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Vinciane Despret
Translated by Helen Morrison
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Territory will therefore take on other meanings which extend well beyond the notion that it is simply a matter of property. Certain ornithologists were moreover at pains to point out that, when it comes to territory, what is said with reference to birds does not necessarily have the same meaning as humans would give to the term. Howard, for example, would emphasize that territory is above all a process, or rather, as he explains, part of a process involved in the reproduction cycle: ‘Regarded thus, we avoid the risk of conceiving of the act of securing a territory as a detached event in the life of a bird, and avoid, I hope, the risk of a conception based upon the meaning of the word when used to describe human as opposed to animal procedures.’9 A few pages further on, he would add that what he calls a disposition to secure a territory amounts to a disposition to remain in a particular place at a particular moment. And even the father of ethology, Konrad Lorenz, whose book On Aggression is certainly by no means exempt from questionable and insufficiently problematized analogies, was keen to distinguish between territory and property, pointing out that territory ‘must not be imagined as a property determined by geographical confines.’10 Territory, he adds, can also, in certain circumstances and for certain animals, be linked as much to time as it is to space. Thus, for example, cats establish what he calls ‘a definite timetable’: a given space is not divided but instead shared at different times. The cats leave scent marks at regular intervals. If a cat encounters one of these marks, it can assess whether it is fresh or a few hours old. In the first case the cat chooses a different route and in the second it continues calmly on its way. These marks, according to Lorenz, ‘act like railway signals whose aim is to prevent collision between two trains’.
Yet the cautious approach taken by Lorenz vis-à-vis possible misunderstandings (a caution which is very much relative since, on the same page, we will nonetheless be confronted with the notion of territory as a ‘headquarters’) is not quite as widely shared as might be suggested by what has so far been described. I have been referring to ornithologists, but they are not alone in taking an interest in animal territories. And that, as we say in colloquial terms, is where things take a turn for the worse.11
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