Paper short abstract:

This paper engages non-dualist and posthumanist dispositions to ask what the relationship between an invasive species and the people who are trying to control it can tell us about human/animal relations, multispecies entanglements and becoming together.

Paper long abstract:

This article examines how the case of the invasive cane toad in the Kimberley region in western Australia can help give substance to the concepts of 'entanglements' and 'becoming with'. The recent arrival of toads in the Kimberley represents a sudden and significant alteration to the way certain people engage with the environment. This article asks in what ways this is happening. The toad case stands out in a few different ways: 1) Among volunteers and environmentalists animosity towards toads and a lack of recognition is paired with a respect and admiration for the toads and sometimes quite intimate relations. 2) A remarkably rapid alteration in the environment is intertwined with local bureaucracy, state and federal politics, indigenous issues and the scientific community. 3) Both the toads and the naturecultural environment into which they arrive are conspicuously unstable, changing and uncertain. The paper explores how these factors - which are unusually marked in the toad case - can shed light upon the notion of interspecies entanglements.

How people are changing patterns of interaction with the environment as toads arrive is seen in light of the texture, directed perception and complex causality of interspecies entanglements. Significantly, the toads are also 'multispecies cyborgs' no less than people are and they facilitate each other's becoming in conspicuous co-shaping. As a new species enters the multispecies collective that is the Kimberley what it is to become human is shifted, not by contrast but by connections.