Animal geographies has emerged over the last 15 years as a lively and provocative area of current human/non-human geographical research and scholarship. Yet, while the ‘animal turn’ has arguably impacted widely across a range of social sciences and the humanities, for ‘human’ geography it offers what is potentially a far more fundamental and profound reconfiguration of the discipline’s traditional ontological and epistemological reach, not least given the challenge that the ‘animal’ brings to the exclusivity of geography’s adjectival humanism. This article is the first of three reports on animal geographies. It sets out the development of the subdiscipline, from the mid-1990s onwards, and charts the emergence of what has become a distinctive and innovative field with increasing interdisciplinary connections.

Animal geographies challenge not only the place and placing of the human and the animal but, critically, the methods we use to engage with both in relation. This second review considers the various methodological implications of a more-than-human geography and explores the innovative approaches that animal geographers employ to speak with non-human animals.

As farm animal welfare becomes an increasingly important component of contemporary global livestock production, animal welfare science and animal welfare policy-making need to find new ways of entering global debates over food security and sustainability. In this paper, we explore the means by which both animal welfare science and policy should articulate with these emerging global debates. Having first established the important gains in animal welfare policy and the maturity of animal welfare science, we identify and explore the potential impact of these current debates and argue that they have the potential for profound change in our understanding of, and our response to, the welfare of animals. We conclude the paper with a number of possible recommendations for how a scientifically informed, sustainable animal welfare policy might flourish.

Although there now exists a wide range of policies, instruments and regulations, in Europe and increasingly beyond, to improve and safeguard the welfare of farmed animals, there remain persistent and significant welfare issues in virtually all types of animal production systems ranging from high prevalence of lameness to limited possibilities to express natural behaviours. Protocols and indicators, such as those provided by Welfare Quality, mean that animal welfare can nowadays be regularly measured and surveyed at the farm level. However, the digital revolution in agriculture opens possibilities to quantify animal welfare using multiple sensors and data analytics. This allows daily monitoring of animal welfare at the group and individual animal level, for example, by measuring changes in behaviour patterns or physiological parameters. The present paper explores the potential for developing innovations in digital technologies to improve the management of animal welfare at the farm, during transport or at slaughter. We conclude that the innovations in Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) offer significant opportunities for a more holistic, evidence-based approach to the monitoring and surveillance of farmed animal welfare. To date, the emphasis in much PLF technologies has been on animal health and productivity. This paper argues that this emphasis should not come to define welfare. What is now needed is a coming together of industry, scientists, food chain actors, policy-makers and NGOs to develop and use the promise of PLF for the creative and effective improvement of farmed animal welfare.

By using the example of the reintroduction of wolves to the southern French Alps, this paper explores the competing ‘philosophies of nature’ that are revealed when agendas of biodiversity enhancement and protection conflict with notions of biosecurity. Tracing the shifting status of wolves as threat and hazard to emblems of reconstituted naturality, I argue that the reintroduction of wolves disturbs notions of both biodiversity and biosecurity, making unified strategies of management increasingly difficult and problematic. More significantly, the reintroduction of these classically ‘wild’ predators into seminatural and domesticated spaces challenges otherwise simplistic classifications not only of wild and domestic but also of human and nonhuman.

There is no animal geography without ethics. The very coupling of the words gives rise to an ethical endeavour; an acceptance that animals have a geography, a making visible of animals within our human geography and scholarship, an acknowledgement that our relationship with animals has consequences. For some, this ethical endeavour extends to politics and includes engaged activism or to individual commitment such as not to eat meat, not to ‘own’ a pet, not to visit zoos and so on. This is a personal choice but, at a broader level, animal geography, in recognizing animals as co-respondent subjects, gives them a moral placing within the academy that, arguably, they rarely enjoyed before. This final report considers the contribution of animal geography and animal geographers to a more informed ethics of human-animal relations, one that increasingly confounds an over-simplistic view of animals as merely moral patients to suggest an ethics which guides a broader, more inclusive moral community.