Critical Animal Studies: An Introduction by Dawne McCance

Review of Critical Animal Studies: An Introduction by Dawne McCance

Extirpation Despite Regulation? Environmental Assessment and Caribou

Many caribou populations in Canada face extirpation despite dozens of provincial and federal legislative instruments designed to protect them. How are industrial developments that impact caribou justified and permitted despite governments\u27 commitments to caribou protection? Toward an answer, this paper scrutinizes an approval process for major projects in Canada: environmental assessment (EA). We identify 65 EAs for major projects with potentially significant adverse impacts for caribou—all projects but one were approved. The results show that most projects were approved on the basis of proposed mitigation measures that promise to render adverse effects “insignificant”; yet mitigation effectiveness is largely unknown. Further, several projects were approved even though mitigation measures were insufficient, citing public or national interest. Finally, some projects\u27 approval rested in part on scientific claims that the project area is already degraded or absent of caribou. Based on these findings, EA is failing caribou, acting as a means by which the state licenses major developments with potentially significant adverse effects for caribou, with a pretense of protection. The failure stems in part from a broader tension within the state that manifests in EA: a tension between the state\u27s roles promoting economic growth and protecting against this growth\u27s negative effects. Recognition of this tension needs to be more central to conservation biology

Towards a more-than-human approach to tree health

New ways of working and thinking in relation to tree health and plant biosecurity are required. The climate is changing and the number of pests and diseases is increasing. A review of the social science literature on plant health reveals that scholars are not quite sure what this ‘new thinking’ might entail. In this chapter, we begin the process of re-imagining tree health by starting with the trees and our research engagement with them. Trees are acknowledged in this chapter as never static, but rather fluid, shape-shifters, translated across time and space. Health and disease are revealed as relational, and a fixed approach to tree health management won’t work. In a world of rapid change, this way of working is not just relevant for trees

Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Thought

Book review of Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Thought by Gary Steiner

Animal traffic : making, remaking and unmaking commodities in global live wildlife trade

Against mass species loss and escalating concern over declining biodiversity, legal and illegal trade in wildlife is booming. Annually, it generates tens of billions of dollars and involves the circulation of billions of live and dead animals worldwide. This dissertation examines one dimension of this economy: flows of live, wild-caught animals – namely exotic pets – into North America. My central questions are: how are wild animals’ lives and bodies transformed into commodities that circulate worldwide and can be bought and owned? How are these commodities remade and even unmade? In answering these questions the dissertation is concerned not only with embodied practices, but also with broader, dominant assumptions about particular figures of the human and the animal, and the relations between them. This dissertation draws on reading across economic geography and sociology, political economy and ecology, and political theory to construct a theoretical approach with three strands: a commodity chain framework, a theory of performativity, and an anti-speciesist position. It weaves this theoretical grounding through multi-sited research carried out from 2010-2013, including participant- and spectator-observation, interviews, and film and photography. In this research, to retain a focus on animals I inserted myself in multispecies contact zones. Specifically, I traced three nodes in global live wildlife trade’s circuits: commodification of animals through capture in biosphere reserves in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize; recommodification (re-legitimation of the animals’ status as commodities) through exchange at exotic animal auctions across the US; and attempted decommodification through rehabilitation at a wildlife centre in Guatemala. This research suggests that commodification and decommodification are not processes of “denaturing” and “renaturing”, respectively. Rather, they are both productions of particular natures. Commodification produces an encounterable, individual and controllable animal life. Decommodification seeks to do the opposite. Ultimately, I argue that all of these global live wildlife trade processes depend on and perform, or bring into being, a human/animal dualism that positions the human figure as a master subject and the animal as a subordinate object. This dissertation thus amounts to a critique of the exotic pet commodity form.Arts, Faculty ofGeography, Department ofGraduat

Cougar-human entanglements on Vancouver Island : relational agency and space

Vancouver Island is home to what is estimated to be the densest cougar population in North America. Over the last century and a half, cougar and human residents of the Island have not co-existed peacefully. From government-sponsored bounty hunts of cougars to cougar attacks on children, encounters between humans and cougars, although rare, have been violent and often lethal. In this thesis, work in Actor Network theory, feminist science studies, and posthuman geographies, specifically concerning themes of agency and space, is brought to bear on cougar-human relationships on Vancouver Island. The thesis focuses on two sites and processes within cougars and humans are drawn into obvious entanglements: cougar-human “conflict” in the southern Island town of Sooke in the mid-late twentieth century, and contemporary cougar science on the west coast of the Island in Pacific Rim National Park Reserve. The case studies examine what it means to be entangled with cougars, and what these entanglements reveal about the production and maintenance of species boundaries, nonhuman agency, and the generation of science and knowledge. In this project, I am interested in the sensual exchange between cougars and humans who are knotted in encounter and how networks of multiple species and technological mediators develop around these exchanges. Theorists in animal geographies, hybrid, posthuman, or “more-than-human” geographies, science and technology studies, and feminist science studies, have begun to bring attention to the multiple ways human and animal lives are intertwined. Too often, this research and writing retains a residual anthropocentric focus, and the animals of the story are backgrounded in troubling ways, reproducing the privileging of human subjects over that of animals. My research seeks to foreground cougars and how they matter to the production of knowledge and the constitution of natural-cultural space on Vancouver Island.Arts, Faculty ofGeography, Department ofGraduat

Re-regulating Socioecologies Under Neoliberalism

The objective of this chapter is to consider the relationship between neoliberalism and environments. The neoliberal era involves governments overhauling regulatory environments that govern access to and control of nature. This entails shifting regulatory regimes, not merely eviscerating them – a re-regulation. We centre our chapter on three processes of re-regulation in the neoliberal era: 1) new regulatory conditions that allow for further exploitation of natural resources; 2) innovations in private and voluntary forms of governance; and 3) the transformation of environmental problems into market-like solutions. But all is not “neo”, of course; neoliberalism inherited from liberalism particular ideas about what are the “right” ways for ecologies and subjects to be governed, the right practices through which humans should relate to and use the environments in which they are situated. For liberals, old and new, when all individuals pursue their self-interest economically, when they relate to nature and land through market logic as a resource to be constantly “improved,” all of society will be wealthier. Yet liberal and neoliberal governing strategies rely on the violent rendering of whole peoples and places as less valuable, making certain people, species, lands, waters available to be sacrificed, developed for the supposed ‘common good’

An analysis of Canada's declared live wildlife imports and implications for zoonotic disease risk

In Canada, there have been calls for increased research into and surveillance of wildlife trade and associated zoonotic disease risks. We provide the first comprehensive analysis of Canadian live wildlife imports over a 7-year period (2014–2020), based on data from federal government databases obtained via Access to Information requests. A total of 1 820 313 individual animals (including wild-caught and captive-bred animals but excluding fish, invertebrates, Columbiformes (pigeons), and Galliformes (game birds)), from 1028 documented import records, were imported into Canada during 2014–2020. Birds were the most imported taxonomic class (51%), followed by reptiles (28%), amphibians (19%), and mammals (2%). In total, 22 taxonomic orders from 79 countries were recorded as imported. Approximately half of the animals (49%) were imported for the exotic pet market. Based on existing literature and a review of the Canadian regulatory apparatus, we gesture to these importations' potential implications for zoonotic disease risk and discuss potential biosecurity challenges at the Canadian border. Finally, we identify data gaps that prevent an extensive assessment of the zoonotic disease risk of live wildlife imports. We recommend data collection for all wildlife importation and improved coordination between agencies to accurately assess zoonotic disease risk