Animal geographies II: Killing and caring (in times of crisis)

Abstract

Humans kill and care for animals in a multitude of contexts. These themes – killing and caring – form the focus of this second report on animal geographies research. Most notably, killing and caring take place through conservation and the production and consumption of food. Other realms of recent research include killing through climate change, formal arrangements of care, how animals are made killable, and the significance of the individual and collective. Further to these two major themes, the review identifies other approaches to animal geographies research in recent years; namely, political and relational. Finally, the propensity for humans to kill and care for animals is highlighted by crisis. I open and close the review by considering connections between animals and two contemporary emergencies: the fires that burned south-eastern Australia over summer 2019–20 and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Distancing animal death: Geographies of killing and making killable

“…Spaces of wildlife conservation are also important sites of animal death (Gibbs, 2020), where saving some species often involves sacrificing others (Palmer, 2020). Both Parreñas' (2018) and Palmer's (2020) multi‐species ethnographies focus on orangutan rehabilitation centres in Borneo.…”

“…'s (2005) article on experiences of farmers in Cumbria during the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic who wept over the bodies of their dead cows and sheep. Moreover, much work across animal geographies and the environmental humanities has drawn attention to the intertwined nature of killing and caring, particularly in conservation (Boonman‐Berson et al., 2019; Gibbs, 2020; Ginn et al., 2014; Palmer, 2020). Whilst van Dooren (2011, p. 294) doubts that killing can be abandoned in conservation, believing that some killing is inevitable to protect threatened species, he argues that it should be challenged and must be ‘a last resort’, echoing Atchison's (2019) problematisation of killing with indifference.…”

“…However, this body of work has so far failed to pay sufficient attention to the death of animals (for an exception see Romanillos, 2011). Published reviews of animal geographies (Buller, , 2015(Buller, , 2016Hovorka, 2017Hovorka, , 2018Hovorka, , 2019 reveal the lack of attention paid to death within this area, even though as Baker et al (2006) point out, killing is the most common type of human-animal interaction, although more recent interventions such as Gibbs (2020) have started to address this, as well as calls to politicise animal geographies (White, 2015). This review piece brings rich discussions of animal death across anthropology (Dave, 2014;Mukherjee, 2014;Parreñas, 2018;Reinert, 2007;Serpell, 1986), environmental humanities (Ginn et al, 2014;van Dooren, 2010van Dooren, , 2014, vegan geographies and critical animal studies (Cole, 2011;Gillespie, 2011;Stanescu, 2013Stanescu, , 2015White, 2015) into conversation with work in animal geography and geographies of death.…”

Introduction to A Research Agenda for Animal Geographies: visioning amidst socio-ecological crises

“…Beyond these conceptualizations, animal geographers have brought a variety of theoretical approaches to the subject of species relations of power. Feminist ideas such as intersectionality, performativity, and standpoint have been fruitfully extended beyond human identities to the lives of animals (Collard, 2012;Collard and Gillespie, 2015;Emel, 1998;Geiger and Hovorka, 2015;Gillespie, 2014;Hovorka, 2012Hovorka, , 2015Kim, 2015;McCubbin and Van Patter, 2020). Such engagements reveal how, for example, speciesism is a Western-based hierarchy that mutually supports racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and other structures of domination (Wolch and Zhang, 2004), as well as how animal subjectivities are produced and reproduced as societal relations of power work in and through animals' bodies (Hovorka, 2015).…”

“…Further, drawing on the theoretical insights of a host of literatures such as de/postcolonial theory, critical race studies, Indigenous studies, and political ecology, animal geographers and animal scholars more broadly have investigated species intersections with racial, cultural, and colonial relations of power (Anderson, 1995(Anderson, , 2000Belcourt, 2015;Bennett, 2020;Boisseron, 2018;Elder et al, 1998;Gillespie, 2019;Isaacs and Otruba, 2019;Kim, 2015;Neo, 2012;TallBear, 2011;Todd, 2014), illuminating how racial and colonial relations are mediated and expressed through human-animal relations (Hovorka, 2016). Moreover, building upon the growing body of work on the commodification of nature, animal geographers have brought the insights of political economy to the lives of animals, exploring how animals are entangled in the broader political economy, how animal commodification occurs, as well as the lived experiences of commodified animals (Barua, 2019;Collard, 2014;Gillespie, 2014).…”