Paper short abstract:

Since the Ebola outbreak, the 'One Health' motto, and the more-than-human losses that it foretells, have reshaped health governance in West Africa. How is this scalar politics enacted, contested and recreated by vets and conservationists confronted to its fault lines –economic, epistemic, and moral?

Paper long abstract:

The 2013–2016 epidemic of Ebola heralded the era of 'One Health' in the West African governance of health. A tremendous amount of interest, resources, and expertise has since been invested in research on infectious diseases of animal origin, their surveillance and prevention. One narrative underlies the operation of One Health in the region, one that connects rainforest destruction and bushmeat consumption with risky contacts between humans and animals, and opportunities for pathogens to spill over. Ecosystem collapse, the extinction of wildlife, lethal pandemics - an imaginary of losses and their modelling feed concerns about so-called hotspots of biodiversity and infectious diseases. How is this scalar politics enacted, contested, and recreated in West Africa?

This paper builds on an ethnography of virus hunting on the forest frontier of Guinea and Liberia. Since the Ebola outbreak, certain humans and certain animals are entangled or disentangled by novel practices of future-making. Conservation programmes endeavour to reduce wildlife hunting; mining companies build corridors between forest patches; chimpanzee sanctuaries adopt biosecurity protections; veterinarians sample bats to predict future outbreaks. The discourse of the hotspot and the catastrophes it foretells undoubtedly yield authority and attract funding. In West Africa however, people and institutions working in One Health must navigate lack of evidence, accusations of opportunism, and the threat of retaliations against wildlife. The paper explores how other more-than-human temporalities – pasts of coexistence, presents of extraction, and futures of prosperity – interfere with One Health governance, and point to its epistemic and moral faults.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a Dutch animal shelter, we consider how shelter veterinarians shape their care for cats by reference to the desired future of adoption, while at the same time, paradoxically, the shelter's ecology itself often complicates the linear trajectory of rehoming.

Paper long abstract:

Animal shelters importantly define modes of human cohabitation with animals, particularly in urban landscapes. These institutions receive stray, unwanted or government-seized animals and aim to relocate them into human households. In this paper, drawing from the first author's ethnographic fieldwork, we consider how veterinarians working in animal shelters shape their care for animals - in particular cats - by referring to the desired future of rehoming.

The rehoming process involves human-animal interactions and practices of neutering, socialization and disease control aimed at reshaping cats' bodies and behaviour closer to a domesticated pet ideal. Focusing on so-called 'misfits' - cats posing behavioural and medical challenges -, we will show how the rehoming involves diverse ways of understanding and evaluating cats, organizing spaces, and forms of caring for individuals and collectives.

The analysis reveals how different futures influence shelter staff's reasoning and acting. For instance, potential owners' aesthetic and affective sensitivities informed how vets shaped cats' bodies. Moreover, the future loss of control that leaving the shelter implied for vets let them prioritize interventions with defined outcomes over courses of action with more open-ended futures. Finally, we highlight how paradoxically, the practicalities of the shelter's 'captive ecology' (Holmberg, 2021) itself often complicated a linear trajectory from stray to pet, requiring vets to juggle objects of care (Law, 2010) with different temporal orders.

Paper short abstract:

This paper relies on an ethnographic study of an Argentinian rewilding project. It examines how the vision of a biodiverse future enacted by rewilding translates into embodied relations between human and nonhuman animals in the present, and how these relations come to shape future ecosystems.

Paper long abstract:

As concerns regarding the alarming rate of biodiversity collapse grow in the conservation community and beyond, debates about how best to conserve a rapidly eroding ‘nature’ intensify, and new conservation strategies emerge. Trophic rewilding is one such strategy. Born in the late 1980s out of the conviction that conservation should move away from merely “managing loss” (Sandom et al. 2013:413), trophic rewilding aims at actively restoring damaged ecosystems by reintroducing locally extinct species which play an important role within local food chains. This paper is an ethnographic study of a rewilding project carried out in the wetland area of Esteros del Iberá, Northern Argentina. It looks at the process through which captive green-winged macaws (Ara chloropterus) are being trained to fly, forage and distance themselves from caretakers so as to be released within their natural habitat, and asks how the vision of a biodiverse future enacted by rewilding initiatives translates into embodied relations between human and nonhuman animals in the present. Relying on six months of fieldwork among rewilding practitioners, I argue that reintroduced macaws, whose lives are shaped throughout by animal training practices, veterinary interventions and monitoring technologies, are perceived by practitioners as both pointers to a biodiverse future – and evaluated as such, through attention to their reproductive and survival potential within a given population – yet also as complex individuals who engage in daily relations of care, communication and intimacy with human caretakers. Rewilding practitioners thus navigate between producing the future, and ethically tending to the present.

Paper short abstract:

While killability defines porcine and bovine lives (Buller 2015), how animals die nevertheless is an important concern on farms. How vets working in the dairy and pork industry valued animals' death, was shaped by the degree of control over, and economic valuation of, farm animal life and death.

Paper long abstract:

Killing has been described as an important form of care for veterinarians that is nevertheless imbued with ambivalences and ethical dilemmas (Hurn & Badman-King 2019; Law 2010; Morris 2012). In this paper, I explore veterinary care and modes of killing in the livestock production industry – specifically, dairy and pork production. Livestock production complicates an understanding of life as linearly ending in death; instead, death is folded into farm animal life in complicated ways. While killability thus defines porcine and bovine lives (Buller 2015), how animals die nevertheless emerges as an important matter of concern on the farm.

In this paper, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2020 and 2021 with veterinarians performing clinical and advisory work on farms in the Netherlands. I show how the potential of the animal to have value to society decides which deaths constitute a ‘waste’ and where killing is legitimate. At the same time, the horizon of the animals’ certain death is often made invisible on the farm. For vets, moreover, killing is a way to prevent the possibility of animal suffering that more open-ended, uncertain futures posed. Uncontrolled and on-farm death, as opposed to controlled slaughter (Svendsen 2021: 43) that happens elsewhere, also serves as an important governance indicator of farm performance on animal welfare and biosecurity. How veterinarians valued the death of animals and their killing, was thus strongly influenced by the degree of future control over, and economic valuation of, farm animal life and death.

Paper short abstract:

This paper engages two projects in Denmark: A veterinary infrastructure to prevent African swine fever from infecting pigs and a rewilding project featuring horses and cows aimed to protect nature for the future. Seeing these projects through one another, the paper explores Danish animal futures.

Paper long abstract:

This paper engages two concurrent bio-governance projects in Denmark. One is a veterinary infrastructure aimed to prevent African swine fever from spreading among the millions of Danish domesticated pigs exported every year. This entails fencing off the border between Germany and Denmark, as well as various eradication practices, all in place to make sure that wild boars, seen as vectors of disease, do not settle in the country. The other project, a couple of hundred kilometres north, is a rewilding initiative comprising a handful of horses and cows, introduced as a way to “safeguard our natural heritage for the future” and to mimic ancient Danish landscapes with little or no human intervention. On the basis of ethnographic work, this paper sees these two sets of practices through one another, with specific attention to discussions about permissible numbers of animals, killability of species, levels of human intervention, invasiveness, and animal welfare and behavior. Analytically, by juxtaposing a veterinary and a conservation project, the paper probes the different extents to which Danish animal futures are seen as changeable in light of pressing concerns for climate change, environmental degradation and loss of biodiversity. Further, the paper shows that such juxtaposition can be engaged actively as a virtue of anthropological fieldwork – which can thereby work as a means to suggest alternative modes of multispecies living in the context of a heavily industrialized animal production sector.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I discuss conservation practices aimed at averting extinctions, which generate multiple trajectories of becoming wild, by exploring the history of reintroducing the Przewalski's horse from zoos to the Mongolian desert steppe.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at conservation as a range of practices that drive multiple and unexpected becomings of a species. The biology and behavior of endangered species are often poorly understood. Basic things, like what do the animals eat, how do they breed, are unknown. But, witnessing the downfall of the species, a feeling of crisis fuels humans' action. They hedge their bets by breeding the species under human care. Veterinarians and breeding specialists often employ controlling techniques in captivity, trying to enhance reproduction, to ensure the safety in numbers that a species needs to stave off extinction. However, controversies emerge regarding how much management can animals withstand before losing behaviors that would allow them to survive in the wild, to forage, or to mate with their own kind. Often, wildlife biologists, wary of too much interference, contest the veterinarians' perspective. They advocate for different practices, grounded in visions of animal autonomy. I argue that the two repertoires of practice can indeed produce different animals. I explore these issues here through the history of reintroducing the Prezewalski's horse to the Gobi desert of Mongolia, which began in 1992, after decades of captive-breeding in zoos. The reintroduction was first run by a veterinarian, whose husbandry-inspired practices shattered the expectation of truly 'rewilding' the animals. Later, a wildlife biologist took over. His practices promoted the animals' self-reliance. Drawing on archival sources, interviews, and fieldwork, I show how conservation practices were constituted and how they generated multiple ways of becoming the wild horse.