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When so many facets of nonhuman life are commodified daily with little challenge, this paper looks to shed light on what is objectionable about commodifying nonhuman life. As a contribution in this direction, we undertake a comparative examination of the formation of two different but equally lively, and international, commodities: exotic pets and ecosystem carbon. In this paper we first set out to understand what characteristics of life matter in the production of the commodity. We argue that a particular mode of value-generating life predominates in each commodity circuit: in exotic pet trade, an individualized, 'encounterable' life; in ecosystem services, an aggregate, reproductive life. Second, we find that hierarchies between humans and other beings are highly generative in the formation and effects of lively commodities. On one hand, these hierarchies cast nonhumans in a disposable state that is integral to the functioning of exotic pet trade; on the other hand, these hierarchies are partly what ecosystem services are designed to address. Nevertheless, we find that reproduction of uneven species geographies is at work in both economies. The degree and nature of effect on the material conditions of nonhuman lives is, however, distinct, and our conclusion calls for greater attention to these differences.

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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'

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