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.