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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research among rare poultry farmers in Italy and Australia, this paper explores multispecies commoning as a practice that sustains shared life, showing how care, use, and repair are entangled in everyday human–animal relations.

Paper long abstract

Based on twelve months of multisited ethnographic fieldwork among farmers of native, heritage, and rare poultry breeds in Italy and Australia, this paper explores multispecies commoning as a situated practice that unfolds beyond the polarised oppositions of conservation versus subsistence, protection versus use, and care versus extraction.

Drawing on participant observation and multispecies ethnography, I examine how farmers maintain endangered poultry breeds through practices including selective breeding, exchange of reproductive animals, informal networks of knowledge sharing, and small-scale slaughter for consumption and sale. These practices challenge dominant conservation paradigms that seek to preserve life by isolating it from use, revealing instead a form of commoning grounded in responsibility, reciprocity, and interdependence across species.

I argue that rare poultry breeds are not treated as bounded property or abstract genetic resources, but as shared, living commons whose survival depends on continuous relational work. This form of multispecies commoning does not resolve ethical tensions around animal death and exploitation; rather, it renders them explicit and subject to negotiation. Violence is not erased but redistributed, slowed down, and embedded within moral economies prioritising continuity of life over maximisation of productivity.

Situated within contexts marked by ecological crisis, capitalist agriculture, and regulatory constraints, these practices of commoning operate as forms of repair—partial, fragile, and always unfinished. By attending to how humans and poultry co-produce shared worlds under conditions of polarisation, this paper contributes to debates on multispecies coexistence, conservation, and alternative futures.