Az állatok megjelenése a földrajztudományban: az állatföldrajzi régióktól a geográfia és az animal studies kapcsolatáig

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.

Compassionate Conservation: Exploring the Lives of African Wild Dogs (Lycaon pictus) in Botswana

This paper argues for a more compassionate conservation by positioning animals as subjects in research and scholarship. Compassionate conservation is a multidisciplinary field of study that broadly attends to the ethical dimensions of conservation by merging conservation biology and animal welfare science. However, animal geography is rarely discussed in the compassionate conservation scholarship despite sharing similar tenets. This paper argues that responsible anthropomorphism and animal geography concepts of animal subjectivity (lived experiences) and agency (capacity to act) positions African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) as subjects in conservation research and scholarship. It merges biological research, public communication, and interview and participant observation data to present wild dogs as thinking, feeling, self-conscious animals with agency, and whose welfare is negatively affected in human-dominated landscapes in Botswana. This paper argues for more attention to be paid to animal subjectivity and agency to foster more compassionate relations with wildlife. It argues that positioning animals as subjects in research and scholarship is an ethical starting point for moving compassionate conservation forward. This ‘enriched’ scholarly approach moves us closer to appreciating the lives of wildlife and the complexity of their circumstances and experiences.