compromises: the beavers must cope with periodic renovation
work; people must learn to tolerate a few days of puddles in the parking lot between
periods of disassembly. A viable resolution required the patience and determination
of trial-and-error experimentation. For example, a first effort to install a drainage
system at the base of the dam failed when the pipes were blocked with mud and debris
by the beavers, who are apparently better builders than humans are plumbers. Over
the longer term, too, there may arise difficulties: will the need for continuing supply of
wood make a tree-planting program advisable? What if the beavers succumb to
some disease or other calamityshould the humans intervene?67 In such instances, I
would argue that the degree of neighborly obligation may vary according to several
factors. Rules of thumb recommended by Palmer would seem to be appropriate guides
here: that agents duties become weightier with increases in scope of causal responsi-
bility for, directness of intent toward, and depth of dependence in interspecific
situations.68
Michelfelder has claimed that we need to seek ways of how we may best co-inhabit
urban areas with wildlife in what we might conceivably wish to identify as a multispe-
cies society and thereby enrich and enhance a sense of belonging to the urban
environment.69 The UAA beavers project certainly makes progress in responding to
such an exhortation. I would even go further and say that it illustrates a new kind of
oikos, practiced beyond the traditional categories of mainstream geography and ecology.
As one set of avant-garde planning theorists have put it, the idea of the city as a series
of disturbed habitats which display various mixes of anthropogenic and biogenic features
might begin to break down the pervasive belief in the mutual exclusivity of city (culture)
and wilderness (nature).70 In this context a dissolution of the culture-nature and
civil-wild dichotomies is attractive because it permits us to appreciate the organic
elements of city life (as against a purely industrial urban imaginary) as well as the
dynamism of natural habitats (as against the received wisdom that overemphasizes
ecosystem equilibrium concepts or nature-in-balance idylls).71
 OIKOS AND DOMUS 231

Conclusion
Following the ramifications of these investigations brings us, finally, to even larger or
wider reflections on the power and promise of relational thinking to overcome other yet
connected dualisms. It is not only city-wild and nature-culture dichotomies that
interpenetrate and overlap, but also the human-animal dichotomy. In fact, if we attend
closely to ground-level data of bioregional enmeshment we will discover a plethora of
interspecies influences and dependencies even in highly built environments.72 Ulti-
mately, we would be led to concur with Steeves that our sense of human community
is foundationally dependent on the Community beyond. Being Human does not even
make sense without the Animal, just as being Ego d[oes] not make sense without the
Other.73 There is a logical and an empirical side to this insight. First, in a somewhat
Hegelian vein, because the very intelligibility of identity requires otherness we need at
least one instance of [nonhuman] difference in order to identify anybody as human.
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Second, as a contingent matter of anthropology, the role of significant species-other is

consistently over time and place fulfilled by animals insofar as all human cultures and
communities are in contact in some way with non-human, animal life.74
Unfortunately, it would seem that for most of recorded history, and certainly during
modernity, people have repressed awareness of animal alterity at the heart of human
self-constitution. The result is a fairly global phenomenon of massive denial that
Livingston has named zero-order humanism, according to which we as humans are
deemed supremely valuable, uniquely constituted, and deserving of absolute control. In
other words, The world exists for the advancement of the human project. The human
project is first among Earthlyindeed, universalmeanings and purposes.75 If the
current discussion has accomplished its goal of casting a positive light on the possibilities
for constructive cohabitation with other forms of animate life, that is for oikos without
domus, then I hope to have contributed to a growing affirmation of humanitys animal
nature:
Living with animals, inhabiting their/our stories, trying to tell the truth about
relationship, co-habiting an active history: that is the work of companion species for
whom the relation is the smallest possible unit of analysis.76

Notes
1. Thomas Alexander, Between Being and Emptiness, in In Deweys Wake, ed. W. Gavin (Albany: SUNY,
2003).
2. Cf. biologist and critical theorist Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and
Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003): Domestication is an emergent process of
co-habiting involving agencies of many sorts and stories that do not lend themselves to yet one more
version of the Fall (30).
3. The former phenomenon is fairly common knowledge by now; the latter is an interesting new situation
for an exemplary chronicle, replete with accounts of falcons and coyotes in NYC, see Anne Matthews
Wild Nights: Nature Returns to the City (New York: North Point/FSG, 2001). Cf. Joseph Bergers O.K.,
Whats That Flying Over Grants Tomb?, New York Times, 31 January, 2004, B4: Adrian Benepe, the
[NYC] parks commissioner, said that the appearance of eagles was another indication that the overdevel-
opment of the suburbs had made the city, with its 40,000 acres of parkland and an increasingly robust
ecology, more attractive [to wildlife].
4. As readers of this journal will recognize, the former notion is borrowed from Daphne Spain by Roger
King: spatial institutions [places locative matrices] play a role in mediating human relations to nature
in that they create a set of behavioral and perceptual patterns (Toward an Ethics of the Domesticated
Environment, Philosophy & Geography, 6, no. 1 (February 2003): 7f.); and the latter idea is glossed by
Clare Palmer: [some] ecologists have emphasized the importance of creating urban green zones less
 232 R. ACAMPORA

disturbed by humans to encourage the return of animals who currently avoid the city or who have been
unable to sustain a living in urban areas due to lack of adequate habitat or food (Colonization,
Urbanization, and Animals, Philosophy & Geography, 6, no. 1 (February 2003): 55).
5. See my keynote essay, Nietzsches Feral Philosophy: Thinking through an Animal Imaginary, in A
Nietzschean Bestiary, eds C. D. and R. R. Acampora (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), from
which much of this and the next paragraph (in the main text above) is adapted.
6. As per On the Genealogy of Morals, I: 11. Note that all Nietzsche quotations herein are taken from the
standard Kaufmann and Hollingdale translations (numerals indicate sections). On the Genealogy of Morals,
trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967); Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Kaufmann (New York:
Vintage, 1989); Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1978); Will to Power,
trans. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967).
7. Graham Parkes term (personal communication); cf. also mammalogist Helmut Hemmers Domestication,
trans. N. Beckhaus (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 190: Taming is not equivalent to domestica-
tion, nor is it a necessary condition for domestication.
8. Beyond Good and Evil, 203, and Will to Power, 980.
9. Beyond Good and Evil, 225.
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10. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1.

11. Will to Power, 398.
12. Will to Power, 281.
13. Refer to Parkes Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsches Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994), esp. pt. 2.
14. Genealogy of Morals, II: 18. Quoted in Daniel Conway, The Beast of Prey, in A Nietzschean Bestiary.
15. Conway, The Beast of Prey. Yet, to be fair to Nietzsche, his quasi-mythical narrative about a putative
master race of hominids savaging the dawn of history is proffered as a genealogy of civilization, i.e., not
as a model for any future development of the genuine culture he advocates.
16. See, e.g., Steven Vogels Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature, Environmental Ethics, 24,
no. 1 (Spring 2002): 2340.
17. The Nature of Reality and the Reality of Nature, in Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern
Deconstruction, eds M. Soule and G. Lease (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1995), 40.
18. See his Animals as Inventions: Biotechnology and Intellectual Property Rights, Institute for Philosophy
and Public Policy, 16, no. 1 (Winter 1996), [online] http://epn.org/ippp/sagoff1.html
19. In this respect it may be said that construction and determination are prone to the dualistic logics of
centrism identified by Val Plumwood, whereby the Other is radically excluded, homogenized or
stereotyped, backgrounded or denied, incorporated or assimilated, and instrumentalized or (ab)used. See
her Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (New York: Routledge, 2002), 107ff.
20. Here I borrow the notion of tropes enacted into lifestyle from George Lakoff and Mark Johnsons
Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
21. See Masons An Unnatural Order: Uncovering the Roots of Our Domination of Nature and Each Other (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), esp. chap. 9. In fairness to Mason, his plea for kinship is of a different
ordermore in the sense of equal cousins in an extended family. That said, the kinship trope is in practice
so historically and sociologically laden with parental (hence hierarchical) overtones that I think we would
be better off with a new metaphor than trying to transform the old one.
22. Yi-Fu Tuan, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 5.
23. See Annabelle Sabloff, Reordering the Natural World: Humans and Animals in the City (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2001), chap. 3.
24. Vicki Hearne, Adams Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Random/Vintage, 1987), 38.
25. Hearne, Adams Task, 81.
26. Hearne, Adams Task, 97f.
27. Hearne, Adams Task, 108ff.
28. Tuan, Dominance and Affection, 99.
29. The following sentences are paraphrased from Smuts Reflection in J. M. Coetzees The Lives of
Animals, ed. A. Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1999), 115ff.
30. John Livingston, Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication (Boulder: Roberts Rinehart,
1994), 161.
31. Smuts, Reflection, 118f. (italics original).
32. This hypothetical reversal of dependency would not, of course, be completely symmetrical (e.g., it would
be unlikely for Safi ever to keep the author). Rather, the point is that by treating each other equally as
possible, a dog and a human can cultivate together a relationship that often transcendsand so cannot
 OIKOS AND DOMUS 233

be reduced tothe structure of wardship plain and simple. Cf. Smuts (120) and Anthony Westons
reference to the self-validating possibilities of positive expectation, whereby assuming an attribute of
another helps to bring about the conditions under which that attribute is more likely to manifest itself:
Transhuman Etiquettes, in Back to Earth: Tomorrows Environmentalism (Philadelphia: Temple Univer-
sity Press, 1994), 158ff.
33. Cf. Haraways remarks on her own experience with cross-species conviviality (96): My multi-species
family is not about surrogacy and substitutes [for intra-human relations]; we [animals] are trying to live
other tropes, other metaplasms (this last term is a coinage roughly equivalent, at least in the present
context, to the idea of metaphors-for-living popularized by cognitive scientists and philosophers such as
Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, q.v. note 20 above).
34. Tuan, Dominance and Affection, 176. We could also call it love, as Tuan himself noteswere it not for all
the romantic distractions, erotic and sentimental, that freight the term.
35. This section derives mostly from my dissertation, The Body Beneath Bioethics: Somatic Bases of
Inter-Species Morality (doctoral thesis, Emory University, 1995), ch. 4.
36. The body of this paragraph is indebted to commentaries by, inter alia, Mary Midgley (see n. 56 below),
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Randall Lockwood, Anthropomorphism Is Not a Four-Letter Word (presentation delivered at the

Conference on the Perception of Animals in American Culture, Washington, DC, 1983), David Bennett,
typescript of Anthropomorphism (1992), and Vicki Hearne, Animal Happiness (New York: Harper-
Collins, 1994).
37. John Llewelyn, The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience (New York: St. Martins, 1991), 49.
38. Llewelyn, The Middle Voice, 65.
39. Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (New York: Scribner, 1978), 281.
40. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II, 1171b32-1172a14; and Lopez, Of Wolves and Men, 280.
41. Lopez, Of Wolves and Men, 284.
42. Lopez, Of Wolves and Men, 285.
43. Cf. Henry Bestons talk, echoing Amerindian notions, of animal species as other nations, The Outermost
House (Garden City: Doubleday, 1928), 25.
44. Cf. Ted Bentons Natural Relations (London: Verso, 1993), introduction.
45. Lopez, Of Wolves and Men, 280.
46. J. R. Wolch, Kathleen West and Thomas E. Gaines, Trans-species Urban Theory, Environment and
Planning: Society and Space, 13 (1995): 751.
47. Peter Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 68. Cf.
my Human and Nonhuman Lifeworlds, Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology, 3, no. 2 (Spring
1992), 10.
48. Of course, the houses most of us find familiar are by no means universal to humanityfor most of the
history of our species, we were nomadic foragers (not sedentary producers) and remnants of such cultures
survive today. For the ecosophic import of this, see my review of Deborah Bird Roses Nourishing Terrains:
Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness (Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission,
1996) in Sophia: Interdisciplinary Journal of Comparative Ethics, no. 2 (1997), 13639.
49. Wilson, The Domestication, 5.
50. The locus classicus is Aldo Leopolds moral meditation on a land ethic in A Sand County Almanac (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1949). Also, the model is latent in much animal rights advocacy.
51. Diane Michelfelder, Valuing Wildlife Populations in Urban Environments, Journal of Social Philosophy,
34, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 86.
52. Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas: neighbor cannot be understood to include irrational creatures because they
do not share mans rational life. Therefore charity does not extend to them (Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae),
quoted by Llewelyn, 269. This attitude also occurs in the secular West of antiquityaccording to Richard
Sorabji, the Stoics thought that we humans can extend oikeiosis [ belonging] (and hence justice) only
to other rational beings as such; from Animal Minds and Human Morals (London: Duckworth, 1993),
124.
53. John Llewelyn, Am I Obsessed by Bobby? (Humanism of the Other Animal), in Re-Reading Levinas, eds
R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 240ff.
54. David Krell, Cristys Mortality, epilogue to Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1992), 318. Note that Cristys eye did not accuse, implying that it could
havewhich would presuppose an awareness of mor(t)ality, that the dog is capable of registering damage,
attributing wrong, and anticipating demise; perhaps, then, Krell is suggesting that Cristy has met the
Levinasian criterion identified by Llewelyn above.
 234 R. ACAMPORA

55. H. Peter Steeves, Founding Community: A Phenomenological-Ethical Inquiry (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998),
140.
56. Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), chap. 10.
57. John Livingston, The Exotic Transplants, in Rogue Primate, 44. The term wrecking crew for this
ensemble of domesticates is credited by Livingston to Peter Scott.
58. Clare Palmer, Placing Animals in Urban Environmental Ethics, Journal of Social Philosophy, 34, no. 1
(Spring 2003): 71.
59. Although Palmer sidesteps the issue in saying that she is not passing comment on the ethical or unethical
nature of urban expansion itself with respect to wild animals (Placing Animals, 71), it remains an open
question whether urbanization amounts to invasion of the sort that would require reparations in
accordance with dictates of restitutive justice. Cf. Paul Taylor, Respect for Nature (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986), 304ff.
60. Michelfelder, Valuing Wildlife, 83.
61. For further information, see www.engr.uaa.alaska.edu/soe/Geomatics/Beaver pages/UAA resident
beavers.htm
62. It should perhaps be noted that Alaskan beavers are truly prodigious rodents, regularly attaining weights
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of 60100 lbs. and fashioning homes of commensurate size/durability. To a visitor from the lower 48,
they at first sight almost resemble small, swimming bearsquite surprising, if the observer is used to (and
consequently expecting) the more southerly-sized kin who conjure images of large guinea pigs instead.
63. This was the state of affairs I discovered in the summer of 2001.
64. Hemmer, Domestication, 178.
65. In fact, this situation also resists neat subsumption into Palmers fourfold classification of human-animal
relations in developing or urbanizing areas (death/avoidance, scavenging/pestilence, immigration, and
displaysee Palmer, Placing Animals, 5054). Clearly, the first and third categories are not suitable
(because neither eradication nor importation has occurred). Secondly, though they originally represented
annoyance, under the new regime the beavers are becoming more appreciated (thus transcending the label
of pest). Lastly, while it may be argued that they have become subjected to exhibition and study, it
should be remembered that the beavers are not objects of captivity or confinement (due to its placement
in a riverine corridor, actually, their self-selected habitat allows more freedom than even typical parkslet
alone zoosafford).
66. The scare quotes come into play because we do not yet have a suitable terminology developed for such
animals. As Michelfelder notes, it is possible to conceive of them as manifesting a third nature: neither
fully wild nor fully domesticated (Michelfelder, Valuing Wildlife, 89)after Vinayak Bharne, Bungle
in the Jungle: Nature Returns despite Our Urban Botch, Urban Ecology (Winter 2000-01): 2326. Notice
also that Safi (in Smuts story) likewise lives out an intermediate, ferine zone of being.
67. Cf. Bernice Bovenkerk, Frans Stufleu, Ronno Tramper, Jan Voustenbosch, Evans W. A. Brom, To Act
or Not to Act? Sheltering Animals from the Wild: A Pluralistic Account of a Conflict between Animal and
Environmental Ethics, Ethics, Place, and Environment, 6, no. 1 (March 2003): 1326.
68. Palmer, Placing Animals 68.
69. Michelfelder, Valuing Wildlife, 88.
70. Wolch, et al., Trans-species Urban Theory, 753. Wolch herself went on to dub the vision of such a
place/practice Zoopolis in Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Border-
lands, eds. J. Wolch and J. Emel (London: Verso, 1998). Cf. Haraways many uses of the hybrid toponym
emergent naturecultures to refer to zones of relational province/provenance (in Companion Species).
71. On the latter, see ecologist Daniel Botkins Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology of the Twenty-First
Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
72. There is an expansive social/natural scientific literature in urban ecology and a growing one in animal
geography. For popular accounts, see Anne Matthews Wild Nights: Nature Returns to the City (New York:
Northpoint Press, 2001) and Peter Friedericis The Suburban Wild (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1999).
73. Steeves, Founding Community, 135. The reason I introduce Steeves conclusion in the subjunctive is that
the relevant premise must actually be experienced to gain assent.
74. Steeves, Founding Community, 142 n. 28, 136. For supporting argument and evidence, see ecosopher Paul
Shepards The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996), and
anthropologist Deborah Bird Roses Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Aboriginal Australian
Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Note that, even in futuristic fantasies of high-tech
imagination, the cyborg figure shows aspects of animality.
75. Livingston, Rogue Primate, 138. Livingston explicates thus (at 140): I define it as the ideology of the
 OIKOS AND DOMUS 235

necessary primacy of the human enterprise. I describe it as zero-order as a way of emphasizing its quality
as an unchallenged given, an unwritten precept from which flow all other varieties of human chauvin-
ism. Note that this meta-narrative cuts right across the ideological spectrum of political economiesright
to left, market to Marxist. For recent and current exemplars and champions of zero-order humanism, see
Rene Dubos programme of humanizing the planet under the banner of noblesse oblige in The Wooing of
the Earth (New York: Scribner, 1980) and Gregory Stocks species solipsism in MetaMan: The Merging
of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
76. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 20.

Notes on contributor
Ralph R. Acampora is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Hofstra University. Several of his articles and
essays devoted to ecophilosophy, bioethics, and animal studies have been published in a variety of journals and
books. He co-edited A Nietzschean Bestiary (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004) and is revising Corporal Compassion
(University of Pittsburgh Press), a monograph on phenomenology of body and inter-species morality.
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Acknowledgment
This article began as a shorter paper presented to a symposium of the International Association for
Environmental Philosophy (Loyola University, Chicago, 10/02). The author is grateful to the IAEP organizers,
fellow discussants, and audience members at the panel on The City and Beyond.
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