Animal geographies II: Killing and caring (in times of crisis)

I Prologue: National emergency

I began preparing this report as news came in that an estimated one billion animals (‘a very conservative figure’) had been killed in the bushfires that roared through eastern Australia during summer 2019–20 (University of Sydney, 2020). As the fires burn out, the number climbs. The extent and intensity of the fires, and associated damage, is without doubt linked to the latest drought. Relationships between bushfire, drought and climate change are complex, but the indirect connections are numerous and strong (Gergis and Cary, 2020; Henley et al., 2019; Seidl et al., 2017). And yet, the Australian government continues to invest in, subsidise, and promote coal mining and export, and reliance on coal for our own energy production – the very practices that feed climate change (Edwards, 2019; Head et al., 2014). The fires and drought are also related to land management practices that have suppressed Indigenous fire regimes, and cleared bush at rapidly increasing rates, despite warnings about the far-reaching social and environmental consequences of both.

And then there’s this. In November 2019, traditional and social media were plastered with images of the woman who pulled a koala from the burning bush using the shirt from her back (SBS Online, 2019). Other images preceded and followed, of people taking injured animals to welfare shelters, tending them in their homes, or offering water and respite at the edge of a burned landscape. Another shot played over: a bushfire ablaze, a firefighter with hose, and a koala sitting nearby, unable to fly, bounce or burrow out of harm’s way. These images – of care for the individual in the face of an overwhelming force – became emblematic of the fires and of the people’s response to this catastrophe.

There are no comparable images of care for the billion animals killed. The scale is unfathomable. No single photograph can capture the pain, suffering, loss, destruction, disruption and fragmentation that has occurred in the animal world. This dualism symbolises the themes of this, my second report about the field of animal geographies: killing and caring. It also highlights distinctions between collective and individual; distance and proximity; structural links and direct contact. I won’t stretch the binary relations too far. But these ones all play out in the circumstances I have described above, and in much of the literature of recent years. In this report I review research published in the past two to three years in peer-reviewed journals (for reasons of scope and space, I have not systematically reviewed the numerous books and book chapters also published). Further to these two key themes, I briefly consider other salient questions arising from this diverse literature.

II Killing

Humans kill animals in a multitude of contexts. A significant focus of recent research is killing as part of conservation. Atchison (2019) and Crowley et al. (2018) show how species are selectively killed with the aim of conserving other species and valued environments. Both call for more explicit discussion of killing as part of conservation practice. Animals are also frequently killed in the context of human–wildlife conflict. Here, killing occurs as retribution for loss or in hope of preventing future loss (Gibbs et al., 2020; Pooley et al., 2017). Seemingly rational and objective logics, such as counting and culling, obscure political struggles (Boonman-Berson et al., 2019). Researchers investigate complex relationships between conservation, conflict and killing, including changing values, attitudes and motivations for killing (Bluwstein, 2018). Lunstrum (2017) turns the question around to look not at wildlife poaching, but at advocated and actual violence towards, and sometimes killing of, poachers. Better understanding human–wildlife conflict demands recognising its underlying causes, including colonial histories of dispossession (Margulies, 2019b), and attending to the processes that endanger nonhuman life and therefore justify conservation (De Silva and Srinivasan, 2019).

A key question emerging from this literature is how animals are made killable. One prominent means is through discourse, including of invasive species (Atchison, 2019) and global biodiversity conservation (Richardson, 2018). As in numerous areas of animal geographies scholarship, the individual/collective binary comes into play in conservation. Enlisting the collective prioritises environmental argument, while obscuring the deaths of hundreds of individuals and marginalising questions of sentience and suffering (Atchison, 2019; Hawkins and Paxton, 2019). Who does the killing can shape rationales and lend authority to an activity; killing has been enrolled as part of a broader environmental or community development agenda (Atchison et al., 2017; Hawkins and Paxton, 2019). In the context of human–wildlife conflict the discourse of safety is prominent. Gibbs et al. (2020) found that human safety is privileged over survival and wellbeing of sharks and other marine animals, including identified threatened species, and Margulies (2019a) traced how the Indian state transformed tigers from protected, endangered species to killable individuals.

Beyond conservation, further rationales for killing emerge. The safety discourse is enrolled in diverse contexts, including bird strike in aviation (Wrigley, 2018) and disease control (Chan, 2016). Chan’s (2016) study of cat culling in Singapore during the 2003 SARS outbreak has new relevance in light of COVID-19. Animals become killable when deemed ‘out of place’ – a category defined through multiple processes. Here, animal geographies scholarship contributes to a broader disciplinary concern for belonging. Those Singapore cats became a ‘problem’ not only via the city’s health regime, but also through nation-building and urban redevelopment projects (Chan, 2016). The coywolf is considered spatially out of place in cities and suburbs, and because it is uncategorisable and thus ‘abject’ (Rutherford, 2018). Other individual studies identified other logics, pertaining to cost and logistics (Collard, 2016), pre-emptive action to reduce hardship (Howell and Kean, 2018), and the still controversial killing for research (Singleton and Lidskog, 2018). Finally, Greenhough et al. (2018) posit that killing largely invisible microbes (‘almost animals’; Cole, 2016; see Gibbs, 2020) helps think through the killing of different life forms.

A second prominent context for killing animals is killing for food. Recent geographical research has examined the conditions and relations of meat production in the context of global environmental change. Stoddard and Hovorka (2019) extend the concept of vulnerability from the realm of human life and ecosystems to the everyday lives and lifetimes of farm animals. In a similar vein, McGregor and Houston (2018) argue that the Anthropocene is an opportunity to rethink multispecies relations and engage a broader set of debates than those advanced by the agricultural sciences. Other studies consider the tensions between caring and killing (Donati, 2019), and how practices of transforming animals into food reveals a politics of farming standards (Wilbur and Gibbs, 2020). Contemporary socio-environmental challenges are triggering development of insect farming as an alternate protein source (Arppe et al., 2020; Bear, 2019; House, 2019). Notions of ‘good death’ are shaped by farmers’ ‘anxieties around insect pain’ and ‘perceived consumer attitudes’ (Bear, 2019: 753).

Two papers published in 2019 engage the particular cultural practices associated with halal meat slaughter (Lever, 2019) and consumption (Isakjee and Carroll, 2019). These UK-based studies argue that controversies over halal meat have brought animal slaughter back into the public realm, from where it has been largely removed in the UK (Lever, 2019). They also make important connections between food and social processes of discrimination and injustice. Objections to halal meat in majority non-Muslim societies are frequently framed around divergent practices, leading to racism and exclusion (Isakjee and Carroll, 2019). Other studies of meat consumption include emergence of animal-free ‘meat’ (McGregor and Houston, 2018; Mouat et al., 2019; Sexton et al., 2019) and ‘conscientious’ consumption (Bruckner, 2018), highlighting moral and ethical arguments, and environmental, animal welfare and food security concerns. A distinct but related subset of research considers animals’ bodies for non-food purposes. Production, circulation and consumption of fur tells of colonial expansionary capitalism and (near) extinction (Collard, 2018; Kleibert et al., 2020). Feathers, body parts and bodies preserved through taxidermy reveal the reach of human–animal relations, including in imperialism, landownership, blood-sport and fashion (Pacault and Patchett, 2016; Patchett, 2017, 2019).

Returning to the vignette with which I opened this review, a final sub-theme is the killing that takes place indirectly, and often on a large scale, as a result of human-induced climate change and environmental degradation. In her account of coral conservation, Braverman (2020) discusses coral bleaching as an environmental indicator. We kill animals – in this case corals – through anthropogenic climate change, and then make sense of climate change through observation of animal deaths. Goupil and Qumsiyeh (2018), working in Palestine, urge greater use can be made of historical geographical works to gauge environmental change. Diverse research highlights how we enlist animals to make sense of the world.

Key to understanding environmental change is our capacity to abstract from the individual to the collective. In Braverman’s account, the killing of the individual coral animal is subsumed in records of bleaching and death of coral reefs, and of marine environmental collapse. Coral becomes ‘a sign and a measure of the imminent catastrophe facing life in the oceans and, subsequently, on earth’ (2020: 21). Relatedly, a story of an individual sea otter’s life and death tells us about the animal, the Exxon Valdez oil spill and clean-up, and crucially, of far longer histories of colonial and capitalist development (Collard, 2018). Elsewhere in conservation, extinction is rendered through numbers; individual lives are less important (Garlick, 2019). And conversely, attention to individual animals can galvanise public support for conservation (McCubbin and Hovorka, 2019) and shape conservation outcomes across multiple scales (Doubleday, 2017). Finally, animals are co-opted into our responses to climate change. Wakefield (2019: 1) presents a vivid account of oysters as risk management infrastructure – an experiment to ‘grow oyster reefs in order to better govern storm surge, rising seas, and coastal flooding’. The project involves acknowledging that oysters may die; conditions may be wrong for all kinds of reasons. This research is part of a move in animal geographies toward bio- and necropolitics (e.g. Crowley et al., 2018; Greenhough et al., 2018; Margulies, 2019a; Wrigley, 2018), to which I will turn with greater attention in my third and final report.

III Caring

Care has become a major theme in geography in recent years, and animal geographers pose questions relevant to the wider discipline. Caring for animals takes place across multiple spheres. The first I want to examine is, again, the realm of conservation. Here, researchers interrogate the nature of care, including: fundamental questions underlying conservation, like the paradox of causing harm to individuals to reach population-based goals (Isaacs, 2019); and the advent of structural approaches such as ‘compassionate conservation’, which seeks to bridge the fields of biology and animal welfare (Fraser-Celin and Hovorka, 2019). Research asks what and/or who is cared for in conservation. For example, Atchison (2019) finds that care is designated for some categories of animals but not others, and Daniels and Mather (2017) apply the concept of care to unsettle dominant narratives supporting conservation practice.

Care for individual animals shapes conservation outcomes (DeSilvey and Bartolini, 2019; Doubleday, 2017; McCubbin and Hovorka, 2019), and as with killing, raises salient questions about the significance of the individual and collective. In their study of the flow-on from the infamous shooting of Cecil the lion, McCubbin and Hovorka (2019) ask whose care counts. They argue that neoliberal conservation can reproduce ‘geopolitical, racial, gendered, and classed orders’ (2019: 2), further marginalising local communities – ‘the very people who need to be meaningfully and respectfully engaged in solutions’ (2019: 17). Caring and killing frequently overlap in conservation (e.g. Atchison, 2019; Daniels and Mather, 2017; Hawkins and Paxton, 2019), and scholars attend to the tensions and politics of killing as part of environmental care. And yet, Atchison (2019: 745) argues, ‘To reconcile care for carp and care for the environment need not be a reductive choice, but it does require us to ask vigilant questions about the motivations and enactment of death, and to not imagine that carp or the effects of killing them are so quickly dissolved.’

The second domain of care for animals is in the production and consumption of food. Concepts of ‘conviviality’ (Donati, 2019) and ‘reciprocity’ (Klein, 2019) are enrolled to think through human–animal relations on farms, as means of promoting multispecies ethics and sustainability. For Donati (2019), conviviality involves care beyond the human, for animals and landscape. She argues that ‘Finding new approaches to eating, living and killing well – that is, a multispecies gastronomy – remains a dificult but urgent ethical task’ (2019: 128), and points to ‘a gap between conviviality on the farm and the conviviality of the table within which killing happens’ (2019: 120). With regard to consumption, the concept of care is shown to benefit cattle, people and planet (McGregor and Houston, 2018), and reveal intersections of feelings, beliefs and practices (Bruckner, 2018).

The absence of care, or instances where care could or should be possible, also draws research attention. Bear and Holloway (2019) propose ‘divergent conduct’ to describe awkward, dissonant and violent relations in milk production. And, (as above) Stoddard and Hovorka (2019) employ the concept of vulnerability to examine the lived realities of farmed pigs during natural disaster. Here too, the question of who or what warrants care looms large. Producing animal-based food necessarily involves killing (even non-meat products such as dairy and eggs involve systematic slaughter of unwanted male calves and chicks). Animal geographers explicitly engage the tensions between caring and killing in food production and consumption, including how the ‘intimacies of affection and care sit uncomfortably alongside the reality of slaughter’ (Donati, 2019: 126; see also Wilbur and Gibbs, 2020), and how the ethics of religious slaughter practices and food consumption ‘scales down from abstraction to practice, from ethics to embodied experience’ (Isakjee and Carroll, 2019: 1).

Beyond conservation and food, care (and care scholarship) occurs across a diverse array of places and spaces: homes and communities; care farms; retirement yards; the military; and the laboratory. Research examines how care is enacted. Lorimer (2019) considers the pet cemetery as a place that demonstrates loss, love and longing by pet owners, and also care by the ground keeper and the town community. This is a ‘minor place’ imperilled by development, which provides a nexus of ‘memory, emotion, intimacy, responsibility and creativity’ (2019: 333). For Bell (2019: 3) ‘sociality’ involves care that extends beyond humans to birds. Among people with sight impairment sonic encounters offer ‘playful moments of curiosity and companionship, alongside deeper experiences of awe, care and respect’. Gorman (2019) finds that care is ‘multidirectional’: ‘providing’ care has benefits for vulnerable groups of humans as well as for animals.

Other work questions what aspects of life and death call for care, and with what effects. Care for aging and unsound bodies is relegated to liminal spaces of dwelling (Franklin and Schuurman, 2019), and subject to complex layers of violence, discipline and co-dependence (Forsyth, 2017; Nelson, 2017). Caring and killing, or harm, clearly overlap in the context of laboratory animal research. Greenhough and Roe (2019: 368) argue that animal technologists are ‘keenly aware of the contested moralities’ that emerge in care for laboratory animals, and that such relationships offer an important position from which to understand this contestation (see also Davies et al., 2018). In this context, individual relationships between people and animals meet the formal arrangements of care and ethics.

This point signals a final sub-theme and contribution of care for animals: the formal arrangements, including ethics, codes of conduct and legality, that regulate or guide human–animal relations. Braverman (2018) reviews the place of animals in law and governance, extending beyond the individual animal (the usual terrain of animal law) to populations, species, land ethics and ecosystems. She argues that legal geography has a tradition of engaging ‘space, matter, and corporeality and is therefore a particularly apt field for staking out the central concerns of more-than-human legalities’. In turn, posthumanist, more-than-human and multispecies accounts offer a ‘way out of the restrictive domains of the (neo)liberal rights framework’ (2018: 140).

Animal geographers engage formal frameworks and structures, considering how they are enacted in practice, and how they interact across scales, from micro-scale decisions to national and international institutions. Cases include: regulation of laboratory animal welfare, and associated political commitments and social understandings (Davies et al., 2018; Greenhough and Roe, 2018); evolving ethical guidelines in cetacean research (Singleton and Lidskog, 2018); practice, politics and bureaucracies of the veterinary Code of Professional Conduct (Donald, 2019); emotional implications of the legal status of dogs (Allen et al., 2019); and application of a Social Licence to Operate – an ‘intangible, unwritten and non-legally binding social contract’ – in the thoroughbred racing industry (Duncan et al., 2018: 318). Without formal guidance, human–animal relations can exist in a ‘legislative grey zone’, as is the case in edible insect farming (Bear, 2019; see also Arppe et al., 2020). Researchers consider ‘more just and contingent alternatives to formal ethical protocols’ (Donald, 2019: 471), and call for more research on ‘how non-scientific groups and individuals construct “good welfare”’ (Bear, 2019: 764). Broader questions about the nature of animal ethics include: positioning animals as subjects as an ethical starting point for conservation (Fraser-Celin and Hovorka, 2019); establishing non-dualistic ethics in human–wildlife conflict to prioritise both vulnerable people and wildlife (De Silva and Srinivasan, 2019); and questioning the social and ethical origins of environmental techniques, such as ‘sensing practices’ derived from hunting, in order to comprehend the diverse political objectives to which they may be put (Blair, 2019).

IV Further questions: Political and relational

Beyond these two major themes in recent animal geographies research, further questions have emerged. Two of note surround the political and relational, to which I’ll turn in greater depth in my third and final report. Here, a brief overview. First, numerous researchers reference Srinivasan’s (2016) astute contribution calling for further political work within animal geographies. This call is being answered. Recent work explicitly engages the political, through gender (Doubleday and Adams, 2019; Must and Hovorka, 2019; Patchin, 2020), justice (Brown et al., 2019; Pitas and Shcheglovitova, 2019), capital (Barua, 2019; Klein, 2019; Satizábal and Dressler, 2019), biopolitics (Margulies, 2019a; Wakefield, 2019; Wrigley, 2018) and the ongoing consequences of colonialism (Bluwstein, 2018; Isaacs and Otruba, 2019; Margulies, 2019a; Pratt, 2019; Wilson, 2019). Second, as in other fields of geography, relational approaches are being widely applied in animal geographies. Researchers engage relationality as an explicit conceptual and/or methodological approach, advancing thinking in the discipline (e.g. Gandy, 2019; Miller, 2018; Robertson and Ljubicic, 2019; Srinivasan, 2019; Wilson, 2019), and also as a broader empirical focus, through, for example, studies of the composition and functioning of cities, landscapes and oceans (e.g. Fredriksen, 2019; Satizábal and Dressler, 2019; Serrano-Montes et al., 2019; Tănăsescu, 2019; Wood, 2019).

V Epilogue: Global crisis

I opened this report in a national emergency, and close it in a global one. Animals are present in both. I work today, like millions of others, under the restrictions of ‘social isolation’ brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. To end this report, I present three images of animals at the time of COVID-19.

1. Zoonosis and the ‘almost animal’. The pandemic was caused by a zoonotic disease; that is, one that transfers from nonhuman animal to human. Animal geographers currently investigate disease control (e.g. Enticott, 2017; Naylor et al., 2017) and extend beyond the animal to the ‘almost animal’ (Cole, 2016; see also Gibbs, 2020), including to viruses (e.g. Patchin, 2020) and other microorganisms (e.g. Greenhough et al., 2018; Lorimer, 2017).

2. Animal markets. It is currently understood (though remains contentious) that the virus reached humans through a wet market selling live wild animals in Wuhan, China (Andersen et al., 2020). Animal geographers investigate commodification of animals, wildlife trade, and the circumstances shaping these economies (e.g. Barua, 2019; Collard, 2018; Kleibert et al., 2020; McCubbin and Hovorka, 2019).

3. Animals in the locked-down city. Social restrictions prompted by the pandemic have seen animals appearing unexpectedly in cities around the world. As interesting as the animals themselves is people’s fascination and apparent joy in spotting and sharing sightings. Animal geography continues a long tradition of research into the place of animals in the city (e.g. Pitas and Shcheglovitova, 2019; Srinivasan, 2019; Wakefield, 2019; Wolch and Emel, 1998; Philo and Wilbert, 2000).

These images highlight the significance of animals in this unprecedented time, and the potential for animal geographies research to offer insights. Crisis has highlighted our propensity to kill and care. And it has brought to the fore the inherently political and relational nature of animals.