Presentation short abstract

A more-than-human Geography and Environmental History of African wild dogs-people relations in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, following from an early case of reintroduction conservation (1980s), with an attention to animals’ mobilities and agency embroiled with colonialism and its legacies.

Presentation long abstract

After local extirpation in the 1940s as ‘vermin’ by white settlers, the endangered African Wild Dogs (Lycaon pictus) were reintroduced in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park (KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa), and currently navigate a complicated socio-political conservation landscape. Predation on livestock leads to what is often, and simplistically called Human-Wildlife Conflict, but this framing obscures deeper historical forces. Based on archival research and interviews, this presentation examines how colonial and apartheid-era policies shaped the conditions for today’s tensions. I show how present day relations are saturated with the past; past conservation interventions, namely the practices of reintroduction, generated conflicting notions of where wild dogs belong, and reshaped the embodied interactions with them. Moreover, the presentation highlights the role of collective memories of having lived with wild dogs, the shifting baselines of predation, and the ecological and societal legacies of local animal extinctions. Current strategies for 'renewed coexistence' emerge within this history. My presentation raises sharp questions at the heart of reintroduction work and in relation to environmental justice (for both people and animals): when one returns a species to a landscape shaped by colonial legacies, what kind of return is actually being made possible? And, as conservationists move to more preventive interventions, and certain wild dog mobilities are curtailed, ‘What is exactly being saved from extinction?’ (Van Dooren, 2018) with the reintroduction?

Timothy Hodgetts & Jamie Lorimer. "Animals’ mobilities." Progress in Human Geography 44.1 (2020), 4-26.

Thom van Dooren, ‘Extinction’, in Lori Gruen (ed.), Critical Terms for Animal Studies (Chicago, 2018), pp. 169-181.