Culling me softly : relocating, rehabing and communicating with problem wildlife

• What happens to wild animals that are at the wrong place at the wrong time? Whom do you call when a moose wanders into someone’s garden, a city swan shows increasing aggression to passers-by, and a family of feral rabbits have taken up residence in a children’s daycare center? The project “License to Cull: Rural and urban geographies of wild animal culling” investigates the vernacular experiences of municipal hunters, pest controllers and professional cullers at estates whose job it is to dispatch of unwanted wildlife species, populations and individuals. The talk, synthesizing the project findings, presents the following themes: 1) Cull: wildlife whose categorical or situational predicaments render them ‘killable’; 2) Communicate: wildlife with whom one attempts non-lethal management, including using cues, repellents, and deterrents in the landscape to communicate to them to ‘stay in their lane’; 3) Animal labour, to which we include the increasingly inventive ways in which animals as used against other animals in ‘Judas’ capacities, as biosensors of invasive species, as predators of unwanted wildlife and as protectors warding off dangerous wildlife, and finally 4) Wildlife rescue, a tendency for out-of-place, injured, abandoned or problematic wildlife to be rescued and rehabilitated. The talk concludes by engaging in discussions about the ethics of removing these animals seen from the perspective of cullers and wildlife rescuers. Within this, I draw attention to the current societal values around for example biosecurity and aesthetics that motivate the removal of certain wildlife in the first place. My talk is intended to stimulate further discussion on urban wildlife management, pest control, the trend to broadcast in social media happy wildlife sanctuary stories, and animal labor.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi -- Socialantropologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology -- Social Anthropology (hsv//eng)

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