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- Convenors:
-
Kieran O'Mahony
(Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences)
Toryn Whitehead (King’s College London)
Kim Ward (University of Plymouth)
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- Format:
- Panel
Format/Structure
This panel will follow a standard format.
Long Abstract
Grazing, trampling, rooting, wallowing, seed-carrying, tree-felling, damming: herbivores are increasingly imagined as ecological engineers capable of disturbing, diversifying, and regenerating landscapes. Across Europe, their (re)appearance- whether through deliberate reintroductions or spontaneous recolonisation- is often bound up with hopeful visions of post-productivist, ecologically resilient, multispecies futures. Yet these utopian imaginaries sit uneasily alongside more anxious narratives of overabundance, agricultural damage, pathogenic risk, or biodiversity decline. Inhabiting complex biocultural landscapes, herbivores occupy multiple and sometimes conflicting ontologies- at once engineers, pests, food, game, companions, and disease vectors.
This panel explores the ambiguous bio- and necro-politics of herbivores, including omnivores whose diets and ecologies are closely associated with herbivory. From wild boar and bison to beavers, deer, domesticated surrogates or rodents, we examine how herbivores not only engineer ecosystems, but also reshape governance regimes, social worlds and infrastructures of care and control. All this unfolds within a European landscape undergoing environmental, economic, and socio-political transformation.
We are particularly interested in how differing forms of knowledge, affect, memory and perceptibility influence the possibilities of coexistence, both human and nonhuman. We invite contributions that explore how sociotechnological mediations- such as trail cameras, thermal imaging, GPS tracking, genomic databases, or computer models- configure how herbivores are sensed, known and governed. We also welcome reflections on how herbivore bodies become sites of intervention- whether through selective breeding, genetic engineering, or by securing their microbial entanglements.
We invite traditional papers and creative contributions that broadly engage with:
• Multispecies coexistence
• Rewilding and conservation infrastructures and interventions
• Sociotechnologies and embodied knowledge practices
• Disease ecologies and biosecurity
• Memory, multispecies justice, and more-than-human governance
Together, the panel will explore how herbivores rework boundaries between wildness and domestication, bodies and environments, health and harm- and raise questions about governance and coexistence amidst uncertain socioecological futures.
Accepted papers
Session 1Presentation short abstract
This paper examines herbivore reintroductions through the lens of risk, animal health and multispecies justice. It investigates how actors negotiate more-than-human vulnerabilities and explores human-herbivore encounters, care practices, and contested responsibilities.
Presentation long abstract
This research examines herbivore reintroductions within rewilding through the lens of risk, animal health and welfare, and multispecies justice. As large herbivores are rewilded to restore ecological processes their reintroduction may emerge alongside new forms of more-than-human vulnerability. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, the paper investigates how human actors interpret and negotiate these more-than-human vulnerabilities and explores how situated relations between humans and herbivores emerge through encounters, care practices, and contested responsibilities. By engaging with multi-species justice, the paper interrogates how responsibility, care, and autonomy are unevenly distributed across these relations, and how such distributions shape the conditions under which herbivores are governed. Positioning this analysis within the IUCN Rewilding Guidelines, the paper contends that governance frameworks must adapt to the fluid, situated nature of human-herbivore relations and the diverse vulnerabilities they generate.
Presentation short abstract
This paper asks how herbivores make and unsettle commons, shaping contested visions of care, governance, and multispecies coexistence. Beginning with the New Forest (UK) and the pony, it explores how grazing traditions endure, adapt, or fray amid tourism pressures and shifting rural imaginaries.
Presentation long abstract
Herbivores increasingly sit at the centre of debates about how European biocultural landscapes are made, governed, and imagined. In the New Forest National Park (UK), free-roaming ponies occupy an ambiguous position. They appear as heritage symbols, ecological labourers, tourist attractions, and sources of friction, unsettling boundaries between care and control, wildness and domestication, value and nuisance. This paper asks how herbivores participate in the making and unmaking of commons, and how their movements, behaviours, and shifting social legibility shape contested norms of access, responsibility, and shared stewardship.
Drawing on political ecology, commons scholarship, and multispecies studies, the paper approaches commoning as a relational, affective, and more-than-human rather than a solely institutional arrangement. Focusing on the New Forest as an enduring pastoral common where ponies, commoners, visitors, and institutions continually negotiate their shared landscape, it explores how grazing traditions endure, adapt, or fray amid intensifying tourism pressures and shifting cultural imaginaries. It further examines the embodied ways ponies are sensed (seen, mis-seen, or overlooked) through everyday encounters that render their bodies alternately visible, spectacular, or invisible within the landscape, shaping how herbivores become knowable and governable.
This paper develops conceptual questions about how herbivores reconfigure governance regimes, enact forms of ecological labour, and generate frictions that complicate assumptions about stability, heritage, and stewardship. It asks how commons shift when herbivores are treated as co-participants in governance and care, rather than passive objects of management or instruments of conservation.
Presentation short abstract
Based on an original case study in Corsica, where stray cattle are both a tourist attraction and a source of public safety and public health concerns, we confront the utopia of animal freedom with the physical reality of bovine bodies and the infrastructure constraints of an inhabited territory.
Presentation long abstract
Sometimes described as a paradise for stray cattle, Corsica appears to be a laboratory for animal freedom.
Once confined to rural and mountain areas and kept under surveillance and control, cows now roam freely along roads and beaches, through villages and even in the island's main towns. Since then, these animals generate a paradox. On the one hand, animals’ mobility is popular with tourists and inspires artists, animal rights activists or researchers who see it as a possible alternative to the highly controlled farming systems on the mainland. On the other hand, the accidents these animals cause, the competition they pose for grazing resources and the diseases they can carry lead to them being seen as a public health and safety issue.
This observation makes Corsica a prime location for studying how utopian ideals of cattle freedom – whether inspired by rewilding theories or notions such as "animal liberation" – are embodied in specific territories and may come into tension with their material realities.
This article analyses how animals’ unexpected presence and mobility lead to recharacterize the activities of those who are supposed to look after them. By questioning the spaces traveled and the boundaries crossed by cows, we describe how technical and administrative categories are transgressed and transformed, and how stakeholders act to maintain or limit these transgressions.
In doing so, we map animal freedom as a heterotopia where cattle gravitate in the grey zones of modernity and circulate in territories where they have no place anywhere.
Presentation long abstract
This presentation analyses the chronobiopolitics of transhumance as a re/wilding practice.
I focus on proposals to reintroduce transhumance in the Lake District on land owned and managed by Lowther Conservation, the most ambitious rewilding project in England by size.
Conservationists hope to leverage the connectivity of upland common land to recreate a wildlife corridor, using domesticated herbivores as proxies for extinct megafauna. This shift from heritage to conservation grazing, from sheep to cattle, is framed as a post-pastoral utopia in a UNESCO cultural landscape. It is a yearning desire for an alternative world grounded not in a pre-farming past but rather in farming's golden age: Rewilding here is not anti-pastoral, but post-pastoral, restoring, rather than replacing, a pastoral practice (hefting) into its more authentic version: transhumance.
Blurring the often found opposition of rewilding and heritage, these proposals also reconfigure the bio- and chrono politics of rewilding. I first analyse the biopolitics of transhumant rewilding, particularly the biosecurity regulations governing the mixing of cattle on the uplands when moving from different farm holdings in the valley (i.e. BCMS) and how this is reconfiguring breed selection for tenanted farms. I argue with Rancière (2022) that time is “not simply the line stretching between past and future”, but time is a “hierarchical distribution of forms of life”: life forms that are timely and those that are anachronic. Such a temporal framing allows for a critical scrutiny of which lives are made to coexist in post-pastoral utopias.
Presentation short abstract
Based on dissertation fieldwork in an English woodlands my presentation examines how bison have been enrolled as ecosystem engineering ‘climate heroes’. I show that what bison are at the reserve is continually negotiated through an array of technologies and infrastructures such as bridges.
Presentation long abstract
In efforts to restore herbivorous habitats in West Blean and Thornden Woods, Kent Wildlife Trust has introduced European bison (bison bisonus) to a reserved area. Idealised to be "climate heroes" as well as ecosystem engineers, the bisons’ introduction has received attracted widespread media attention as a pioneering attempt to achieve greater ecological resilience. Drawing on fieldwork carried out at the reserve, and engagement with publicly available information on the Kent Wildlife Trust website, my presentation examines the multifaceted presence of bison in the woodlands amid an entanglement of provisions, technologies and regulations.
I argue that the array of human-led interventions – including tracking collars, fences and bridges – are not merely spatial strategies determining where bison may venture in the reserve. Rather, they also mediate bison lifeworlds, raising critical questions about the future of human and more-than-human coexistence amid damaged natures. By spotlighting the construction of “bison bridges” as part of the reserve’s infrastructure, I suggest that such interventions have considerable ontological consequences for bison, qualifying and constraining their ecological identity. I draw on Burua’s concept of the infrastructuring of more-than-human life to argue that bridges, as examples of infrastructure themselves, facilitate how bison lives take shape. Along with other material interventions at the reserve, and the discourse of climate resilience surrounding their introduction, I ultimately show that bison are not only implicated in ambitions to redeem a degraded landscape, but also in techno-optimist attempts address the climate crisis.
Presentation short abstract
I examine the uptake of drone surveying and thermal imaging technologies in deer management. I contend that these are making deer legible and killable in new ways, reconfiguring their governance via affective intervention.
Presentation long abstract
As wild deer populations in the UK grow and spread—with associated economic, ecological and biosecurity impacts—management efforts are intensifying and adapting. Deer, in response to increased culling pressure, are becoming more nocturnal and selective in their movements. This novel behavioural shift exploits spatiotemporal niches (times and places where shooting is and is not undertaken), frustrating culling efforts. Drawing on ethnographic research in the South Downs, I examine the uptake of drone surveying and thermal imaging technologies in deer management. I contend that these are making deer legible and killable in new ways, reconfiguring their governance. Rather than estimating population counts from ground-based surveys, drone surveys produce a seemingly totalising vision of deer populations in a landscape, complete with age, sex, and species characteristics. Drone surveying, however, is more-so prized for the sociality it affords. Drones, in making legible the distribution of deer across ownership boundaries, foment a local politics of countryside responsibility, shame, and care. As part of this, the cartographic representations generated by drones (of a situated deer population) are mobilised by conservationists to enrol recalcitrant landowners in a spatiotemporally integrated governmentality. In so doing, they are attempting to cement a particular ontology of deer: as an object-target of management, rather than recreation or spectacle. Drone survey, then, is a more than biopolitical technology, it is an affective and moral technology thoroughly involved in the reworking of local human–deer relations.
Presentation short abstract
We explore the opportunities and challenges of navigating between different boar-ish valuescapes to address policy and practice in Britain.
Presentation long abstract
Wild boar, which are historically native to Great Britain, were absent from the wild for multiple centuries. Since the 1980s, escapes from farms, along with deliberate illegal releases, have contributed to their contemporary return. They are officially categorised as 'feral wild boar' in England and ‘feral pigs’ in Scotland due to the illicit nature of their release and doubts over genetic purity. There are several free-ranging populations across Britain, and they appear to be expanding in both size and range, with further unsanctioned releases likely. While their presence is celebrated by nature restoration advocates and practioners, who call them wild boar, agricultural damage and potential infectious animal disease outbreaks raise concerns. The UK and Scottish Government’s current approach heightens these risks and fails to captialise on the potential benefits of their presence.
Drawing on our research in the UK and Europe, we have synthesised several policy recommendations, including a national monitoring system and strengthened biosecurity infrastructure, which will protect agricultural interests and unlock opportunities for nature recovery. These recommendations will be stress tested at two workshops in England and Scotland which seek to identify areas of common ground between different stakeholders. In doing so, we explore the opportunities and challenges of navigating between different boar-ish valuescapes to address policy and practice in Britain.
Presentation short abstract
Feral goats are a problematic introduction to Aotearoa (NZ), subject to culling for about a century. This paper draws from ethnographic engagement with goat cullers and feral goat control, from ‘kill zones’ to technical reports, to explore the relationalities and ontologies emergent in culling.
Presentation long abstract
Goats were one of a series of ungulates released in Aotearoa (New Zealand) during the colonialist terraforming of the islands, and they now range throughout swathes of the country. Their wanton browsing across various ecologies and tenure poses problems for pastoral farming and environmental conservation, interrupting and transgressing these projects delimitations. Goats 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. This paper draws from ethnographic engagement with goat cullers and wild goat control, from cullers’ ‘kill zones’ to their technical reports, to explore the relationalities and ontologies emergent in culling. I will explore the cullers’ entanglements with the targets of lethal control and the environments they govern at different scales through exploring their attachments to the means of violence – the rifles, bullets, thermal imaging, etc. – and the affordances of these technologies, as well as the techno-scientific means of grasping these animals’ presence in ecological monitoring. More broadly, this paper aims to explore the vexed more-than-human relationalities in rendering certain animals killable.
Presentation short abstract
The privatized landscape of central Texas is home to an array of herbivorous ungulates from Africa, Asia, and Europe. Positioned within a dynamic multispecies assemblage, “exotic wildlife” embody new relational ontologies as they co-produce emergent ecologies that blur boundaries and defy control.
Presentation long abstract
The Texas Hill Country hosts the highest density and diversity of introduced herbivores from Africa, Asia, and Europe in the world. Far removed from their evolutionary origins, this collective of "exotic wildlife" is situated within a dynamic assemblage that shapes multispecies coexistence in a heavily privatized landscape. Despite decades of dwelling in this novel environment, the ecological role that exotic ungulates play here is poorly understood and hotly contested.
While this panel centers European landscapes, this paper situates Texas within the broader ecological afterlives of European settler-colonialism. European settlement reorganized the Hill Country through privatization, enclosure, hunting, mixed-species ranching, and the translocation of species imagined as suitable for transforming the region into a productive pastoral landscape. These interventions—combined with Indigenous dispossession and the suppression of long-standing land stewardship practices—established the political, ecological, and economic conditions in which today’s exotic wildlife industry flourished. The resulting assemblages reflect how European environmental imaginaries and land-use regimes continue to shape ecologies far beyond their geographic point of origin.
Today, exotic herbivores in Texas inhabit shifting roles: lively capital, invasive pest, ecological proxy, biopolitical reservoir, and biosecurity risk. Technologies such as high fencing, trail cameras, reproductive and genetic interventions, and disease-surveillance mediate how these animals are perceived, valued, and governed, shaping possibilities for coexistence in a highly privatized terrain. The paper positions the Hill Country as a site of multispecies experimentation that illuminates how colonial ecological legacies persist and how boundaries between wild and domestic, native and introduced, and care and control are continually reworked.