How wild boar hunting is becoming a battleground

Sport hunting has been shaped by modernization processes such as commoditization and rationalization. But these processes have also precipitated counterreactions seeking to return hunting to a state of authenticity. This is manifested in the rise of atavism such as bowhunting and exemplified in an embodied turn that involves a more intimate and care-based relationship with wildlife. Many hunters today are demarcated into “communities of practice” on the basis of how they are positioned in relation to these contradicting trends. In this article, I investigate what happens when such trends and leisure communities of practice collide, using a case study of wild boar hunting. I show how the wild boar becomes a nexus for the contradictions of modernization. This is discussed, first, as to what this means for wild boar welfare and, second, as to what sorts of identities, values, and ethics the wild boar brings about among hunters

Interspecies Violence and Crimes of Dissent: Communication Ethics and Legitimacy in Message Crimes Involving Wildlife

In this article, we consider the phenomenon of message crimes involving harm to wildlife from a sociological and criminological perspective. Using a case study of dissident Nordic hunters killing protected wolves to send a message to the state agencies responsible for their conservation, we engage philosophically with the question of wildlife victimhood and why interspecies violence is unjustifiable as a mode of political dissent. As an alternative to the species justice perspective in green criminology, we examine how the acts disrespect animals as moral subjects of public communication and frustrate dialogue regarding what is owed to them in terms of political justice

‘Not the Wolf Itself’: Distinguishing Hunters’ Criticisms of Wolves from Procedures for Making Wolf Management Decisions

Swedish hunters sometimes appeal to an inviolate ‘right to exist’ for wolves, apparently rejecting NIMBY. Nevertheless, the conditions existence hunters impose on wolves in practice fundamentally contradict their use of right to exist language. Hunters appeal to this language hoping to gain uptake in a conservation and management discourse demanding appropriately objective ecological language. However, their contradictory use of ‘right to exist' opens them up to the charge that they are being deceptive – indeed, right to exist is a 'disguised NIMBY!' We address this situation by distinguishing hunters’ criticisms of wolves from the procedures for reaching objective policy decisions. Wolves; conservation policy; deliberation; NIMBY; metaconsensus; hunterspublishedVersio

Neo-republicanism as a route to animal non-domination

In this article, we reinterpret the current political turn in animal rights theory in terms of republican as opposed to liberal political theory. By appealing to the values of liberty and fraternity as well as equality, we argue for a conception of animal liberation from human domination and not from humanity per se. This establishes a basis of liberty and fraternity in our cooperative relationships with animals in a "zoopolis," or interspecies political community. We contend that such a basis for interspecies political cooperation is not available on the more traditional model of animal liberation, where rights are derived from weak equality of the species

Are Illegal Direct Actions by Animal Rights Activists Ethically Vigilante?

Constructed as terrorist, illegal direct actions by animal rights activists have become the subject of draconian law enforcement measures in the US and UK. Some scholars respond to this phenomenon by interpreting such actions to protect vulnerable animals not as terrorist but civilly disobedient. This approach highlights their ethical character, as a normatively relevant consideration in the state’s law enforcement response. Consistent with this approach, we argue that illegal direct actions by animal rights activists are not terrorist, although their motivations are sometimes anti-statist and anarchist. However, we also argue that civil disobedience is an awkward fit for many such actions. Consequently, we explore a different approach. Instead, we consider illegal direct actions to protect vulnerable animals in light of a concept of ethical vigilantism. This permits us to acknowledge how these actions often dis-align from civil disobedience, while also allowing us to insist their ethical motivations remains normatively relevant considerations for the state

Skill or Slaughter in ‘Fair Chase:’ What does Animal Resistance Tell us about Modern Sports Hunting

In philosophy of sport, the internal justification for sports hunting is often that the chase empowers hunters to become skilled performers. However, this internal justification for sport hunting is challenged by two factors. One is the growing awareness that the hunted non-human animals themselves are skilled performers, demonstrating agency is resisting their hunters. Another is that recent developments in hunting practice undermine the internal justification by reducing the necessity for hunters to refine their performance skills, in effect allowing them to rely on technology and shortcuts in place of sportsmanship. Both factors reveal important justificatory deficits in modern sports hunting as closer to slaughter than skill

Interspecies Political Agency In The Total Liberation Movement

In this paper, we examine the possibility of interspecies political agency at the level of social movements. We ask to what extent animals and humans can be co-participants in one another’s liberation from oppression. To do so, we assess arguments for and against including animals in the ‘total liberation package’, taken as the liberation from oppressive societal structures. These are not pragmatic-political arguments, but conceptual-philosophical arguments that have been put before animal liberationists attempting to ‘piggy-back’ on human liberation movements. In discrediting these philosophical arguments, we argue that animals have capacities for self-liberation that humans can facilitate and that animals, in turn, can facilitate human liberation. As such, we defend the coherence of a total liberation package linking all oppression and all liberation, animal and human. We further argue that the rhetoric of total animal/human liberation performs a vital function in creating unity and solidarity between otherwise disparate and fragmented social justice movements

In the gap between legality and legitimacy

It may be challenging to see how illegal hunting, a crime that ostensibly proceeds as shoot, shovel and shut up in remote rural communities, at all communicates with the regime. Examining the socio-legal interplay between hunters and state regulation, however, clarifies illegal hunting to be part of a politically motivated pattern of dissent that signals hunters’ disenfranchisement from the polity. While few contemporary illegal hunters cut conscientious figures like Robin Hood, their violation of illegitimate law may likewise testify to a profound disjuncture between legality and legitimacy. This is the premise taken in the following research. Here it is observed contemporary Swedish hunters experience the deliberative system pertaining to wildlife and wolf conservation to be systematically stacked against them and unable to serve as a site for critical law-making that provides equal uptake of all voices. One manifestation of their growing disenfranchisement is the establishment of a counterpublic mobilised on the basis of shared semantics for the sorts of deliberative deficits they argue befall them in the present. Within the remit of their counterpublic, hunters undertake and justify illegal hunting along with other forms of disengaging dissent like abstentions, non-compliance, boycotts and conscientious refusals with state agencies. The research captures hunters’ dissent in Smith’s deliberative disobedience, a deliberative and Habermasian grounded reinterpretation of the more familiar classical theory of civil disobedience. On this perspective, illegal hunting signals a deficit in the deliberative system, which hunters both bypass by taking an alternative conduit for contestation, and draw attention to when they undertake dissent. The dissent in this case study is deconstructed in terms of its grammar—as simultaneously engaging and disengaging with the premises of power—and in terms of its communicative content. Set within the field of Environmental Communication, the dissertation is intended as an empirical and theoretical contribution to a discussion on the boundaries of political dialogue in the context of civic disenfranchisement: it asks whether some of hunters’ dissent may be parsed as a call for a more inclusive debate, or as dialogic acts in themselves. Finally, it presents ways toward short-term and longer-term reconciliation of hunters with the deliberative system, drawing on the work of contestatory citizen mini-publics from the third wave of deliberative democracy

The Implications of Victimhood Identity: The Case of \u27Persecution\u27 of Swedish Hunters

This ethnographically based study examines Swedish hunters\u27 claims to victimhood through appeal to the term \u27persecution\u27. Perceiving disenfranchisement, injustice and discrimination on the basis of wolf conservation policy, we present hunters\u27 self-styled predicament as victimhood-claimants of persecution at the hands of a state that has been co-opted by a conservationist, pro-wolf agenda that systematically disenfranchises rural and hunting interests and lifestyles. Through the phenomenological accounts of hunter respondents, our paper takes seriously the hunters\u27 perception of persecution and, likewise, considers the opposite case made by conservationists: that wolves have been, and continue to be, the real victims of persecution in the conflict. Nonetheless, we show that the persecution language as it is applied from opposing parties in the conflict is problematic inasmuch as it is focused around creating a moral panic and confusion among the Swedish public who are ultimately responsible, as a democratic body-politic, for assessing the legitimacy of claims to moral wrong-doing and legal redress for the wronged. Our case study joins scholarship that explores the pathologies of claims to victimization by populist rural interest groups in the context of controversial conservation directives