Kangaroos: The Non-Issue

Lorraine Thorne 1
University of Bristol, United Kingdom

The international trade of kangaroo skin and meat has been contested on ecological and ethical grounds for several decades. Yet, it continues unabated. This article reviews the constitutive practices of the kangaroo network, drawing on the Actor Network Theory to provide insights into why and how this trade continues. Questions of agency, network, and space are explored in this account, which looks at the real and imagined geographies of the kangaroo trade.

The bodies of nonhuman animals have long been drawn into trade as living flesh, raw material, iconic body part, and genetic assemblage. In the newly industrializing world, domesticated animals fuelled the development of international trade—Europe readily ate Argentinean beef or tender New Zealand lamb and clothed itself with antipodean wool. But even animals designated as "wild" have stretched the boundaries of many empires (Whatmore & Thorne, 1998). Today, wild animals are implicated in many kinds of trading networks, encompassing not-for-profit organizations and commercial enterprises alike.

Embryonic Interest

Social science interest in animals is relatively embryonic (Arluke & Sanders, 1996; Wolch & Emel, 1995), and analyses sensitive to the animals caught up in trading networks are thin. In the past, this topic has been studied in ways that frame animals as passive resources, cultural symbols, or taxonomic groupings. An invigorated study of wild animals in trading networks requires diversion from standard practice. Taking as its focus the largest trade of wild mammals in the world—the international kangaroo trade—this article offers some moves in that direction. It challenges the fiber of the kangaroo trading network, its historical legacy, and the spatial imaginaries that it espouses. The Actor Network Theory (ANT) is employed here as a lens through which frequently ignored aspects of the kangaroo trade can be seen.

ANT derives from studies of the social construction off science and technology elaborated during the 1980s by Callon (1986), Latour (1988), and Law (1986). ANT holds that society and nature are not neatly divisible into easily identifiable compartments. Rather, the theory gives analytical significance to different kinds of material forms (material heterogeneity), such as humans, machines, devices, buildings, and other living organisms -- thereby introducing symmetry as a key concept (Law, 1994). Thus an actor network comprises materially heterogeneous linkages where agency is multiply performed among various materials, although those who speak (humans) may make claims to "power" over those who or that do not (Callon and Law, 1995). Recently infusing into European human geography (Bingham, 1997; Murdoch, forthcoming; Thrift, 1996 and Whatmore and Thorne, 1997), ANT has offered a rich suit of "spatial metaphors," refusing "to impose a single conception of undifferentiated space upon variable landscapes of relations and connection" (Murdoch, forthcoming). These metaphors, moreover, bring into view all manner of material spaces, irreducibly "real" and "present."

My purpose here is to facilitate analytic recovery of the (dis)connections running through the human-nature "hybrid" of the kangaroo network, using ANT. Documenting this kangaroo network reveals the discrete connections between spaces of calculation and spaces of killing often overlooked and dismissed as unconnected in our lives. Since the European settlement of the "great south land" 200 years ago, kangaroos have been hunted and killed as part of the kangaroo drive. The contemporary international trade in kangaroo products is an historically specific, complex set of (attenuated) relationships between hidden spaces, sites, and actors. Spatial metaphors help legitimate the kangaroo industry; in particular, deployment of spatial imaginaries has tangible, material impact upon the animals' lives. The taxonomy of abundance fuels public acceptance of kangaroo slaughter, underpinned by widespread popular images of "virtual" kangaroo hordes bounding across a flat, virtual landscape. Ultimately, by casting kangaroos as large, abundant "pests" now repackaged to serve the lucrative cause celèbre of biodiversity, the kangaroo trading network profoundly delimits the options for agency of this commercially targeted species. Kangaroo slaughter is thus rendered justifiable -- a non-issue.


The Legacy of the Kangaroo Drive

The gradual exploration and mapping of the Australian continent by white European explorers is reflected in place-names and statues. Yet, the opening up of the country was a more dispersed affair: "True European exploration...was not done by a handful of men called 'explorers,' but by women, sealers, travellers, and drovers" (Ryan, 1996).

A siege mentality accompanied the exploratory push. This mindset kept the new country always at bay, protecting the white settlers from experiencing the land and water, the animals and the aboriginal peoples on their own terms—projecting, rather, a civilizing face onto all they encountered (Muecke, 1996).

Ignorant of the fragile soils, European settlers began practicing agriculture as at home, and by the 1830s, a major expansion of pastoralism had begun in earnest. So great was the livestock deployment that, by 1900, pastoral lands eclipsed only the harshest desert environments (Russell & Isbell, 1986). Many plant species perished, intolerant of browsing and grazing by the introduced herbivores (Caughley, Shepherd, & Short, 1987). Also, from early in the European colonization, indigenous fauna became the direct targets of hunters: "Out of the squalor of Melbourne the diggers marched...and, casually and indifferently, shot all the wildlife they met" (Lines, 1991, p. 91).

The largest wild animals, kangaroos and wallabies, were hunted for sport. Kangaroo drives ensued where horsemen with whips mustered the animals into corrals and slaughtered them en masse. The cruelty of these practices was, in some ways, an outworking of frustration with the difference of the place, and perhaps a soothing of imperialist angst. Throughout the 20th century, a transition has occurred from the colonial killing regimes to kangaroo programs institutionalized through state and federal departments:

[L]arger kangaroos were seen as a serious threat to the livelihoods of the rural community from as early as the 1850s. [The] laws at the time required farmers to kill kangaroos and many millions were destroyed. Fifty years ago, the large kangaroos were not protected. Governments did not think this was necessary. Kangaroos were valued for their skins. Governments began to realize that while rural production still had to be protected so too did the kangaroo. Commercial operations...had to be controlled [for] the survival of kangaroos...During the 1950s and 1960s [they] passed laws to control harvesting. Since then, a person must have a permit to kill kangaroos (Environment Australia, Biodiversity Group, 1996).

However, while all kangaroo species were eventually assigned legislative protection, only Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia, and Western Australia went the route of espousing a commercial industry. In Victoria, where the natural range of kangaroos intersects with agricultural areas, no industry operates. Neither, in the Northern Territory (NT), where kangaroos bound among the state's grazing cattle, are the trucks and containers of traders to be found. Although kangaroos in Victoria and the NT are not commercially slaughtered, the same density of animals part of another state renders them 'fair game' (Caughley, Shepherd, & Short, 1987, pp. 9, 10, 13).

The viability of the historically embedded kangaroo trading network depends upon continued access to bodies in quantities reminiscent of the kangaroo drives. It also requires that a civilizing face be put upon the commercial kill of Australia's national symbol, which is the responsibility of Australian High Commission staff worldwide. Further, there must be expert witnesses prepared to argue for slaughter, overlooking the anomalies of geographical comparison. These witnesses, their documents and devices, create spaces of calculation.


Spaces of Calculation

The kangaroo trade is a network that includes at least 32 government departments Australia-wide with oversight responsibilities for the five commercially-sought kangaroo species (Australian Wildlife Protection Council, 1997). To elaborate the killing of kangaroos, one must begin with the less obvious spaces animated in the trading network—those of specialist calculations and discourse, wildlife service departments state-wide, the Biodiversity Group of Environment Australia, science faculties of universities, and the offices of consultants)--where science and management are materially practiced among people, documents, and devices. A further-flung set of actors infuse these spaces, from those flying aerial transect surveys to participants of wildlife symposia world-wide.

Kangaroo Management Programs

Ultimately, the specialist spaces of calculation deliver Kangaroo Management Programs (KMP's), which each state must prepare on an annual basis. To examine the details of each KMP would take a long exposition. Briefly though, each KMP is informed by a standardized division of labor for matters wild, namely with regard to the prescience of scientific and management authority respectively. For example, at a federal level, Environment Australia's Biodiversity Group is segmented into the Wildlife Protection Section (the Australian CITES Management Authority) and the Wildlife Population Assessment Section (the Australian CITES Scientific Authority).

The scientific authority alleges that designated killing quotas are based on good scientific grounds and the management authority testifies that procedures are in place to ensure program compliance. Their task is to follow the two aims of kangaroo management set out by the Council of Nature Conservation Ministers (CONCOM) in the mid-1980s.

The first of those aims is "to maintain populations of kangaroos over their natural ranges" (CONCOM, 1985). Within a country so radically altered since European occupation (Lines, 1991; State of the Environment Advisory Council, 1996), the natural ranges of various populations are already impaired. For example, studies of the distribution and abundance of western grey kangaroos and euros in the western Australian wheatbelt have shown that kangaroo density has declined during the past 50 to 70 years with the fragmentation of the habitat and increased distances between remnants of native vegetation (Arnold & Weeldenburg, 1995). The kangaroos have not responded well to habitat degradation and the ensuing intensive agriculture. Yet, the 1997 kill quota for these species was 82,000 individuals.

The second aim of kangaroo management is "to contain the deleterious effects of kangaroos on other land management practices" (CONCOM, 1985). This second aim is rather incongruent with the first. The first aim is to maintain the kangaroos in their natural ranges, while the second aim is to mitigate damage to land-use practices by killing the kangaroos. Since these aims are open to each state's discretion, the scientists are relied upon to determine how many animals may be removed from a steady-state environment via the calculation of harvest models. However, into the spaces of calculation, there come telephone calls from interested parties, face-to-face visits from farmers, and academic documents with details about the pests. During the 1970s and 1980s, these calculations favored kill figures that paid little serious attention to kangaroos as living beings. They served to arbitrate the practices of an industry whose conduct is woven into pastoral occupation, whose markets are well-established, and whose advocates are of a diverse constituency.

While some nongovernmental organizations argued otherwise, the historical orthodoxy that depicted the large kangaroos as pests appeared both plausible and true well into the 1980s: Those who lived on the land were believed to hold an unbiased, authentic account of kangaroo behavior, and the farming community's position was bolstered through its traditional status as the backbone of the national economy; the pest status of kangaroos thus explained the existence of the kangaroo industry. By the mid 1980s, however, an analysis of literature shows a refocusing within the spaces of calculation. Queensland, which annually receives the largest chunk of the national commercial kangaroo kill quota, was already signalling its dispatch of the damage mitigation basis to its program:

It is important to recognize that while the kangaroo industry was originally a response to the past problem caused by these animals, it has come to exist in its own right as the user of a valuable renewable natural resource and thus it serves not only the needs of the farmers but also its own interests. (Queensland National Parks and Wildlife Service, 1984)

Dissenting voices in influential places began to appear as the decade wore on, notably from a Senate Select Committee struck to consider animal welfare:


[T]he major driving force behind kangaroo killing at present is the kangaroo meat and hide industry...the Committee has not received any data on crop damage [to] justify a kill of more than 26 million kangaroos and wallabies over the last 7 years. The industry is the obvious beneficiary of such high quotas. (Senate Select Committee on Animal Welfare, 1988)

This same awareness began to permeate the scientific community as it turned to observe the daily practices of the industry: "Wholesalers will buy kangaroos from shooters only if they can make a profit from selling the productions. The number killed therefore depends on availability of markets for meat and skins" (Caughley, Shepherd, & Short, 1987, p. 207).


The Impact of Field Research Data on KMPs

More recently, the spaces of calculation have been augmented by data derived from field research into the alleged competition between kangaroos and domestic livestock. The findings of these studies undermine previous calculations showing that kangaroos negatively impact sheep and cattle. Edwards, Croft, and Dawson (1996) concluded, on the basis of a large-scale study, that red kangaroos in the arid rangeland compete with sheep for food resources only under semi-drought conditions. And, despite the intermittent competition, wool production has not been significantly impaired. In South-Australia, the hill-dwelling euro kangaroos were found to principally eat grasses, which constituted 80% of their diet in severe droughts; sheep ate grass during the wetter seasons, but shrub in dry conditions. The reduced feed availability resulted in diversification of food preferences, not competition.

However, the strength of certain logics in the specialist spaces of calculation dies hard; Environment Australia's Biodiversity Group begins its justification for "harvesting" kangaroos with the following:

Certain species of kangaroo are so common in some areas that they cause major damage to farming and grazing properties. In large number, they can ruin crops and damage fences. They also compete with livestock for food and water. Landholders can lose income as a result, which effects the whole rural community. Commercial harvesting lessens this risk at no cost to the landholder." (Environment Australia, Biodiversity Group, 1996)

The generic farming wisdom that kangaroos unrepentant nibblers swarm, to blight the prospects of rural enterprise, is translated here into risk. Yet, the possibility of that risk being in some way quantifiable has been known for years. Risk, per se, was tied up in a category referred to as the non-commercial kill, permits for which require property inspection, the numbers of which were always a fraction of the commercial quota. In other words, the federal and state governments had a working mechanism for addressing perceived damage, one that entirely precluded the need for a commercial kangaroo industry. This illustrates how the kangaroo trading network has operated in a less-than-honorable way--protecting commercial killing spaces from full scrutiny and debate.


Networks and Biodiversity

However, with the demise of the damage claim, new justifications are operative in the spaces of calculation that feed into, and are supported by, various networks articulating biodiversity. A review of how scientific and management experts in South Australia and New South Wales have recrafted the non-commercial quota illustrates this. First, they admit that the quota reflects the anticipated extent of damage to be caused by kangaroos. Second, they reassign this former, noncommercial component to the kangaroo industry. With this repositioning comes a change of name. South Australia now recognizes the category as "land management" wherein "[t]he latter will be released only when there is an identified threat to land management goals," as opposed to a "sustainable-use" component. (Environment Australia, Biodiversity Group, 1997,). New South Wales now acknowledges the quota as "damage mitigation":

This part of the quota will be released only when the regional commercial quota has been used and then only based on consideration of property inspections, kangaroo population trends, and climatic trends." (Environment Australia, Biodiversity Group, 1997)

The impact of this recognition on individual kangaroo lives -— that damage may be authenticated, as opposed to being a risk -- is not to be passed over lightly. New South Wales overshot its annual quota for red kangaroos in 1996, by 24,370 animals (Environment Australia, Biodiversity Group, 1996b). It would have required approximately one-twelfth of its approved quota in 1997 (134,000 animals, not 1,128,800 animals) were the intent of kangaroo management, indeed, to alleviate anticipated damage, upon verification.

For some, the fact that the damage component is now available for commercial use may provide an incentive for pitching the figures high. South Australia's land management quota in 1997 is more than four times greater than its commercial quota in 1985 (505,000:135,000 animals). To this rough half million lives must be added a further 433,000 animals for sustainable use, leaving South Australia nearing the million-body league in 1997. Considerable faith resides in the spaces of calculation when the body count for the commercial industry is sanctioned to increase by nearly 600% in a 12-year period. An ANT approach holds this kind of faith up for analysis, insisting that spaces of calculation are the kangaroo trading network in practice.


Kangaroo Killing Spaces

Just as the spaces of calculation extend through networks to distant arenas of scientific foci and political foray, kangaroo killing spaces are by no means constrained to the outback. Through body parts, purchase-orders, or containers, killing spaces are opened in Milanese tanneries just as well. The dance of order-placement and order-readiness make it difficult to assign, with exactitude, the point at which a killing space is activated. Indeed, from an ANT perspective, the paperwork passing the desk of customs and excise, the stamp that authorizes the shipment, the individual who lifts the stamp—this assemblage, as much as the raw hides stored dockside, is the kangaroo trade network.

Further, the soccer player choosing a kangaroo leather boot for its ability to feel the ball, also helps to create a killing space. Purchases such as these are achieved through persuasive sales techniques, contributing to the industry's profitability ($200 million annually). Table 1 shows the total species kill figures for 1996. This table reveals that (a) ideal killing spaces are accessible and (b) ideal hunted animals are large. Note too the geographical diversity of the kangaroos' preferred habitats.


 

Table 1. Accessibility, body-weight, and the 1996 kill
 

The nightly practice of killing kangaroos follows a well-worn, routine formula—the only fanfare is the occasional truckload of illegal hunters: Four-wheel drive vehicles penetrate the darkness using light to freeze groups or individuals. A gunshot claps, echoing fear. Adult bodies fall to the dusty ground, often dead on impact. Young-at-foot, hurtling into the blackness, die alone. Pouched young stunned, but not killed outright, expire with time. The shooter, most likely a part-timer, hangs each carcass -- legs tied vertically, head swinging -- on the truck. The shooter proceeds to the next target.

What is happening in the moment of each death? Each is a performance whereby the agency of the kangaroo, in its right to be there, is being forcibly denied by the shooter. Refuting the legitimacy of kangaroos to dwell as individuals, within their bodies, in their places of residence creates a killing space, which profoundly violates a living space. Ironically, in its death throes, a kangaroo acquires partnership with the international kangaroo trading network. This is, however, is nonagency—the animal, at this point, is a corpse. But even this proscribed agency is barely visible in most discussions of kangaroo slaughter. Further, in the intimate moment when a shooter aims for the designated zone of the gendered animal, a zone stipulated by the Code of Practice, the bullet that issues from his gun makes the entire network durable—every actor in the network becomes wholly accountable for personal action -- the actor network becomes a seamless web.

A Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) report in 1985, estimated that shooters kill approximately 15% of kangaroos inhumanely. In other words, the bullet in each of these cases brought pain and suffering to its victim. It is a moot point that domesticated animals ought to be killed humanely in a hygienic killing space. Indigenous fauna, seeping blood and breeding bacteria, are allowed, however, to suffer prolonged deaths. At a recent conference with multi-constituency attendance, which was organized to discuss whether the Code of Practice is an appropriate mechanism for preventing cruelty, one participant organization noted: "It seems even at a conference convened to discuss cruelty to kangaroos, any discussion of cruelty was confined to those within the animal welfare movement" (Australian Wildlife Protection Council, 1996).

Thus, it appears that human actors of calculation and killing have little empathetic experience with the living, multi-sensual beings whose body spaces they invade in the technological form of bullets.


"Oh Give Me a Home, Where the Kangaroos Roam ..."

One aspect of Actor Network Theory is its focus upon agency. With respect to wildlife caught up in international trading networks, there is a particular complication that must be recognized from the outset. It is only with the application of a certain fraught status to a species--endangered or threatened with extinction -- that the trade of an animal's body parts becomes the subject of serious attention. At that point, a species may be technically removed from circulation via national and international regulations implemented through the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

By contrast, while the status and distribution of species declared "abundant" is often routinely monitored in wildlife inventories, these animals are effectively non-issues in the sense that trading systems created around them are assumed basically defensible. The taxonomic designation of abundance acts as a cloaking device for spaces of calculation and killing whereby animals are (allowed to be) translated from the wild into the commodity system. Sustained interest in the ways in which they are networked is thus misplaced, pending default of their classificatory life-chances.

Practically, this a serious problem with which some campaigning organizations grapple, since they are often cornered into arguing over the transitional boundary between whether a species is abundant or vulnerable. The battle is to prove that the species in question is vulnerable to population crash, and that management procedures are inadequate. However, the agency-through-death linkage is ultimately unsatisfactory because the legitimate candidates for shared concern become rare species—and the spaces of other trading networks involving abundant animals are made trivial by contrast.

If abundance is not only a taxonomic description of fecundity, but a normative adjective hiding the practices of a complex network, it is also a license to kill with wide public support. For this reason, consideration must be given to the spatial imaginary of abundance as it works in the popular imagination with respect to kangaroos.


Virtual Abundance

The vision of kangaroos extending over a vast compass collides with a landscape shadowed by the civilizing face, which specialists in spaces of calculation agree should be removed of itinerants. This potentially implosive moment is stabilized by holding kangaroos' bodies separate from a particular spatialization of the world as a flat, deterministic, almost barren surface. In other words, kangaroos are virtually abundant, and the land is to be virtually devoid of them.

A close look at the demise of western grey kangaroos, commonly called mallee kangaroos in the western Australian wheatbelt, illustrates this. For the popular spatial imaginary to hold to abundance — the land must be a flat, unchanging plane. Thus, western Australia has been granted, without widespread public resistance, a kill quota for western grays in 1997, which is almost twice as high as that permitted 6 years earlier, despite the habitat reduction. Ignored in this process are certain openly discussed facts:


Whether we look at wetlands or saltmarshes, mangroves or bushland, inland creeks or estuaries, the same story emerges. In many cases, the destruction of habitat, the major cause of biodiversity loss, is continuing at an alarming rate." (State of the Environment Advisory Council, 1996, p. 5)

Perhaps these changes are not deemed significant for the animals involved because the flat plane of the imaginary is a static entity. As Table 1 illustrates, that flat plane has mountains, forests, deserts, and scrub. Ecological niche is both specific and discrete, and kangaroos have home ranges from which they seldom venture. However, few are willing to highlight this difference for more or less obvious reasons.

The conviction that kangaroo bodies are impervious and always virtually abundant, leads to extraordinary oversights. In Queensland, for example, during the 1982-1983 drought, when 70% of the kangaroo population perished on the east coast within several months, the annual quota was not reduced, even though macropod reproduction ceases during drought. In the same state, an overshoot of the commercial kangaroo quota has occurred in 4 years since 1984, totalling 199,525 animals. Recent material on the 1997 commercial kill in Queensland, however, suggests that kangaroos may be less abundant than the idealized spatial imaginary presents:


I note from the minutes of the Queensland Macropod Management Advisory Committee of last 16 July that they are not killing very much of their quota. Indeed, by the end of June, from a quota of grey kangaroos of 925,000 they had shot only 130,400...14% of the quota; of the red kangaroo quota of 875,000 for the year, by the end of June they had only shot 188,970...21.6% of the quota; and of the wallaroo quota of 200,000, only 52,630 had been shot...some 26.3%. In those same management committee minutes, it also recommends that the minimum size of the skins be reduced from 5 square feet to 4 square feet. Evidently something is going wrong in Queensland, whereas, in New South Wales, quotas are already taken up fully in several areas. (Jones, 1997, pp. 810-816)

Abundant kangaroo and barren landscape are therefore purified imaginings (Latour, 1993), far removed from the lived reality of individual animals sharing emotional fellowship in their three-dimensional places of residence. The sightings of population monitoring or the statistics of harvesting ratio calculations confirm kangaroos as viscerally separated from their dwelling places. This would fit well with the discourse of disembodied beings contained in the United Nations' so-called Biodiversity Convention: “'Biological resources' includes genetic resources, organisms or parts thereof, populations, or any other biotic component of ecosystems with actual or potential use or value for humanity" (United Nations, 1992).


Spatial Imaginings' Impact on the Commercial Harvest

As virtual animals, kangaroos are readily acceptable, commercially viable bodies. Increasingly, with shedding of the pest rationale, the kangaroo industry takes center-stage as sole proprietor of these bodies, requiring no excuse on its behalf:


In recent years there have been changes in the way that kangaroos are viewed by the rural community. Increasingly, kangaroos are being seen as a valuable natural resource for their meat and skins -- rather than a possible rural problem." (Environment Australia, Biodiversity Group, 1996)

Irrevocably, public determination to marry two essentially conflicting spatial imaginaries abundant bodies and barren land, is co-implicated in the success of the international kangaroo trading network. Ironically, by this count, kangaroos will achieve agency only if, as a species aggregate, they undergo population crash through events such as slaughter, reproductive failure, or environmental impacts such as droughts, floods, and diseases. At that point, they will be accorded the divine rule of Death and Disappearance (Muecke, 1996) and claim some attention. That is, the remaining few bodies will be deemed worthy of the right to be there.

However, as their populations have not crashed across what is called the commercial harvesting zone, the kangaroos have failed that particular trial of agency. As long as they fail to perform in this sense, kangaroos will remain a nonissue in the international arena. The spatial imaginary of abundance must be reconciled with animals' rights to dwell in space so that an animal's abundance is not a death warrant. Such reconciliation might bring about the closure of the commercial kangaroo industry.


Conclusion

Kangaroo slaughter has been contested on ecological and ethical grounds for decades, although by the early 1990s the concentrated, internationally-geared opposition faltered when Greenpeace abandoned its kangaroo campaign, which was apparently thwarted by the spatial imaginary of abundance. The Australian government, some scientists, and most farmers achieved a discursive coup at that stage -- the kangaroo issue was assuredly a nonissue to the international community. Perhaps it is more than coincidence that, in 1992, the highest-ever annual quota was approved, at more than 5 million adult animals. Nonetheless, several national Australian organizations, some with international affiliation, continue to assert how the curious, the ironic, and the simply sad are woven into the target kangaroos, who are, simultaneously, protected indigenous wildlife, emblem of the nation, "pest" species, export product, and gourmet food.

The kangaroo network is historically embedded within a colonial siege mentality, materially practiced as the kangaroo drive. The agency of kangaroos as living beings is co-opted in the intimate moment of each death, rendering them partners of non-agency within the kangaroo trading network. An examination of the actors, spaces, and relationships making that network through the ANT lens illuminates the hidden spaces involved—in particular, the role of spaces of calculation, which otherwise appear disconnected from those of killing. Further, it is possible to see how the taxonomy of abundance and distinctive spatial imaginaries, provide the popular illusion of ethical detachment from the practices of this network. Through this kind of analysis of wild animals in international trade, it is possible to acknowledge how, why, and by which means their agency is revoked and reinstated.


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Wolch, J. & Emel, J. (1995). Guest editorial. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 13, 632-636.


Notes

1. Correspondence should be sent to Lorraine Thorne, Department of Geography, University of Bristol, University Road, Bristol, BS8 1SS, UK. I would like to thank Chris Philo, Jennifer Wolch, Sarah Whatmore, Nicola Brimblecombe, and Ken Shapiro for their constructive and insightful suggestions.

2. The discipline of economics is the prime explorer of trade-related issues, dealing with ethical considerations as the option of "welfare," with organic nonhumans designated as stocks or resources. While anthropology has examined trading systems and the role of nonhumans within them, the latter are principally tokens of cultural specificity. In the biological sciences, animals are primarily characterized by their bodily form and function, and their quantitative presence or absence at a given site.

3. The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) mounted a campaign which was reportedly successful in September of 1977 to persuade the U.K. grocery multiple, Tesco, to remove kangaroo meat from its shelves.
 

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