Encounters between humans and animals are the raison d'etre of zoos. In earlier scholarship by geographers, the zoo has been examined as a key site within which strategies for domestication and mythologising of the animal world are enacted (Anderson, 1995). This transformation of ‘nature’ into a cultural backdrop is examined by Hallman and Benbow (2007) as facilitative of family interactions and learning opportunities (see also Idema & Patrick, 2016). While the meeting of entertainment and education at the zoo can be uneasy, it is claimed that learning tends to supersede leisure. Roe and McConney (2015) for instance, indicate that 170 zoos across 48 countries reported that the majority of their visitors come to learn. The character of zoos is historically and socially determined (Nekolný & Fialová, 2018). Central to this character is the idea of territory; not only is the zoo a territory set apart from the rest of the city, but also certain zoo territories are kept visitor-free. Our paper complements other recent studies of zoos. Olive and Jansen (2017), for instance, examine the role of Canadian zoos in their response to the biodiversity crisis. Through conservation programmes such as captive breeding and release, the authors claim that zoos can be major players in the protection and recovery of at-risk species. In other Canadian scholarship, Collard (2013) examines the politics of China loaning pandas to Canada. They see this ‘trade’ as needing to be problematised in the context of wider economic and, ultimately unsustainable, economic flows. Elsewhere, in their focus on dolphins on display in Singapore, Neo and Ngiam (2014) question the notion of ‘captivity’. This allows them to propose that relations between humans and animals are fundamentally moral and spatially contested around ideas of what is ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’. More recently, Holmberg (2021) investigates how expressions of violence and domination engage with care practices, coining the term ‘pastoral power’ for what occurs with respect to the Giant Pacific Octopus at Vancouver Aquarium. We seek to extend this geographical scholarship through identifying and addressing a gap: the unpacking of the human experience of entering zoo-territories that are usually kept free of visitors in order to maintain beastly ‘purity’. Our focus is on Auckland Zoo. Building on earlier examinations of zoo spaces both locally (Kearns et al., 2016) and in other Commonwealth countries such as Australia (Anderson, 1995) and Canada (Hallman & Benbow, 2007), we ask how ‘territories’ are (re)created through conservation-based placings of animals. Our argument is that the construction (and sometimes transgression) of boundaries that form zoo territories govern zoo-based encounters and are integral to the formation of animal identities. Playing on—and with—Dean MacCannell's (1973) seminal interpretation of staging, we examine human–animal encounters in terms of zoo ‘performances’ as experienced by both human visitors and non-human inhabitants. Animal actors are seen to perform within broader assemblages of stage(d) spaces. Using the analogy of a show we reflect on how Auckland Zoo's ‘Behind the Scenes’ programme reveals relationships between animal ‘actors’ and the visitor's role as ‘audience’. We are interested in how interspecies encounters are mediated by boundaries (both material and discursive). This mediation occurs through social and capital exchanges, human and non-human agency and moments of unpredictability. We argue that while zoo animals have agency, this is often limited within bounded spaces designed to recreate ‘wild’ or ‘natural’ spaces. These spaces, in turn, facilitate different sets of human–animal performances. In each, animals become entertainers, educators and ambassadors according to spatial and temporal boundary-constructions. Our analysis is based on the first author's observations of both human and animal behaviours, conversations with other participants (both guests and zoo staff) in 2018 as well as analysis of zoo spaces themselves, particularly in terms of signage and the location of animal enclosures. These observations are integrated with a range of narratives presented by the zoo (through their website, advertising and promotional pamphlets). This allows us to extend earlier examinations of Auckland Zoo's dispersed spaces (Kearns et al., 2016). In the remainder of the paper, we first afford closer consideration to the core concept of territories, before moving to the Auckland case study and consideration of the zoo as a stage. We then account for the process of the zoo as a ‘show’ and consider three sets of actors: animals framed as the hero, the innocent and the jester. We close by reflecting on the nature of agency and boundary transgression in the narratives at play within the Zoo. Within Auckland Zoo, territories consist both of physical spaces (such as fences, cages and pens), and as a means of non-human identity construction. This research follows Elizabeth Grosz (2008) and J.D Dewsbury's (2011) lead. For them, territories are understood in the Deleuzian sense: as part of shifting assemblages. Territories consist of habits and actions which are understood through signs, symbols and actions. Furthermore, territories can be destabilised through de-territorialisations, or re-formed through re-territorialisations, revealing shifting assemblages of humans, non-humans, technologies, places, objects, symbols and events that result in an untidy, entangled constellation of lives. Territories also have a strong relationship with identity, or as Deleuze (2004) claims: ‘territory is the domain of the having’. By way of example, a sheep becomes a sheep not because of his or her genetic legacy, but because of the territory s/he is bound within. ‘Sheep’ is commodity, wool-maker, meat or cute lamb, depending on the spaces and practices surrounding her. Likewise, ‘tiger’ may become noble beast, threat or prized trophy according to which territory he participates in at a given time. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argue this ‘territorialisation’ is a process of (temporary) self-making, with boundaries constructed through signs, habits and actions. Territories, then, consist of elements grouped by similar qualities, which are distinguished from other territories because of contrasting qualities. As such, identities are created by what they are not. Functioning in a manner similar to DeLanda's (2006) relations of exteriority, identities emerge as a function of dealings with other entities, spaces and practices. Furthermore, these relations have their own ontological integrity (Price-Robertson & Duff, 2016), requiring encounters both within and beyond sets of bounded territories. In this context, territories within Auckland Zoo require limits and boundaries that define (and con-fine) animal spaces to (re)produce animalised identities. In particular, different enclosures (as territories) mark particular identity-sets, labelling and defining those who act within them. Here, animal identity creation can be understood as a territorialising process, as the animals in residence assume multiple and changeable roles including identities as ‘educators’ and ‘ambassadors’. As we later observe, three common stage archetypes—the ‘hero’, the ‘innocent’ and the ‘jester’—are useful in reframing how zoo animals perform within staged structures. A clear relationship thus emerges between material bodies, identities, modes of human-animal encounter and governance of space. Using the foregoing framework, territories are more than spaces: they are systems of orientation. We therefore use the term to refer both to the identities of species (the classification of animals) and the spaces of their performance. We view ‘territorialisation’ to be the process through which animals are secured in place through both narratives and systems at Auckland Zoo. Since its establishment in 1922, Auckland Zoo has undergone multiple transformations, increasingly (re)framing its animal inhabitants as ‘educators’ rather than as ‘entertainers’. While in the past, animal performance primarily served to sate human appetites for the exotic, emphasis has increasingly been placed on conservation awareness (see Kearns et al., 2016). Auckland Zoo therefore grounds the way we experience its non-human inhabitants by highlighting the plight of particular species of animals, as well as crediting individual zoo creatures as possessing decision-making powers and ethical rights. In many ways the result of this ideological shift has been increased segregation between animals and humans, as a ‘hands-off’ philosophy has replaced an anthropomorphised, circus-like experience for zoo visitors (epitomised by elephant rides and chimpanzees' tea parties). Animal and human territories are distinct, at least to the visitor to Auckland Zoo. As a result, new sets of animal identities have been forged, as animals are re-cast as ambassadors for their species within highly fabricated replications of their wild homelands. Performances rely on separations between dual roles of stage/actor—audience/spectator. Moreover, the zoo philosophically situates animals as requiring meaningful engagement with ‘natural’ activities. Audiences are thus fed animalised performances on stage sets that signify places outside the zoo—for example, African savannah, Australian outback, or New Zealand native bush, even Rotoroa Island in the nearby Hauraki Gulf (Kearns et al., 2016)—constructed of props designed to replicate wild behaviours. The concept of sets and props can be related to what MacCannell (1973) referred to as the ‘front stage’ (also see Goffman, 1949). Conventionally understood in the literature as the meeting place between hosts and guests, this is necessarily a contrived space where performances are carefully measured and often sanitised. As such, the front stage is generally considered to be an ‘inauthentic’ space, or a facsimile of real-life designed to satisfy the tourist gaze. Nevertheless, as MacCannell pointed out, tourists have always desired a deeper, more authentic experience (reflected, perhaps, in the market for ‘eco-tourism’). To this end, Auckland Zoo provides ‘Behind the Scenes Experiences’ through which participants can experience ‘backstage’ areas of animal enclosures, and/or participate in ‘enrichment’ activities involving direct encounters with animal bodies. Of course, these ‘backstage’ experiences are no more authentic than passively viewing animals within their enclosures. Nonetheless, they can be understood as an extension of the Zoo-show, territorialising spaces and animal identities to fit contemporary zoo ideologies. Engagements with animals themselves are therefore subject to highly moderated processes. Emergent animal identities are subsequently shaped by (re)presentations of zoo-spaces as (re)constructions of nature and spaces of interactive learning, facilitated by front/backstage visitor experiences. Zoos have long been considered vital components of urban life. At the time of its establishment the Auckland Council doubtless understood that exhibiting nature in this way marked the city as a civilised centre of modernity (Wood, 1992). As Braverman (2011) notes, introducing animals into the metropolis meant their subsequent conversion into spectacle represented the ‘ultimate triumph of modern humans over nature, of city over country, of reason over nature's apparent wildness and chaos’ (Braverman, 2011, p. 814; also see Anderson, 1995). From its naissance in a rapidly industrialising city, Auckland Zoo functioned as a material and representational oasis of ‘nature’, with animals the most direct link between the wild, exotic beyond and the more mundane, urban here-and-now. Then, as now, these urges were perhaps fuelled by nostalgia. However, experiencing nature at this time was primarily to service the leisure needs of urban citizens and, as such, Auckland Zoo's animal inhabitants were often publicised as sources of entertainment and expected to perform accordingly. The illusion of ‘wild animals in nature’ was therefore established not by the surroundings, but by the bodily presence of animals themselves. Stark concrete cages dominated the zoo, epitomised by the blue and white painted cement icebergs across which the second author recalls seeing the lone polar bear unrelentingly pacing on his early childhood visits. Through these early years the high rate of animal deaths (and low rate of breeding) was testament to such ‘unnatural’ conditions. However, from the 1970s, Auckland Zoo began moving towards modifying its environment to embody values of conservation and animal welfare. Following international precedents (e.g. Benbow, 2000; Coe, 1985) there was a shift to a ‘cageless’ zoo designed to facilitate natural behaviour through the provision of features such as grassed mounds and climbing equipment. Recent developments include multi-species zones, designed to be more immersive for both zoo animals and human visitors. Indeed, the zoo promotes the latest zoo-space—the ‘South East Asia’ territory—as one that will both ‘provide the best care for our animals’ and bring multiple animal species together ‘to give visitors a deep connection with nature and inspire a love and care for wildlife and each other’ (www.aucklandzoo.co.nz, accessed 20 September 2021). Such developments enable spectators to imagine the objects of their gaze as in the ‘wild’ and help generate a different set of expectations about interspecies relationships, particularly in terms of conservation and animal welfare. Conservation values also are built into the ways animals are presented: information boards, demonstrations from keepers, promotional events such as ‘safari nights’, leaflets and merchandise all emphasise vulnerable and endangered species. Furthermore, narratives that entwine animals with conservation ethics ensure that zoo-dwellers become representative of ‘nature’. Critiques of the realist-Cartesian environmental paradigm often note that throughout Western thought and practice, nature is reified as a pristine domain, separate from the contaminating influence of humanity (Lestel et al., 2014). However, the zoo's own ‘nature’ necessitates a high level of human–animal encounter. The emergent materiality of the zoo therefore reflects the increased importance placed on environmental conservation and species preservation, articulating spaces beyond the zoo-boundaries through both representation of, and physical experience with, animals within it. As animal performance is governed by space, the experience of ‘going-to-the-zoo’ is moderated by boundaries that establish animal identities as relational to us as humans. The stage is therefore set: as we become audience, animals become actors. The zoo experience begins. When we ‘go to the zoo’, we take part in a performance enacted within the opening hours of 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. At the most basic level, we are subject to temporal boundaries with the zoo gates open only during these specified daylight hours. We are presented with animals as symbols that, according to Collard (2013, p. 228), ‘depend inextricably on their material and bio-physiological presences’. The rest of the time, zoo-doings are hidden from us; presumably animals will sleep, eat, defecate, exercise, play, take medicine, undergo surgeries, fight, copulate, give birth and be euthanised in the same zoo-space(s), or within parallel ‘backstage’ enclosures. However, during these opening hours, the curtain is parted and zoo actors participate in a show that features boundaries between them-as-animal and us-as-human. In turn, as the audience, visitors are expected to abide by rules reinforced by physical structures. Just as we are expected to remain seated through a theatrical performance, at the zoo we gaze at cheetahs from behind perspex walls and at otters over concrete barriers. We look down on tigers in a pit, and up at orang-utans on their hilltop climbing structures. Although breached by both parties at times, these boundaries secure our positions as ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ and serve to maintain distance between species as well as the manner in which we connect/disconnect with one another. Fundamental to the zoo ethos is the replication of ‘wild’ animal behaviours which are increasingly achieved through ‘enrichment’ activities in the form of games and challenges. The Zoo describes enrichment as ‘a way of enhancing the environment an animal lives in. It's anything we do here at Auckland Zoo to encourage and stimulate natural behaviours in our animals … Providing enrichment alleviates boredom and gives our animals more choice on how they use their environment’ (www.aucklandzoo.co.nz, accessed 4 October 2014). Although framed in terms of animal welfare, the passage reveals the zoo's status as active provider, with the animals themselves referred to as recipients of enriching activities. The description continues: ‘[a]long with improving animal welfare, it gives our visitors a more enhanced experience at the zoo and a chance to see behaviours they may not have realised an animal could do’. Visitor experience is now overtly mentioned, making transparent the importance of active animals being on display. In other words, enrichment ensures that animals perform at certain (pre-advertised) times, in a clear demonstration of MacCannell's (1973) staged authenticity. Despite increasingly hands-off policies and practices, Auckland Zoo must also respond to visitor demand for intimate interspecies moments of encounter. Behind the Scenes Experiences have been developed, intended to educate the public about animals' ‘natural’ behaviours. Conducted in small groups and usually held within animal enclosures, these guided tours are relatively expensive, and last one to 2 h. It is important to note that animals are selected by the zoo (rather than chosen by customers), and their access is mediated by booking systems, with set dates and times often months from the registration date. Human–animal encounters are therefore placed within temporal boundaries as well as being conducted within defined and bounded spaces. As ‘Experiences’ are performed within enclosures, participants partake in literal boundary-crossings that are not part of regular Zoo visits. Entrance into animal territory then, is a vital component of a more privileged ‘experiencing’ of the Zoo, offering a way that the visitor can overcome spatial boundaries and, in so doing, enter a highly ritualised performance. Armed with orange lanyards, we may meet with our guides and temporarily participate in the backstage, animal ‘inside’ of the Zoo. Yet permission to access animals is measured not only by lanyards, but also via a coloured coded system of Zoo uniforms through which lanyard-bearers must liaise. In this case, shirt colour demarcates the level of animal interaction a staff member is privy to. At one end of the spectrum are the red-clad volunteers who answer questions and point out interesting animal behaviours. They are approachable, and indeed we could even join their ranks should we complete a training programme and commit to a number of weekends onsite. Zoo guides wear teal blue attire (a progressively more ‘natural’ colour). They are our gateway to animal experiences. However, it is zookeepers who are the acceptable presence within animal enclosures. Accordingly, zookeepers wear khaki safari outfits, symbols of knowledge of, and intimacy with, the animal world. Connected with hunting and a Hemingway-esque masculinised dominance over nature, the safari suit has been re-appropriated to convey the message of conservation that we now associate with the zoo. Wearing khaki implies camouflage and becoming part of the natural world. Keepers are thus the mouthpiece of zoo animals and are made visible by performing educational talks that feature the animals themselves. It is khaki-wearers who we accept as qualified to make informed decisions about where visitors can and cannot perform alongside animals. For example, in the lion enclosure we are instructed to remain behind a line painted across the floor of the stark concrete den. Here we stay, safe from fearsome claws and formidable jaws while keepers administer medicine to an elderly lioness. Keepers are also responsible for ensuring that doors are secure between areas so that we can set foot in the outdoor enclosure to assemble activities for feline enrichment. Once locks are in place, latches clicked and heavy barred doors drawn, visitors are invited forward. Lion bodies are securely absent and it is now the audience who are captive in a role-reversal that puts keepers, guides and guests on display in the enclosure. As participants, we perform our enrichment set-up while a second keeper tells the ‘outside’ audience the lion's history in the zoo and the types of activities they would engage in had they remained wild. An excursion into the lion's lair is thus a process that reinforces lion identities through myths and narratives that focus on places (Brighenti, 2010), as animals perform roles that affirm themselves as both parts of the zoo-show and as active, unpredictable agents. More benign perhaps, is the Red Panda Experience, which also involves the construction of enrichment environments and allows participants to undertake basic feeding tasks first-hand. Here, food is attached to equipment so that the pandas are forced to ‘hunt’ for it, as well as offering food directly from human to animal bodies (see Figure 1). In this case, both humans and animals are inside the enclosure together, having stepped past the normal boundaries that segregate humans from animals. After being thoroughly briefed on protocol (and donning the lesser boundary of latex gloves) we must remain still, hands outstretched to initiate an approach. Patience may be rewarded, as food is accepted from human hands as well as from the more ‘natural’ display where pear halves have been suspended from overhanging branches within the enclosure. Hence in both the offering and taking of food, both human and animal participants in the experience are granted an intimacy of encounter and a degree more agency than is usual in zoo visitation. In other Experiences more defined barriers remain between animal and human bodies. Taking place in a ‘backstage’ zone, the hippos remain in secure pens; visitors throw bright red apples and orange carrots into their mouths from behind a line demarcating what the zoo-keepers call the ‘safe zone’. We are safe from them, of course, but they too are presented as safe from us; in 1937 ‘Chaka’ the hippo died in agony after swallowing a tennis ball thrown into his enclosure by a visitor. The performance of food-throwing and catching creates a territory of interaction, but is simultaneously restricted through delineated human and animal zones. The safe zone, the bars of the cage, the mediation of keepers who pass participants a single apple at a time and offer instructions as to when they may take their turn to toss a piece of fruit all serve to segregate zoo-space and experience into zones that are exclusively animal or human. Zoo Experiences are also mediated by experts through embedded conservation messages that play into the enunciation of the zoo-as-territory. Most obvious are educational messages, given verbally (supported by information boards outside exhibits) which place animals within ecological contexts. From the outset, encounters with individual animals are (re)framed as an act of charity towards a whole species, rather than thrill-seeking or a commercial enterprise on behalf of the zoo. Thus, conservation becomes part of a ritual that involves technology, capital and the transfer of knowledge, all of which ensure that the participant enjoys privilege above and beyond a regular visitation. We can therefore understand territories as being organised by patterns of interactions between actors. Determined through conquest and claims to space, the physicality of territories is established through assemblages that result from embodied encounters between multiple human and animal actants and fluxing power relations. Territories can therefore result from behavioural practices particularly those that articulate agency through the construction of boundaries such as Zoo Experiences and that can subsequently be re-territorialised through animal agency. At Auckland Zoo, animals are classified not only by their scientific Latin name, but also through information about their characteristics. Information boards thus identify the otters as playful, the lions as fierce, the wallabies quick and apes smart. Furthermore, information boards emphasise animals' homelands, spatially defining them as members of a species (such as an African lion, Indian elephant, or Australian wallaby). Thus, animals have identities as belonging to certain foreign spaces, as out-of-place in New Zealand. Belonging in dual spaces, animals therefore represent their species as tokens of far-off wild spaces as well as bodily existing as individuals with whom we can form connections on the zoo-stage. The birth-lands of animal bodies become not just exotic lands abroad (as was common in zoos of the past), but also places generally presented as depleted of resources and victims of human greed. Such depictions help justify the animal's presence in the zoo such that it is necessary to have individuals confined: as representations of species in peril, or as breeding stock. In this way the animal's role as entertainer is understated and their educational value is accentuated. Nevertheless, Behind the Scenes Experiences reveal how the Zoo has tried to balance visitor desires (for fun animal encounters) and conservation of endangered beasts. Moreover, the role of entertainer is too broad and all-encompassing to fit the wide range of animals in Auckland Zoo. As in a conventional drama, animal identities are overlaid by archetypes invoked through imagery, dialogue and spaces of encounter. Here we focus on three of these—the Hero, the Innocents and the Jester—to help unpack some of the complex and multifaceted identity constructions within zoo-space. Traditionally the Hero is not only a warrior fighting for good, but also a saviour. In our account of the Zoo, this part is played by Anjalee the elephant. Historically, elephants have been some of New Zealand's few examples of non-human public figures. We have had Jamuna, from the Zoo's ‘golden age’ of elephant rides and chimpanzee tea parties, and Rajah, who was euthanised aged only 19 due to his ‘rogue behaviour’ such as spitting at visitors. In contrast, there was a monumental outpouring of grief when 40-year-old Kashin died in 2009. In early years, Kashin had been sponsored by the Auckland Savings Bank (precursor to ASB Bank). The second author recalls being given a plastic piggy-bank-like effigy of Kashin at primary school in the 1960s to encourage thrift and saving. Eulogies appeared in newspapers and on television, and there was a free day at the Zoo when grief-stricken members of the public could pay their respects to her. Almost 20,000 people attended the public memorial, testament to the association of the elephant as valued public figure, and the relationships developed through animal–human encounters at the zoo. After Kashin's death, focus shifted to the subsequent concern for lone elephant, Burma, with media predicting her certain death should a replacement companion not be found. This led to the acquisition of Anjalee, a 9-year-old ‘orphan’ elephant from Pinnewala Elephant refuge in Sri Lanka. A gift from the Sri Lankan government, Anjalee had the role of supporting international bonds between countries, as well as performing national duties. Expectations surrounding what ‘makes’ a zoo have meant that it is a matter of civic pride to have elephantine displays. Former chair of the Zoo Board, Graeme Mulholland, for instance, associates elephants in zoos with being cosmopolitan, civilised and modern—in contrast to Dunedin, which he seemed to regard as an elephantless backwater (New Zealand Herald, 2011)—and elephants are traditionally a huge draw for paying visitors. As saviour, Anjalee has been not just a companion to Burma, but also a strategy for ensuring the financial survival of the zoo as corporate entity. A second characteristic of the Hero is that of making a journey, the passing of boundaries through which hardships are overcome and transformations are made. In Anjalee's case, this journey was not only difficult, but also relatively expensive, with Auckland City Council loaning the Zoo $3.2 million to cover transport and quarantine. Rather than directly arriving at the Zoo, she flew via freighter to Auckland from Sri Lanka, only to be immediately re-loaded onto a defence force C130 Hercules bound for her quarantine in Niue. Anjalee was now less ‘trade item’ or ‘cargo’, and more escorted nobility. After her 90 days were up, Anjalee again boarded the Hercules, finally arriving at the zoo. There were celebrations upon her arrival, including a photo exhibition showcasing the Zoo's past elephants, firmly embedding Anjalee into a genealogy. As with other elephants, Anjalee's identity was in part an entertainer who could be taken for elephant walks and an educator (as the focus of question and answer sessions) that represented elephants in general. While the decision was made in 2020 to relocate both elephants to overseas zoos in order to give Anjalee the chance to reproduce, it remains that her presence was not only a considerable investment, but also a token: both badge of esteem and vital component of a Zoo. Her role was therefore one of revenue-maker and capital value for the zoo, a powerful drawcard whose bodily presence served to connect visitors with far-flung places and classical understandings of ‘wildlife’. As such Anjalee's selfhood