Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

I explore culling as an expertise of the Anthropocene, discussing how the labour, infrastructure, and knowledges of lethal control enact ecologies. This draws from ethnographic work with goat cullers in Aotearoa (New Zealand), who work to manage feral goats as a problematic species.

Paper long abstract

Culling has become an increasingly standard expertise of the Anthropocene. As a form of lethal intervention aimed at reducing animal populations (both domestic and wild) toward a management goal, it purports to intercede into non-human formations and alter them. Projects of such violence toward unwanted, invasive, or ‘surplus’ animals come with ambivalences and controversies but also vitally rearticulate who knows environments, who cares, and who has the capacities to alter their emergence.

I draw from ethnographic engagement with goat cullers in Aotearoa (New Zealand). These animals have been subjected to official culls to halt their expansion and suppress their populations for about a century now, nurturing a community of experts in lethal ungulate control that has since been exported to other global contexts. I will explore culling as a practice and still-emergent expertise, where through lethal interventions into ecologies, expertise and particular knowledges of these spaces are furnished, and how through the development of management plans and infrastructural interventions for culling, imaginaries of the environment are altered. I argue that through goat culling, previously dislocated, vulnerable spaces are connected to broader conceptions of a manageable environment. I also explore the practical and political ambivalences of their labour, the repertories that have been developed, and how this expertise in environments articulates privileged claims over them in defining these spaces and how they ought to be cared for.