Animals in Geography: From Zoogeographic Regions to the Relationship Between Geography and Animal Studies

Abstract

This paper investigates how animals have appeared in geographical works from the discipline’s institutionalisation until recently. I scrutinize the different animal geographies in broader context to shed light on the motivations behind why geographers focused on animals from different perspectives. This overview is especially important for evaluating the novelty of the ‘new’ animal geography. The distribution of animals on Earth has been investigated in many ‘geographical’ works since the 18th century but most of them were not written by ‘geographers’, even after the institutionalisation of the discipline. The geography of domestication and domesticated animals also has a long history, but the Berkeley School, whose representatives were especially active in this field, was pushed into the background in the second part of the 20th century. The ‘new’ animal geography that focused on the human-animal relation started to unfold in the 1990s.