Cougar — Human Entanglements and the Biopolitical Un/Making of Safe Space

Abstract

If a cougar is close, you might sense a disconcerting silence settle. The soft hairs on your neck might stand on end. Your skin might tingle and prickle. It is the acute awareness, people say, of being stalked. Stories of being stalked are common on Vancouver Island, or Cougar Island as National Geographic calls it (Luck, 2006). On this 460-km-long island, strung down Canada's southwest coast, despite almost two centuries' worth of human effort to extirpate cougars and 150 years of urban, suburban, and rural development, cougarĥ uman interaction is on the rise. Cougar population estimates vary from 300 to 800, (1) but biologists and government officials are confident that cougars are more densely populated on Vancouver Island than anywhere else in North America. Throw into the mix an expanding suburban fringe on southern, eastern, and western Vancouver Island; burgeoning deer populations (one of cougars' favorite prey) in these areas; rapidly changing ecosystem dynamics due to a century and a half of logging; and scores of rural settlements brimming with sheep, chickens, and goats, and you have the perfect recipe for cougar^human encounters. It is unsurprising but no less shocking, then, that this strip of land in the Pacific is home to one quarter of North America's lethal and nonlethal cougar attacks in the last century. Cougars are, to borrow Haraway's (2008, page 19) term,``queer messmates'':``companion species who and which make a mess out of categories''. Coinhabiting with cougars comes with a constellation of particular and compelling issues. The cougars'

An exploration into political ecology and nonhuman agency: The case of the wild horse in western Canada

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Markets and Mutations: mosquito nets and the politics of disentanglement in global health

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“We are not animals!” Humanitarian border security and zoopolitical spaces in EUrope1

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