Dilemmas of transgression: ethical responses in a more-than-human world

The dingo ‘problem’ on Fraser Island: the transgression discourse

People who visit Fraser Island for the first time often struggle to find the words to describe the beauty of this magical island. But also animal life, especially the 230 species of birds, Australia’s purest dingo and many other species contribute to the unique island environment. ³³

Fraser Island, located near Australia’s eastern coast in the State of Queensland (see Map in Figure 1), is the world’s largest sand island, over 120 km long, and since 1922 has been designated a World Heritage area because of its ‘natural values’. The Island is a well-known tourist destination, with an emphasis on the Island’s wildlife which includes Australia’s ‘purest’ strain of dingo (Canis lupus dingo). During peak tourism season, the restricted residential areas on the Island adjacent to the Great Sandy National Park are heavily populated by humans.

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Figure 1.

Map of Fraser Island from J.Carter, ‘Displacing Indigenous Cultural landscapes: The Naturalistic Gaze at Fraser Island World Heritage Area’, Geographical Research, 48(4), 2010, pp. 398–410, p. 402.

The dingo arrived in Australia some 5,000 years ago via south-east Asia, and in most parts of Australia bred with the domestic dog following European colonisation. While some Aboriginal traditional landowners and contemporary residents have, over time, semi-domesticated the Fraser Island dingo, it is still thought to be the ‘purest’ strain of dingo in Australia. A discussion between one of the authors and an Aboriginal traditional landowner of Fraser Island, living at nearby Hervey Bay, revealed the long-standing history of human–dog–dingo relationships on the island:

We used to take our domestic dogs on the island. Then Parks and Wildlife came along and they stopped all that from going on. They put all their restrictions on there – what you can and what you can’t do, but before that you could sort of just about do what you want (personal communication, Aboriginal traditional owner to author, February 2016).

This history complicates debates around the dingo’s ‘wildlife’ status, which is marketed to tourists who seek their photographs of a top-order predator. The Fraser Island dingo–human locale therefore provides an instructive case in which to explore transgression.

In 2001, two dingoes killed a child on Fraser Island, which led to an immediate culling of 31 dingoes by government authorities in charge of the national park. Culling of the dingoes occurred alongside an outpouring of outrage from animal welfare and environmental groups as well as many individuals. ³⁴ It also stirred questions about whether urban-based Australians and wild animals can successfully share the same space:

The child’s name was Clinton Gage and his death broke his family’s heart, sold newspapers around the world and challenged and reproached Australians for their failure yet again to interpret the dingo and its wilderness environment through an informed and responsible discourse. ³⁵

The 2001 Fraser Island Dingo Management Plan distinguished between ‘wild’ and ‘habituated’ dingoes, and the Environmental Protection Agency of Queensland has claimed that because of prolonged contact with humans, some dingoes had ‘changed their natural habits, losing their fear and wariness [of humans]’. ³⁶

The conceptual boundaries between ‘natural’ and habituated behaviour however become blurred when humans are involved in reinforcing ‘wild’ behaviours. ³⁷ Strategies directed at reinstating dingoes’ ‘natural’ fear of humans and de-habituating them to humans include: barrier fencing to spatially segregate humans and dingoes; discouraging human-initiated contact with, or proximity to, dingoes; and ‘hazing’ – spraying animals with pellets or other irritants (a practice which has now been discontinued). ³⁸ The most recent version of the Fraser Island Dingo Management Strategy (FIDMS) ³⁹ continues an interventionist approach, for example, trapping and ear-tagging to identify ‘habituated’ dingoes.

Nevertheless, humans are now being called upon to modify their behaviour and become ‘dingo safe’. According to a review commissioned by the Environment Protection Authority of Queensland, soon after the introduction of a public education and awareness raising programme in 1998, ‘dingo-related’ incidents dramatically declined. However, reported incidents rose again after 2001, ⁴⁰ and the graph below (Figure 2) from a later review up to 2012 shows that between the years 2002 and 2012 around 70 dingoes were killed under the FIDMS.

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Figure 2.

Trends in the total number of dingoes destroyed and incidents reported between January 1990 and October 2012. Code C incidents include loitering or stealing food, Code D incidents include overt aggression towards humans, and Code E incidents include serious attack. The linear trend-line on the number of dingoes destroyed since 2002 is intended to show the apparent declining trend in destructions since this time.

The reporting of another Fraser Island dingo attack in 2011 reflects a continued management approach of killing ‘problem dingoes’ while shifting some responsibility to humans:

‘Dingoes destroyed after Fraser attack’ (from the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, 2011 ⁴¹ )

Two dingoes that attacked a toddler on Fraser Island yesterday have been captured and destroyed, the Department of Environment and Resource Management has confirmed.

[Terry Harper, general manager of the Department of Environment and Resource Management] advised all visitors to the island to be ‘dingo smart’:

‘Our ambition is to keep dingoes wild on Fraser Island which is a wild place’, he said. ‘One of the implications of that is that people need to take personal responsibility for going to wild places and on Fraser Island that includes being “dingo smart”’.

Being ‘dingo-smart’, however, has a history that began long before the Department’s education and awareness campaign.

Dingo–human relations over time

Across Australia, Aboriginal elders have recalled raising dingoes as pets to protect children from other dingoes, and early miners and timber-getters also recount positive stories of befriending dingoes. ⁴² For many Aboriginal people, the dingo is part of the Dreaming, ‘fitted into the wider kinship structure’ and buried with ceremony. ⁴³ The wild side of the dingo has also been acknowledged, and its capacity to behave as a ‘trickster’ ‘moving freely between the worlds of gods and humans and playing tricks on both’. ⁴⁴ In Australia more widely, the dingo has been seen as a ‘vicious sheep-killer’, endangered wildlife or a domestic pet. ⁴⁵ In discussion with one of the authors, an Aboriginal landowner urged all people, tourists and residents to treat the dingo as ‘an apex predator, like lions or wolves’ (personal communication, Aboriginal traditional owner to author, February 2016).

However, these diverse representations of the dingo – spiritual lawman and law-breaker, human pet and human predator – have historically been absent in tourists’ interactions with the Fraser Island dingo. Parker argues that tourism operators ‘[lure] parents and children to the island with a flawed and impossible discourse – the children’s dingo’. ⁴⁶ She suggests that the presence of families with children in areas such as campgrounds where dingoes live reflects the alienation of many Australians from their natural environment, where ‘they no longer seem able to recognize the dangers of wildness’. ⁴⁷ It is more than alienation, however: in their offerings of food to dingoes and their assumption that dingoes could be tamed into behaving like domestic dogs, tourists on Fraser Island have, argues Parker, effectively transgressed the dingo’s territory by stealth and attempted to colonise it, ‘bearing unsuitable gifts and demanding something in return’. ⁴⁸

Meanwhile, Fraser Island residents, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, who currently live in close proximity to dingoes know not to feed them, ⁴⁹ and there is a growing awareness by non-Indigenous scholars and conservationists of the need to re-present the dingo in a more complex form than simply as ‘wildlife’ or ‘marauder’, in order to understand and live alongside it:

. . . if it is finally accepted that . . . dingoes naturally have a complex repertoire of behaviours that include symbiotic and predatory associations with humans, then it can be assigned its place on the landscape as a dangerous animal and conserved as such animals are everywhere, with its separation from people given due weight. ⁵⁰

Transformative encounters: human mourning and dingo standpoints

After the culling of 31 dingoes on Fraser Island in 2001, there is evidence of a concern that dingoes were ‘dying because of human mistakes’. ⁵¹ The reactions to the culling of the dingoes recorded in a survey by Burns et al. ⁵² included grief and shock: feeling afraid for the dingoes ⁵³ and sadness at the killing of a ‘real special thing’. ⁵⁴ Others saw it immediately as a justice issue, noting that dingoes had been fed by humans and calling for fairness for the dingoes, ⁵⁵ or described the culling as a tragedy and an incident that was no fault of the dingo. ⁵⁶ Other responses were more political and directed anger at government and wildlife management, suggesting that the government had simply wanted to be seen to be doing something ⁵⁷ or that it was people rather than wildlife who needed managing. ⁵⁸

These responses point to an identification with the dingoes’ ‘point of view’ or, in Wolch’s ⁵⁹ terms, the ‘dingo standpoint’. They suggest that more is at stake than the survival of a tourist attraction or even an ecosystem. The compromise approach taken to dingo management since 1998, where the education of humans has been added to other strategies such as animal tagging and the killing of ‘problem’ dingoes, responds to a history of dingo–human encounters that reaches beyond the attack incidents described in the media reports and beyond expert explanations for dingo behaviour and advocates’ arguments for dingo rights. In their grief and anger, the survey respondents expressed a connection with dingoes that might begin to inform a different kind of ethics in dingo–human relations.

The ethical terrain in dingo–human relations

The killing of dingoes on Fraser Island has been underpinned by definitions of ‘natural’ dingo behaviours as acceptable when they remain ‘in place’ (behind boundary fences), and the behaviour of problem – transgressing – dingoes as ‘unnatural’. These definitions in turn enable the human act of killing to be ethically justified in that it becomes not simply the killing of animals who transgress ‘human’ space and threaten humans, but the mercy killing (‘euthanasing’ ⁶⁰ ) of ‘unnatural’ animals who can no longer represent the ‘pure’, natural dingo and have lost their dingo way.

Such justification becomes a way to resolve the tension between meeting objectives of human wellbeing (in this case through the preservation of boundaries) and those of animal protection. ⁶¹ It reverses the conservation principle where boundaries are constructed to provide ‘reserves’ for wildlife that protect them from humans. ⁶² It is only the transgression by the dingo of human-ordered space that is invoked by policy-makers and park managers under such justification.

Arguments for killing dingoes also rely on a different conservation principle that values, and hence ethically privileges, the preservation of a species rather than individual animals or populations: the maintenance of a ‘generative’ heterogeneity in ecosystems and landscapes, rather than specific existing differences between ‘species, genes, habitats’. ⁶³ Thus, the suffering of individual dingoes becomes subsumed in the debate about the dingo as a ‘type’ of nonhuman, as a ‘pure representative’ of the species, or as an essential component of the ecosystem, producing and reproducing an ethics of space in which nonhumans may be rendered invisible. The Australian Dingo Conservation Association couches its aims in terms of protecting and conserving ‘the Australian Dingo’ rather than individual dingoes; ⁶⁴ elsewhere, the deaths of individual wolves have been made ethically invisible in the same way. ⁶⁵

In suggesting that strategies to make dingoes fear humans need to be accompanied by a strategy to make people fear dingoes, Burns et al. call for greater recognition of the fact that ‘human–Dingo interactions involve two parties’. ⁶⁶ Each encounter, close or distant, good or bad, deadly or friendly, between dingoes and humans is a place-based encounter between individuals, each with a ‘face’. On Fraser Island, it was those encounters that generated mourning, anger and fear for the dingoes after the incident in 2001. Instone suggests that this is part of a bigger conceptual shift: that each respectful encounter in which the ‘trickiness’ of dingoes is accepted and negotiated ‘refocuses attention on the transformative power of the encounter between humans and non-humans in the making of Australian nature’. ⁶⁷

Even encounters that are less direct can produce a transformation in human–animal relations. The resort guest quoted above ⁶⁸ who regrets the loss of ‘a real special thing’ may indeed be referring to ‘the dingo’ as a type or as a species and may not have had an encounter with the elusive dingo; the statement is nonetheless an expression of sadness that responds to the killing of 31 individual dingoes. Other comments from residents and tourism employees also refer to a generic ‘dingo’ – who is fed by humans, whose future is feared for, who needs to be managed less than humans do – but they too are expressing grief and outrage at the deaths of individual dingoes. Later in this article, we return to the ethical distinction between concern for a collective and concern for individual animals.

The slow co-evolution of a different kind of relationship between humans and dingoes is reflected partly in the concern that authorities have to demonstrate that there is a declining number of dingoes being killed (even when, as indicated in Figure 2, the evidence for a consistent decline is not strong ⁶⁹ ). However, it is also reflected more positively in the attempts that have been made to achieve an understanding of dingo worlds, of the way ‘transgressions’ are constructed by humans and the possibility that transgressions might occur in both directions. Developing a more equitable human topology for Fraser Island will, as Parker notes, take time, and meanwhile, the ‘dingo-proof’ fence continues to provide a physical boundary between tourists and dingoes. ⁷⁰

Encounters: where human and dingo topologies intersect

Histories of human–nonhuman relations acknowledge a more symmetrical co-constitution of space by humans and nonhumans. ⁷² In a study of tourists whale-watching and swimming with dolphins, Cloke and Perkins ⁷³ note the contribution of the animals themselves, through both carefully staged and unanticipated actions, to ‘the changing nature of places and . . . the performances which help to define those places’. ⁷⁴ We need to consider, argues Clark, ‘not only how nonhumans make worlds of their own, but how they provide worlds for others’, ⁷⁵ including humans. Human–dolphin interactions allow familiarity with the animals to grow through sharing of spaces. ⁷⁶ Through co-constituting spaces in ways that enhance humans’ enjoyment, animals perform the opposite of transgression; rather than breaching a human-defined space, they help to define it.

Considering animals as co-constituents of space has ethical and practical possibilities beyond the wild encounter. For example, shared urban topologies include conceptions of ‘the zoöpolis’, ⁷⁷ and the ‘living city’, ⁷⁸ where sites of significant interaction include parks, abandoned land, public infrastructure spaces and waterways that cut across the established spatial divisions ‘between civic and wild, town and country, human and nonhuman’. ⁷⁹ Instone and Mee have described the ‘dog park’ of Australian cities as a still ‘uneasy settlement’ between humans and dogs but nevertheless one where ‘shared knowledges and practices can be developed and performed’. ⁸⁰

Encounters with animals can give us time to see the animal’s ‘face’ ⁸¹ and the possibility of an engagement based on empathy and an understanding of ‘animal’ standpoints’. ⁸² Haraway has argued that humans need to have a certain regard ⁸³ for an animal in order to give it a face; Parker notes in her discussion on dingoes that this regard is reciprocal:

Many writers have commented on the moment when an animal returns their gaze . . .

The dingo, pushing her paws through the sand to locate the trap, wants to live . . . Without the barrier of a denigrating discourse, it would be hard to look a trapped dingo in the eye. ⁸⁴

Such encounters with animals appear to induce an empathy or awareness that translates into a ‘care ethic’, ⁸⁵ an awareness that Segerdahl likens to ‘a moral wound [that] had been opened that ought never to heal. We have become vulnerable to what I, at this moment, want to call, the other animals’. ⁸⁶ For Karlsson, encounter is ‘the basic, moral event’, where asymmetries of power imply ‘an increased responsibility on account of the more powerful part’. ⁸⁷ Lynn ⁸⁸ argues that beyond encounters with particular animals, there is also moral value derived from a capacity to empathise with both individual and collective wellbeing of animals, including ‘wild or distant animals’. ⁸⁹ Smith ⁹⁰ notes that the empathy induced by watching the clubbing to death of one seal may extend our ethical consideration to ‘include thousands of similarly situated seals or members of other quite different species and/or even permeate our felt understandings of the ecology of the entire planet’. ⁹¹

Both transgression and transformative encounters occur at the intersection of disparate topologies – one nonhuman, the other human; the latter kind of encounter has been elaborated in various ways that all include ideas of openness, attentiveness and empathy that transcend cultural and ethico-legal boundaries and the notion of transgression by the nonhuman.

Paying attention and staying in the open

Our thinking on intersecting topologies can be extended to enrol diverse spatial contexts. In Wolch’s zoöpolis, ⁹² humans would stop distancing themselves from animal worlds and become more closely acquainted with animal lives and their connections with each other and their environments. Wolch describes such a process as a form of ‘re-enchantment’. ⁹³ Van Dooren and Rose ⁹⁴ convey some of this re-enchantment with animal worlds in their work on the narratives through which flying foxes are connected to place:

Given the flying foxes’ intense determination to return to or remain in camps where they have mated and given birth, the experience of those who return to find that the home camp has been rendered uninhabitable or even razed must be stressful and demoralizing in the extreme . . . [F]lying foxes inhabit not just trees but worlds of meaning . . . ⁹⁵

To be re-enchanted by the other, and recognise its expressiveness, involves paying attention to other lives and worlds, using, for example, some of the methods of tracing nonhuman topologies described by Hodgetts and Lorimer. ⁹⁶ It includes too the kind of attention paid in Whatmore’s stories of ‘becoming elephant’ ⁹⁷ and in Darwin’s study of earthworms. ⁹⁸ It is ‘getting “dirty and knowledgeable” in order to know and talk about animals responsibly’: ⁹⁹

This kind of unequal relation [between human and animal] cannot be made good through codification, nor abolished by means of radical political theory/action (such as that of animal rights). Instrumental relations call for something more nebulous, but perhaps also more authentic: an alternative form of life, namely, the willingness and ability to ‘stay in the open’.

To stay in the open is to give up some certainty, ¹⁰⁰ to constantly question our own assumptions and attitudes about animals and to pay attention to the experience of animals. ¹⁰¹ In doing so, transgression might disappear and be replaced with an informed acceptance that dingoes do what dingoes do, that all animals do what animals do. It enables humans to learn more about animal topologies, and acknowledge how these might differ, vastly or incommensurably, from human-constructed worlds. Haraway, for example, asks laboratory practitioners to question themselves about how laboratory practices could be ‘less deadly, less painful, and freer’. ¹⁰²

The move away from a worldview based on human exceptionalism is a form of ‘giving up’ not only conventional modes of inquiry, but the self: ‘to cast oneself . . . with some ways of life and not others’. ¹⁰³ In their study of water voles, Hinchliffe et al. ¹⁰⁴ found that paying attention to detail produces another world, one that is understood with more than simply the senses:

In practice, the pictures and written texts are woven together with the traces, tracks, and mammals to form a complex of writings. Our eyes (and to a lesser extent our noses) were being trained to recognise distinctions that were formerly invisible to us. The pictures, field signs, and conversations were changing the way we sensed and, as we will see later, the way water voles made sense. ¹⁰⁵

The authors note that they were learning ‘to be affected’ and that the idea of faithfully representing the water voles was being replaced with a form of ‘creative address’ to them: ¹⁰⁶ ‘allowing others, of all shapes and sizes, to make a difference to the process of knowing’. ¹⁰⁷

What is needed, suggests Lorimer, is ‘a humble willingness to put one’s knowledge at risk in the process of learning to be affected by the phenomena under investigation’. ¹⁰⁸ Paying attention is also a form of Karlsson’s ¹⁰⁹ ‘attentive-love’: more basic than sympathy because it arises directly from the perception of particular animals’ potential for pain or suffering. ¹¹⁰ Clark eloquently describes an alternative ethical future to the present asymmetry between human and animal – the ‘profound non-symmetry’ of empathy and compassion:

No less than the unbalancing of our relationship with nature, the offer of help – without expectation of return or recompense – to those who have been laid low by the ordinary chaos of terrestrial existence also upsets the assumption of co-constitutive relations – and draws us deeper into the issue of how to live as best we can in an inherently precarious physical reality. ¹¹¹

Empathy and compassion lead to other ways of being with (or not being with) nonhumans; making room, ¹¹² being alongside, ¹¹³ practising conviviality ¹¹⁴ and other forms of entanglement with nonhumans require a different lens from that of transgression – a different topology – for seeing the world. After empathy, the practice of an ethics that accommodates alternative topologies would require changes to the design and regulation of space in myriad ways – ‘not only animal regulation and control practices, but landscaping, development rates and design, roadway and transportation decisions, use of energy, industrial toxics, and bioengineering’. ¹¹⁵ Some encounters, those that involve more than simply ‘being alongside’, might involve Taylor and Carter’s ‘etiquette’ for multispecies interactions, an etiquette that provides a framework for engagement based upon attentiveness and acceptance:

. . . etiquette involves reciprocity of seeing, touching, and speaking with the other, a bodily invitation to interact by welcoming gesture, following the rules of courtesy and trust, allowing the space to respond (or not) as a journey in discovery of the other. ¹¹⁶

Forms of writing are still being developed to convey the kind of knowledge that emerges from encounter and the ‘slowed-down attentiveness’ that is different from the researcher’s usual observation and categorisation ¹¹⁷ or the dominant definitions and responses typical of a discourse of transgression. An example of such experimental writing is Pär Segerdahl’s edited book on animal studies, where ‘animals made us undisciplined in our discipline’. ¹¹⁸ Here, the scholarly chapters are interleaved with short narratives:

These short pieces often describe an experience, or a notion, or a thought that secretly drives our work but cannot be digested completely in scholarly form. These interludes reveal animal studies to transgress not only disciplinary borders, but also borders between the academic and the personal. ¹¹⁹

This suggests that in order to situate encounters with nonhumans outside a discourse of transgression – to shape a new topology that takes account of the nonhuman ‘standpoint’ – humans will need to push beyond existing ethical and scholarly boundaries.