How does the concept of liminality help us to conceptualize the borderlands between humans and animals? From one angle, the answer is straightforward enough, as the purpose of all theories of liminality is to explore the business of the border and the boundary. More specifically, the lives of nonhuman animals can be characterized as liminal or in-between, neither one thing nor another, or both at the same time. Some animals fall in this way between the wild and the domestic, challenging any neat demarcation between the human and the nonhuman, nature and culture. But liminality comes in a variety of flavours, not all of which are compatible, and the purpose of this essay is to draw out the differences, including the contradictions, between these approaches to the animal-human borderlands. Focussing on three distinctive conceptualizations of the liminal, I want to redirect our attention from the boundary between humans and animals to that between humanity and animality, and from liminal animals to ‘liminanimals’.1 This is the principal theoretical message here, but I also want to make the further claim that we should be able to work with these inconsistencies rather than merely to be aware of them. We should (to borrow Donna Haraway’s dictum) ‘stay with the trouble’ that liminanimals represent, rather than chase after a kind of theoretical purity.2 Being clear about what we mean when we link liminality and nonhuman animals is the aim – but we do not do full justice to the theory of liminality unless we question the seeming solidity of our presumptions. Staying with the ‘mundane trouble’ that ‘terran critters’ represent means, I argue, accepting the complexity and even contradictory formulations of liminality, not trying to wish them away through magisterial but misleading statements about humans, animals, nature and culture.3 This paper’s purpose is to review the profusion of liminal animals out there, but also to make the theoretical point that the ‘animal-human borderlands’ are even more troubling than we might first imagine.