Paper short abstract:

"Pig-pig" is a feral pig who was adopted by a recreational hunter. This paper examines how Pig-pig's life and place in the world is sustained within a web of multispecies relations, relations that also subvert violent, national institutions geared towards unmaking her existence.

Paper long abstract:

In Australia, feral pigs are marked as out-of-place, untouchable, and killable. Nonhumans enacted within a discourse that aims to unmake their existence through a relational vacuum, by delegitimising and severing all social and ecological ties. As Celermajer and Wallach argue, they are made "illegible". So, in rural New South Wales, 2019, during one of the worst droughts in memory, I was surprised to meet a healthy feral pig living with a family of recreational pig hunters. An adopted two-year-old sow, ambiguously called, "Pig-pig".

Hunters keeping feral pigs as pets is not uncommon, yet I still consider Pig-pig extraordinary and wonder how her life is possible in a world geared towards annihilating her kind. This paper will explore the relational knots that sustain her ongoing, if tenuous, place in this world. Pig-pig was spoken about as fostering, and being fostered within, a web of unexpected, multispecies connections and perspectives: as brood member, tolerated prey, more-than-human friend and, because of the drought, possible Christmas lunch. She is a reminder that being is always dependent on others, and that relationality is the condition by which life and indeed existence is possible.

The relationship with Pig-pig subverts the deeply violent institutions that target invasive species, and emerges from a hunter's way of living-with and killing these animals. Hunting's interspecies relations do not easily fit within what scholars might consider ethical or good. This paper also reflects on the possibilities of intimacy, respect, and porcine ways of being that recreational hunting affords.