Send message to Author

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.