Maintaining the public good of biosecurity means disposing of alien, invasive, feral, pest and public hazard animals. This may range from everything from urban wildlife blocking constructions projects, escapee animals, to game animals like wild boars or moose becoming public security hazards. These out-of-place animals, spatially or behaviorally problematic animals, are now culled as part of UN and EU goals to protect biodiversity, agricultural assemblages and to maintain public health in sustainable cities, but the practices and principles that comprise such animal culling in everyday work are often shrouded in obscurity.
In our beginning study, we unpack the values and calculations (‘necropolitics’) on which pest controllers and hunters rely when they cull undesirable animals in urban and rural geographies respectively. We ask: what values, norms and knowledges guide pest controllers and hunters engaged in culling? We examine how pest controllers’ and hunters’ shared norms and categorizations, urban and rural geographies and animal agency impact the animal’s relative ‘killability’. Beirne (2018) suggests there are particular circumstances in which animal killing is immoral. Our aim is to apprehend these circumstances to respond to the earlier call by Beirne (2014) on “how and why some theoricides are constructed as socially acceptable and others as unacceptable must surely be problematized as a key object of inquiry” (p. 61). Our inquiry includes attending to the ‘where’ of animal killing, corresponding to geographies of death.
Our presentation considers analytical approaches to determining how and to what extent the practice of culling corresponds with policies regarding city planning, biodiversity and animal welfare. Cullers of undesirable animals can be thought as the administrators of the boundary between nature and society (Latour 2004), but may increasingly have negative public and self images as ‘the garbage collectors of society’ (Dahles, 1993): containing zoonoses, animal attacks, damage to agricultural assemblages and protecting native biota. Mapping culling norms among pest controllers and hunters is an important contribution to both the ethics and politics of killing: for whom, when, and for what good this is justifiable in society.
Works cited:
Beirne, P. (2014) Theriocide: Naming animal killing. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 3(2) p. 18
Beirne, P. (2018) Murdering animals: Writings on theriocide, homicide and nonspeciesist criminology (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK)
Dahles, H. (1993) Game killing and killing games: An anthropologist looking at hunting in a modern society. Society & Animals, 1(2) pp. 169-184
Latour, B., 2004. Politics of Nature How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Harvard University Press
2020.