Trophy Hunters & Crazy Cat Ladies: exploring cats and conservation in North America and Southern Africa through intersectionality

Re-Thinking Felid–Human Entanglements through the Lenses of Compassionate Conservation and Multispecies Studies

“…Multispecies scholars have also explored how conservation discourses marginalise the wellbeing of individuals and those who care for them [ 8 , 10 ]. For example, McCubbin and Van Patter [ 8 ] examined how the hierarchies of scale (ecosystem/individual), knowledge (reason/emotion), and gender (masculine/feminine) are embodied in the two contrasting figures - the othered Crazy Cat Lady and the privileged Trophy Hunter.…”

“…As felids strive to persist within these altered environments, they are routinely shot, poisoned, and left to die in snares in response to real or perceived threat their presence poses to human safety and livelihoods [ 5 , 6 ]. These killings often occur under the guise of protection, through practices of trophy hunting, predator control, or the preservation of genetic “purity” of a species [ 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 ]. With the global decline of felids, current approaches and frameworks centred on human exceptionalism and widespread violence toward wild animals are conspicuously failing felids.…”

Coping With Human-Cat Interactions Beyond the Limits of Domesticity: Moral Pluralism in the Management of Cats and Wildlife

“…Beginning with small cats, the management of feral domestic felines is mired in heated conflict across the globe." (24). Other observers have argued that "the scientific literature on this issue is mostly unbalanced in one direction or the other and the various protagonists commonly have difficulty engaging in a civil discussion of their [differences]" (12).…”

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).…”

“…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).…”