C. S. Lewis, the British theologian and novelist, once proclaimed: ‘The tame animal is in the deepest sense the only natural animal.’ It prompted a passionate protest from Evelyn Underhill, another theologian who had an aversion for the introduction of modern artifice to nature's pristine being, who said, ‘… if we ever get a sideway glimpse of the animal-in-itself … we don't owe it to the Persian cat or the canary, but to some wild free creature living in completeness of adjustment to Nature a life that is utterly independent of man’.

Both these strands of thought symbolise an age-old tussle among thinkers to define essential animal subjectivity. Lewis eulogised the ‘tameness’ of animals that has played a crucial role in human civilisational projects ever since the first agricultural settlers used bullocks to plough the land. Underhill, on the other hand, is concerned about the primal essence of life, uninfringed upon by motives of human progress. These concerns for nature preservation with utilitarian logic gained potency as human civilisation progressed. But as we shall see in this chapter, human–animal interactions in frontier spaces display a complex dynamism beyond such binary arguments.

As the distance between wilderness and civilisation grew, human–animal relations diversified into various spheres of proximity where they interacted in distinct ways. Irrespective of these differences, every sphere continuously created cultures populated by ideas and representations of other species to deal with their relative distancing.