Related Papers
Journal of Environmental Planning and Management
The many boar identities understanding difference and change in the geographies of European wild boar management
2023 •
Marianna Szczygielska
Wildlife management across Europe is increasingly characterised by a‘war on wildboar’. In response to epidemiological and economic threats to pig production andagriculture, state agencies, policymakers and hunting organizations have altered theirmanagement as they attempt to contain wild boar. Through a cross-section overviewof eight European countries with differentiated strategies–the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Great Britain, Norway, Poland, Spain, and Sweden–we analyze five critical components of contemporary wild boar management: categorizing, responsibilizing, calculating, controlling, and sanitizing. We consider three critical triggers that change how wild boar and, by extension, a range of other wild species are managed in relation to the aforementioned categories: (over)abundance and population growth, biosecurity crises, and technological innovation. While the triggers, on one hand, might streamline transborder management policies, we show how wild boar also uproot longstanding wildlife management cultures by transforming hunting traditions, landowner-hunter relations and meat handling practices.
Przegląd Kulturoznawczy
Feral Urban Wild Boars: Managing Spaces of Conflict with Care and Attention
2019 •
Agata Kowalewska
People and Nature
Categorisation of cats: managing boundary felids in Aotearoa New Zealand and Britain
2023 •
Virginia Thomas
1. Management of domestic and wild animals is an integral part of conservation and is often based on how an animal is categorised. For example, feral cats are often killed, while valued companion cats and native wildcats are protected. 2. Drawing on qualitative research and using the concept of boundary-work, this paper examines the complex categorisation and management of cats within conservation in Britain and Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ). We examine how, both in theory and in practice, valued companion and wildcats are distinguished from unprotected feral cats, and in-between categories of stray and hybrid cats. 3. We demonstrate that stakeholders draw boundaries between cat categories differently. These differences in boundary-drawing reflect the inherent blurriness of category boundaries, practical challenges, and, importantly, differences in values, in particular whether priority is placed on the life of the cat or the cat's potential victim, particularly native or game birds. This can mean that laws outlining protections for specific categories of animals have limited effect if, in practice, those encountering cats draw boundaries differently. 4. This paper also reports on important differences between the two case studies. In NZ, even cat advocates support the humane killing of unambiguously feral cats while this is less true in Britain. Furthermore, due to the nature of the contexts, conservationists in NZ are more 2 inclined to assume that ambiguous cats are feral whereas conservationists in Britain are more inclined to assume that they are wildcats. 5. This paper demonstrates that values not only shape people's perceptions and treatment of animals, but also how they draw boundaries between them. This finding may have important implications for understanding other controversies in conservation and animal management.
American Ethnologist
Reversible pigs: An infraspecies ethnography of wild boars in Barcelona
2023 •
Aníbal G. Arregui
The idea of "species" is the main unit for representing ecological relations. But what would an ecology look like if we started by tracing its relations from below the species threshold? By deploying an infraspecies ethnography, I show how, in suburban Barcelona, human and wild boar individuals relate in personal, creative ways, and how in doing so, they also reshape their quotidian ecologies from the bottom up. Departing from species-level imaginaries of wildlife managers, suburban residents cope with wild boars not only as idiosyncratic specimens but also as reversible beings: pigs that are simultaneously "wild" and "tame," "rural" and "urban," "pest" and "neighbor." Shifting the attention from relations between coherent species to the situated encounters between singular specimens unveils how individuals weave reversible relations, remake ecologies, and navigate the uncertainty of emerging human-animal intimacies.
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space
Nonhuman citizens on trial: The ecological politics of a beaver reintroduction
2017 •
Steve Hinchliffe
Wildlife reintroductions can unsettle social and ecological norms, and are often controversial. In this paper, we examine the recent (re)introduction of Eurasian beavers to England, to analyse responses to an unauthorised release of a formerly resident species. Although the statutory response to the introduction was to attempt to reassert ecological and political order by recapturing the beavers, this action was strongly opposed by a diverse collective, united and made powerful by a common goal: to protect England’s ‘new’ nonhuman residents. We show how this clash of state resolve and public dissent produced an uneasy compromise in the form of a formal, licensed ‘beaver reintroduction trial’, in which the new beaver residents have been allowed to remain, but under surveillance. We propose that although the trial is unorthodox and risky, there is an opportunity for it to be treated as a ‘wild experiment’ through which a more open-ended, experimental approach to co-inhabiting with wil...
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
The Anthropocene’s animal? Coywolves as feral cotravelers
2018 •
Stephanie Rutherford
This article considers the irreducible indeterminacy of the coywolf and how this shapes human perceptions of the animal, as well as attempts to manage it. The hybridity of the coywolf matters very much to its interactions with humans, as well as the panic that has ensued over its evolutionary success. They are genetic and morphological intermediaries, an admixture of western coyote, eastern wolf, and dog. They hunt in packs like wolves but demonstrate a fearlessness to humans more common of coyotes. They thrive in urban or semiurban environs, moving along our highway, transit, and green space systems in search of food and shelter. I suggest it is the putative ferality of the coywolf—its margin—dwelling between urban and wild, between wolf and coyote—that disrupts our prevailing narratives about how, and on whose terms, animals can occupy the world. But it is also an animal that offers an opening to think about mutual flourishing. I contend this is a fruitful place to start tackling ...
Geoforum
Bovine biopolitics and the promise of monsters in the rewilding of Heck cattle
Clemens Driessen
Annals of the Association of American Geographers
From “Nazi Cows” to Cosmopolitan “Ecological Engineers”: Specifying Rewilding Through a History of Heck Cattle
Clemens Driessen
Rewilding has become a hot topic in nature conservation. Ambitious schemes are afoot to rewild continental Europe and North America. Hopes are being invested in the political, economic, and therapeutic potentials of future wilds. Popular and scientific enthusiasms for the wild are frequently ahistorical and apolitical, however. This article begins to address this problem. It offers one genealogy of rewilding, focusing on a history of Heck cattle and their deployment in European rewilding projects. These animals were back-bred by two German zoologists in the 1930s, with Nazi patronage, for release as hunting prey in the annexed territories of Eastern Europe. Some cattle survived the war and their offspring have become prominent, alongside new back-breeding initiatives, in contemporary efforts to rewild a unifying Europe. Cattle now figure as cosmopolitan ecological engineers, whose grazing will create functional, wild landscapes. This genealogy examines what and where is understood to be wild and who is authorized to make such decisions in this story. Drawing cautiously on this extreme example, it examines historic rewilding as a form of reactionary modernism. It critically traces the emergence, persistence, and transformation of various ontologies, geographies, and epistemologies of wildness in Europe to position contemporary rewilding as a mode of ecomodernism. When compared, rewilding under Nazi rule and in the contemporary European Union are found to be different in every relevant problematic respect. Reflecting on differing conceptions of what it means to be modern helps specify a multiplicity of rewildings past and present. The article concludes with a set of criteria for discriminating among rewildings to inform the emergence and analysis of this conservation paradigm.
Society & Animals
License to Cull: A Research Agenda for Investigating the Necropolitics of Countryside Culling and Urban Pest Control
David Redmalm
This paper proposes an empirical research agenda for investigating the practices of biosecuritization of wild animal threats in modern society. Previously mostly studied on the lofty biopolitical level of directives on combatting invasive species or culling pests, we outline the conceptual and methodological points of entry for bringing the on-the-ground work of culling out-of-place, unwanted, individual animals and populations. This means a focus on necropolitics as constituted by the norms, everyday professional practices, vernaculars of killing, and identity work by pest controllers in the city and hunters on the countryside. Borrowing from research in the domestic animal killing context, we nevertheless show how wild animal killing is imbued with more spontaneity, remorse, aesthetics, public stigma, and multispecies entanglements, requiring adapted research protocols.
Rewilding
For Wilderness or Wildness? Decolonising Rewilding
2019 •
Kim Ward
