Human-animal relations in lively cities: a novel look

Here is a brilliant new volume on human-animal relations, examined through several lenses: political, ecological and anthropological. Maan Barua’s Lively Cities is a valuable addition to the genre of human-animal relations in Asia, adding to recent volumes focusing on human-tiger relations in the Sunderbans (Jalais, 2014) and in Mishmi Valley in Arunachal (Aiyadurai, 2021), and a range of other species in the Uttarakhand Hills (Govindrajan, 2018). What is common to these books is the very intimate view of animals and their responses to humans and human society, brought to light by anthropological approaches. In Lively Cities, Barua goes a little further: to additionally view people from the animal’s perspective, based on entangled observations of human and animal behavior.

Lively Cities enriches the field of urban ecology, a burgeoning field in Asia, where the world’s largest and fastest-growing metropolises are located. A number of works have looked at the politics of urban landscapes such as lakes, rivers and city streets, particularly vis-à-vis conservation (Agarwal, 2014; Nagendra, 2016). However, these works focus largely on human-resource interactions and their environmental implications. Barua, however, views the ecology of cities from a different perspective- that of the other-than-human. For instance, Lively Cities provides deep insights into practical issues of maintaining the sanitized city where wild and feral beasts are constantly trying to get a foot in the door. This brings up the question of how the twenty-first century concept of the Smart City in India will grapple with commensal animals that are unwanted by many, but also welcomed by some (see also Jalais, 2021).

Inconvenient nature

For an ecologist, the most significant take-away from Lively Cities is the persistence of nature against all odds. The continuing failure of humans to tame nature has been evident both historically and in contemporary times. Lively Cities describes the series of efforts to remove rhesus macaques from Delhi since the early twentieth century- from trapping and relocation of the macaques to the deployment of gray langurs to ward them off. Despite dogged state-sponsored efforts, these animals have now become a permanent fixture of Delhi’s cityscape.

Just as humans do, commensals such as macaques appear to demand their own piece of the urban pie- the privileges, comforts and food security associated with the city! They justifiably recognize that life is better and easier in and around humans than in the forest! Similarly, Kaali, the urban cow, “repurposes” infrastructure such as road dividers for rest and rumination and forms her daily rhythm in response to human behavior, resource distribution patterns, noise levels and diurnal temperature variation in her part of the city. In London, parakeets fit comfortably into the niche of abundant yard-feeding created by sympathetic humans.

Interestingly, humans are altering nature in significant ways, and still expect that nothing in nature will change. There are suites of ecological changes that come with every transformation that we make in the landscape, given the inter-connectedness of species and environmental factors. For instance, we amplify food provisioning for feral and wild species through our garbage disposal methods and around religious sites or often enough, simply because we like to see these species around our homes. However, we are alarmed when species such as macaques, crows and stray dogs explode in numbers.

The growing interface between forest and urban areas, caused by the development of agrarian habitats, may also be contributing to the steep increase in numbers of wild species seen in the city, for instance, crocodiles in Ahmedabad and more recently, lions in Porbandar. The erstwhile rural buffer between protected habitats and urban settlements in India is seen to be rapidly shrinking, and along with that, the buffering landscape that earlier provided for some of the needs of feral, habitually commensal, and wild species.

The different examples in Lively Cities also show the complexity of responses by various groups within human society. Commensal animals now cause much grief to a range of stakeholders in the city (particularly the government which wishes to maintain “order”) yet are also welcomed by many. People of different classes, proclivities, religions and castes often wish for different outcomes; therefore, management questions can be extremely complex for the government, which inevitably wishes to impose order.

Segregating the city

Lively Cities spotlights the continuing human quest to segregate consumption spaces from production spaces, a post-colonial obsession in the Global South. Urban spaces are overwhelmingly seen as consumption spaces with little role for production activities. Given the drive among planners to distinguish cities from rural areas, there has been a concerted attempt to do away with any form of agriculture, fishery or dairying, that may have existed prior to urbanization. According to the author, such segregation may also arise out from an attempt to impose some order on the otherwise haphazard nature of the city. Barua quotes the celebrated planner, Le Corbusier, to describe the city’s preferred expression of modernity, the “political aesthetics of the straight line” (p. 214):

“Man walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going.” The “pack-donkey”, on the other hand, “meanders along, meditates a little in his scatter-brained and distracted fashion, he zigzags”, taking “the line of least resistance.” (p. 214)

Barua has researched the intriguing history of pastoralism in Delhi right from colonial times, defined by persistent attempts to contain the dairies and control the movement of cows and buffalo within the city. Dairies were equated with “unsanitary disease-causing conditions” by the planners of the time, an antiquated perspective continuing to the present. Interestingly, owing to its perceived better taste and nutrition, Delhi’s inhabitants today favor milk supplied by local pastoralists who live in the peri-urban space of the city-village, over branded milk.

Politics of ecology

Lively Cities deeply explores political ecology in the urban space, reminding us of the value of this lens in the urban sphere as much as non-urban spaces, where the tussles over natural resources have been analyzed much more (e.g., Robbins, 2000; Shahabuddin, 2010). In the pursuit of understanding “the micropolitics of ferality” (p. 147), Barua gives us interesting characters: no significant participant is left out. The author spends as much space on Kaali, the quintessential Indian urban cow, as he does on her benefactors such as the woman who puts out vegetable peels every morning for the cow, or the car driver who willingly makes space for Kaali on crowded streets. Everyday life in London provides interesting vignettes as well: from the middle-class bird-lover who never fails to put out seed for rose-ringed parakeets in her yard, to the militant sharpshooter who is trying to get rid of the “alien” parakeets. Then there is the Syrian refugee who makes a meagre living out of marketing parakeet-feeding opportunities to tourists and park visitors. Barua writes with empathy and depth about such people, which helps to understand the motivations that drive various players in the dominant paradigm of city-planning.

City-planning inevitably revolves around “gentrification, displacement of the poor and enclosure of the commons". Numerous authors, including Mayank Vikas (2019), Thomas Crowley (2020) and Shubhra Gururani (2018) have amply demonstrated these kinds of transformational shifts in the city of Delhi beginning in its colonial history. For instance, nomadic pastoralists that used the grasslands and forests in and around Delhi, were gradually marginalized in the quest for modern planning and urban order. The indefatigable efforts adopted to rid the city of its commensal animals, have their roots in the past and are just another manifestation of the same underlying imperatives- of a “clean city” free of animals and “pests”. But such efforts show up the inequality within the city. Middle-class people feed macaques, but slum-dwellers living in their fragile shacks with few defenses, suffer disproportionately more from the same habituated animals. Parallels can easily be drawn with the dangers of stray dogs on city streets. While middle-class and elite citizens parachute in with free food for stray animals, often making a daily routine of it, homeless people and their children suffer the most due to heightened exposure to stray dogs.

Invasion ecology: the making of an enemy

Lively Cities provokes a rethinking of the concept of invasion biology in contemporary ecological sciences and encourages a dialogue between the science and the politics of conservation pivoted around the question of invasives and their ecological harm.

However, Barua challenges the idea of the “nonnative” and wants us to re-examine this concept (p. 178). The debates around aliens versus native species have become common in ecological discussions. Barua uses the rose-ringed parakeets in London as the key anchor for discussing everyday events in the city as part of an urban politics that amplifies the anti-immigrant (and racist) stand of London. The imperative is to rid the city of the rose-ringed parakeet, which was brought in from India, and which subsequently multiplied.

Barua’s primary argument here is that the narrative of a nonnative population has been constructed, and then legitimized by science. However, he feels that there is just not enough scientific evidence to prove that parakeets oust native birds or compete with rare cavity-nesting birds. Using the parlance of population trends, distribution, and mapping, he argues that the science may be biased against nonnatives, given the ways in which it is used.

In this context, Barua points out that the parakeets have adapted to the new conditions and how the existing species have adjusted their food/behavior. For instance, the average flock size of roseringed parakeets has gone down due to the need for reducing competition at birdfeeders. There is evidence that they have gradually evolved stronger beaks as they need to feed on hard nuts much more than in their natural range. Further, many co-occurring species have already adapted to the rose ringed parakeet in the short span of a few decades: native raptors such as peregrine falcons and tawny owls now prey principally on parakeets in place of their more diverse prey.

Barua’s work does tempt the reader to reexamine the concept of invasives (see also – Pearce, 2015). Yet one feels that he is being a tad too hasty in judging the paradigm of invasion biology held dear by ecologists. In terms of narratives, the pendulum seems to swing too much between view of invasives as an imminent danger to biodiversity (Ricciardi et al., 2011; Simberloff et al., 2013) and those who feel there is no problem at all. It might have been useful to generate a more nuanced discussion of invasion ecology in this volume.

That being said, Lively Cities will be a rewarding read for anthropologists, sociologists, ecologists and political scientists! Barua treads skillfully across a complex minefield and in the process, provokes rethinking about urban ecology, bio-politics and human-animal relations, based on his pioneering research. I eagerly await his future forays into the histories and lives of other urban commensals such as the house gecko and the rock pigeon, who both so enrich and complicate our lives, in more ways than we care to admit.