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Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the (hi)stories of vultures, humans and livestock in Europe, this paper considers how divergent understandings of decay and well-being are imagined, enacted and valued within landscapes that are becoming at the same time more homogeneous and fragmented, more toxic and sanitised.

Paper long abstract:

European vulture species, share a long history with farming practices to an extent to which they have learned to subsist predominately on the remains of livestock carcasses left in the fields. They have also been subject to long-term conservation efforts aiming to bring back locally extinct species.

Yet in 2002 an abrupt rupture occurred. In an attempt to halt the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) the EU introduced strict hygiene rules that prohibit the leaving of carcasses in the open. Keeping European landscapes tidy and sanitary had an adverse effect on European vulture populations and ran contrary to environmental legislation that aimed at their restoration and conservation. As the starving of vultures and their alleged turn into predators killing lambs alarmed local farmers and people involved in vulture conservation (for different reasons) – an exception specifically for vultures has been negotiated, which re-allows the leaving of carcasses under specific circumstances and in defined places.

Using a more-than-human lens, this paper elucidates how the entangled (hi)stories of vultures, humans, livestock and others allow for a consideration of how divergent understandings of decay and well-being are imagined, enacted and valued within this context. Paying attention to the world-making activities of scavengers, I will argue, allows us to reconnect thinking about multispecies survival with the life giving unravelling and consummation of decaying flesh. Scavenging in this story emerges as a lively world forming activity, which challenges the late modern quest to live without death in sanitised and impoverished worlds.