'Of place' or 'of people': exploring the animal spaces and beastly places of feral cats in southern Ontario
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Feral cats are contentious and transgressive, with opposing views on whether to classify them as abandoned pets, wild animals, or invasive species. Concerns about their welfare often conflict with fears that they are impacting native fauna. This paper presents the results of a case study of human–feral cat relations that took place in southern Ontario, Canada in 2014. This research investigates the discursive constructions of feral cats and their 'animal spaces' using the results of 40 semi-structured interviews. Following recent calls to move beyond human representations of animals and better integrate animals' geographies, this study also explores the 'beastly places' of feral cats using the results of field observations of 20 feral cat colonies and anecdotal evidence from colony caretakers. The results emphasize the diversity of free-living contexts and the complexity of management options. This paper ends by discussing the place-making practices of cats, along with their potential ethical ramifications. Overall, it illustrates the importance of spatial factors in understanding the complex social and ethical dynamics of human–animal relations, and advances an understanding of nonhuman animals as inhabitants of personally meaningful homes.This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Social & Cultural Geography on 2017-01-04, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14649365.2016.1275754. Deposited by shareyourpaper.org and openaccessbutton.org. We've taken reasonable steps to ensure this content doesn't violate copyright. However, if you think it does you can request a takedown by emailing help@openaccessbutton.org.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it