This article explores protection efforts that have arisen in the New York City metropolitan area around the monk parakeet, a nonnative bird that has achieved a broad distribution outside its native habitat range. In some urban regions in which populations are established, controversy has developed around the parakeets’ use of utility infrastructure and potential impacts on native species and agricultural crops. This case provides an opportunity to explore animal protection rhetoric about nonnative species, an understudied topic, considering the great extent (...) to which species have become established in ecosystems outside their natural ranges and the persistence of public affinity for nonnative plants and wildlife. This article identifies four major frames through which advocates have delivered the birds to public and legal audiences and considers how they have mobilized and handled notions of “nonnative-ness” in their advocacy work. (shrink)

Conservation policy in New Zealand is centred around an objective to totally eradicate three invasive species; the ship rat, the brushtail possum and the stoat, by 2050. The preferred control method to achieve this is large scale poisoning operations with 1080 and similar toxins. This project is backed up by governmental and non-governmental agencies and surrounded with discourse of ‘war’ and ‘invasion’. The ‘Big Three’ predators are endowed with sinister motives as a means of mobilising support. This self-described ‘war’ is (...) evaluated in terms of ‘just war’ theory and found wanting. In particular there are issues with the recruitment of children for killing, humiliation of combatants, questionable economic motives for the ‘war’, deception by government agencies, lack of consultation, a lack of consideration of alternatives, the use of excessive suffering, and unrealistic expectations. An alternative paradigm of ‘compassionate conservation’ is proposed for New Zealand. Instead of trying to get back to a stable pre-colonial state of nature, I propose a holistic approach that respects both ecosystems and their members and takes into account new understandings of ecosystems as dynamic processes. (shrink)

Human attitudes to various nonhuman animals have varied considerably\nacross cultures and throughout time. While some of our responses are\nundoubtedly instinctive and universal-a visceral fear of large\ncarnivores or the feeling of spontaneous warmth for creatures exhibiting\nhigh degrees of neoteny-it is clear that our attitude toward specific\nspecies is largely shaped by our innate anthropomorphism: that is, when\nwe think about animals, we are also thinking about ourselves. There are\nfew better examples of this than the shifting attitudes toward whales\nand dolphins throughout the 20th century, (...) particularly among citizens of\nWestern democracies. This article narrates the cultural history of this\ndevelopment and demonstrates how the current enchantment with whales and\ndolphins is primarily the result of two broad-and related-cultural\ndevelopments: the modern entertainment complex, particularly cinema,\ntelevision, and aquatic theme parks; and the 1960s counterculture, with\nits potent blend of holistic ecology, speculative neuroscience, and\nmysticism. The result was the creation of what we might think of as the\n``metaphysical whale,{''} a creature who has inspired the abolitionist\nstance toward whaling. (shrink)

This paper makes a contribution to nonhuman animal studies by discussing the tensions in practices, discourses, and narratives of hunting in a settler postcolonial society. It aims to present a discussion of how the imperialist construct of the “exotic” is applied to nonhuman animals. The focus of the paper is on the different roles the exotic animal status plays in the hunting experience in New Zealand, and how other agencies also play a part in the construction of the hunting discourses (...) and personal narratives in relation to the exotic animal. The paper concludes that the exotic concept is closely linked to a celebration of New Zealand’s distinctiveness from their colonizer. Always a process of “Othering,” the exotic status not only impinges on the relationship established with the nonhuman animal prey, but also leads to an inconsistent discourse that implies a speciesist position, one which is nonetheless consistent with a dominionist performance. (shrink)

One of most pertinent and acute risks that the world is now facing is emerging or re-emerging zoonotic diseases. This article focuses on culling as a measure for zoonotic disease control, specifically the culling of 11,000 badgers as part of the Randomized Badger Culling Trial in the UK and the culling exercises in Singapore. The independent expert panel that devised the UK study concluded that reactive culling was ineffective in reducing the cases of bovine tuberculosis in cattle. The panel also (...) concluded that proactive culling was not cost-effective. Behind the scarcity of empirical evidence to support culling, the resultant reduction in biodiversity can actually harm both animals and humans. Public health policies should be evidence-based, culturally adaptable and ethically justified; a novel biomedical and public health approach, named One Health, plausibly provides a reasonable ethical framework as well as research and interventional methods that square with that framework. OH recognizes that nonhuman animals and humans are interlinked in both sickness and health, since we all share the same ecosystem. OH could potentially replace standard public health strategies, as it provides alternative evidence-based methods for biomedical research and adds a non-anthropocentric component to an ethical decision-making process. (shrink)