Abstract
This paper makes an intervention highlighting the animal dimension of military geographies as an overlooked yet illuminating aspect of the hybrid nature of warfare. By bringing animal geographies into dialogue with critical military geographies and with a focus on relational ethics, the processes, performance and consequences of the more-than-human nature of the battlespace are examined through a vignette of Wojtek the bear. Wojtek was a mascot, pet and officially enlisted soldier of the Polish Army in the Second World War who travelled the desert plains, helped to fight at the Battle of Monte Cassino, before being demobbed with his fellow Polish comrades in the UK, eventually ending his civilian days in Edinburgh Zoo. Although a well-known figure Wojtek and his biography have predominately been used as a means to explore the Polish soldiers’ experience of the Second World War with the result that the bear as an animal is absent. This paper, therefore, puts the bear back into his biography in order to acknowledge the role and lived experience of animals in the military. Further, it suggests that exploring the place of animals in the military requires geographers to articulate the hybrid nature of warfare and also to explore the ethico-political relations this produces.
Highlights
Introduction ew viIn the late 1940s at Edinburgh Zoo once in a while something strange would occur at the bear enclosure
As Whatmore explains the very ‘physical fabric of the zoo [is] a showcase for public ly entertainment and education, designed to keep animals and people in their proper place (2002, page 42). These relatively rare and seemingly peculiar visitors to the bear enclosure were not there to witness nature or the wild, but were visiting an old comrade, Wojtek who like them had been a soldier of the Polish Army in the Second World War
Wojtek had served alongside these men on the battlefields of the Middle East and Italy and after the war like many of the soldiers from the Polish Corps the bear began to forge a new identity in postwar Britain
Summary
In the late 1940s at Edinburgh Zoo once in a while something strange would occur at the bear enclosure. Through describing an encounter between a lobster, technology, chemicals and a scientist in the laboratory, Johnston reveals how the routine processes of experimentation operate in a ‘terrain of violence – where lives are imperilled’ (2015, page 299), raising questions about how and where ethical relations regarding whose bodies are disposable, are produced and naturalised in the military-industrial-academic complex This approach is explored by Jake Kosek (2010) in a study of the place and history of the honey bee in the military, culminating in its current use in the war on terror. By (re)narrating the biography of Wojtek, this paper builds upon research in animal geography in three ways; it traces the lived geographies of an individual animal to demonstrate that the battlespace is another seemingly human space in which animals are present and active, it claims that animals are entangled in shaping and being shaped by strategies of violence, and it, suggests that studying the hybrid nature of war relational ethics of violence can begin to be accounted for. Analysing Wojtek’s life as a knot - an entanglement of politics, cultures, environments, human and nonhuman animals - is an effort to recognise the inherent hybrid nature of warfare, ly exposing that animals are a ubiquitous presence in the military and draw attention to the transformative ( long lasting or transitory) nature of becoming in the battlespace
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