Civilized spaces are places with borders, places defined in terms of limits and zones of restricted access. We occupy rooms in houses and buildings with exterior walls sited relative to neighborhoods and city limits and county lines and state, provincial, and national borders; we commute in climate-encased vehicles to jobs where we assemble on shop floors, or sort ourselves into offices or cubicles, or step into our stations behind counters or service windows, or climb into other vehicles. All of these bounded spaces are designed as regions of containment, aggregation, and, above all, segregation and separation. That which falls on the other side of the border is external, outside, other.
This is a wholly unnatural thing. Externally-defined boundaries are artificial contrivances, inventions of civilization, technologies of control with no true counterpart in the natural world. Animals, we are told, inhabit territories. And some creatures will fight to the death defending a patch of terrain. From within the civilized mind-scape, such fights can only be seen as a kind of border dispute. We are quick to apply a civilized template, quick to see parallels to civilized notions of property.
Property, however, does not exist in wild nature. Neither do regions or zones or territories. And especially not states and provinces and nations. These are all tools of power and control, technologies of restriction and constraint. And the borders themselves, the boundaries associated with these things are defined primarily in terms of the limits of control, and only secondarily by what is contained within or without.
For animals—and noncivilized humans—boundaries are defined by the center, by the spatial and temporal contours of their capacity to act in the moment, a region that travels with them, expanding and contracting according to transient changes of purpose and circumstance.