CAT (which is short for Crosslocating Animal Transgressions, but CAT will do) began on 1 January 2026, and will continue until December 31 2031, funded by the Research Council of Finland. The overall idea is to map out how people-animal relations are changing in the European context across several levels: in the arrival of animals in places they did not used to occupy (e.g. wild boar and foxes in cities); in mass extinctions and responses to that, which includes rewilding and conservation projects; in debates about hunting, animal farming and people's use of animals for various purposes; and the role of microbes in all of this. The idea is to map out what is happening in the perceived borders between people and animals, and how transgressions across those borders, both by people and animals, is helping to redefine the relations of people and animals.
The lead researcher in this project is me, Sarah Green. I am a social and cultural anthropologist, and I specialise on both the anthropology of location and borders as well as the anthropology of what some would call the 'more than human' or 'other than human' - for the sake of simplicity, I use the word 'animals' here. It's not quite right, as I am also interested in microbes, which are not exactly animals, but it will do for now.
In the first year (2026) of this project, I will be mapping out a broad sense of what the current debates are around the European region. In future years, myself and a small team will carry out some research based on those findings. As we are working, we will be in close communication with life scientists (ecologists, virologists, veterinarians and so on), to gain a better understanding of how scientific understandings of these relations is changing. The ultimate aim is to bring together what anthropology can learn about these relations with what science is learning about them.
I will be reporting what I find out from time to time here, in this blog. Through that, I hope to build up a sense of how these issues are playing out across the European region. If you are reading this and know of an interesting example, feel free to send it to this site through the Contact Us tab.