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

Abstract

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.

Natural born cullers? How hunters police the more-than-human right to the city

“…While an interspecies etiquette should ideally go both ways, so that also human urban residents learn to behave in ways that do not produce problem animals, such as by feeding the wrong animals the wrong kind of food in the wrong places (von Essen and Redmalm, 2023b), the etiquette appears overwhelmingly focused on communicating the codes of conduct to animals. It is ‘unilateral’ with human teachers and hence may be destined to fail (von Essen et al, 2023). It is moreover unclear where we are headed in the future, both when it comes to responding to animals’ cues, and when more generally it comes to accommodating an ‘animal urbis’ in which ‘the breath, life, soul and spirit of the city … is embodied in its animal as well as human lifeforms’ (Hubbard and Brooks, 2021).…”

Mediating Human-Wolves Conflicts Through Dialogue, Joint Fact-Finding and Empowerment

“…Wolf management is challenged by a lack of legitimacy, which is particularly pronounced in rural regions and communities near wolf territories. Being forced to accept wolves as a part of the environment, citizens in rural areas experience a marginalisation of their livelihood and everyday life situation in wolf management processes (Pettersson et al, 2021;Skogen and Krange, 2020;von Essen and Allen, 2017;Pohja-Mykrä and Kurki, 2014;Højberg et al, 2017). Traditional governance methods, based on the principles of liberal democracy, targeting predefined interests ("stakeholders"), such as nature conservationists, hunters, farmers, governmental agencies etc., at the expense of the common good, tend to reproduce the very problems they seek to solve von Essen and Hansen, 2015;.…”