| 1. |
- von Essen, Erica
(author)
-
Animal Resistance! Animal Agency and the Paradox of Capture and Control
- 2021
-
Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- In a recent iteration of research into animal agency, multiple fields of study now consider empirically and conceptually the ways in which animals subvert orders, actions and representations imposed on them (Colling 2020). Notions of ‘nature strikes back’, trickster wild life, and rebel animals escaping from the slaughterhouse all powerfully engage anthropologists, wildlife managers, sociologists, cognitive ethologists and above all the public. In the following paper, we examine how animal resistance is manifested in the modern sport hunting context—a perhaps unlikely case given ostensive power imbalances. Indeed, first, the seeming absence of mutual consent in interspecies sports like hunting make it difficult to suggest wild animals may be ‘playing the game’ to the extent they resort to counter-deceptions to fool and misdirect hunters (von Essen, et al. 2020). Nevertheless, we show how there are several resistant modalities on the part of wildlife in modern hunting: one of these is a species-level adaptation to capture including camouflage; another is the use of individual wiles to deflect or deceive hunters or their dogs in response to chase; and a third modality, we suggest, is how the technology of wildlife surveillance employed by hunters (trail cams, gps-trackers, and more) can be rendered by animals to tell their own stories, thus resisting subjectification (Verma, et al. 2016). To this end, we show how resistance and emancipation of wild animals becomes an affordance of technology that was originally paradoxically aimed to capture and control wild animals. We conclude by discussing key questions around intentionality around animal agency and ideas of consent in game-playing.
|
|
