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Short abstract:

This paper reports how elephants in northern Botswana regularly damage a veterinary fence and what stakeholders think should happen to the fence. The analysis zooms in on the role of ambivalence in enacting a future across veterinary, conservation and agricultural worlds.

Long abstract:

This paper is about a veterinary fence in northern Botswana. Veterinarians consider the fence necessary to prevent the transmission of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) from buffalo (considered the FMD reservoir host) to cattle. The fence also separates a wildlife area from a communal farming area. This separation therefore does more than just prevent disease transmission; it also prevents people and their livestock from entering the wildlife area, and it prevents wildlife species other than buffalo from crossing over to the communal area. However, the fence does not prevent elephants from crossing, and they cause damage to the fence to such extent that currently the fence cannot be effectively maintained. By doing so, elephants challenge human practices of ordering multispecies coexistence and force stakeholders to envisage alternative futures. This paper therefore considers the ways in which veterinarians, conservationists and farmers make sense of the elephants’ agency, and what they think should happen to the fence. While all three stakeholder groups are concerned with mobility across the fence, they are concerned with different species and different directions (communal into wildlife area vs. wildlife into communal area). Consequently, the groups suggest different ways forward. At the same time, the stakeholder groups also partially share some of each other’s concerns, and are internally not always unified. What does this ambivalence mean for veterinary worlding? What kind of governance arrangements bolster rather than suppress this ambivalence, and how can it be made actionable? To answer these questions, this paper will draw on a variety of literatures across multispecies anthropology, health geography and feminist STS.