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By Cole Harris. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008. 486 pages. $39.95 softcover. ISBN 0-7748-1450-8 (www.ubcpress.ca) Cole Harris is a highly accomplished Canadian historical geographer who, though now emeritus [...]

Zoogeography developed as a Newtonian/Cartesian science in the early nineteenth century as descriptive classification. After Darwin it evolved into biogeography, an explanatory, then predictive science, often aligned with and even indistinguishable from ecology. As a science, biogeography remains objective and remote from human interaction, using animals to forward anthropocentric concerns. Applied biogeography, led by ecologists, has studied distribution patterns altered by urban encroachment. Human/animal relations have been a concern for twentieth-century cultural geography, reflected in historical studies of domestication and in musings about current human/animal relations. The geography of domestic animals seldom considers animals other than as economic units or commodities. A subjective, humanistic and, at times, biocentric animal geography has been influential in widening the scope for some, but animal geography remains a science. It has been unable to wrench frç∙ of a purely analytic approach in favor of holism. An emerging animal geography furthers social theoretical concerns with little in common to zoogeographies other than still using animals as a commodity. It therefore remains within the Newtonian/Cartesian method of science rather than addressing the more holistic concerns of a complexity paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the hog-producing region in southwestern Kansas and on the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas. Description of the hog farms; Functions of the farms in the organized cycle of hog production; Hog-production system of Seaboard Corp.