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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.