Social licence to cull: Examining scepticism toward lethal wildlife removal in cities

Abstract

1. The public may sometimes resist orders to cull wildlife, even when these pose a biosecurity threat. Managers and researchers desire to know why this is so.2. Research overwhelmingly focuses on the role of the species in conditioning resistance but our approach also shows the circumstances, settings, people responsible and methods used that undermine the legitimacy of the cull.3. We bring these together and use a social licence to operate (SLO) framework to demonstrate how support for wildlife culling in the context of biosecurity may be revoked. In the absence of SLO, resistance to wildlife culling can range from personal unease at seeing a cherished species or a neighbourhood fox being culled, to openly confronting the municipal hunter. 4. By interviewing (n = 32) and following (n = 4) municipal hunter in Swedish cities who cull wildlife individuals or populations deemed to pose a threat to public health, safety or other societal interests, we uncover parameters by which culling wildlife are deemed to be problematic: who performs the culling, when the culling is done, how it is done and where it is done. This leads us to the concept of necroaesthetics: taboo ways of taking animal lives. In a unique perspective, we apprehend two forms of resistance: one that hunters attribute to the public and that of hunters' own unease at performing certain culling interventions. While the public and municipal hunters disagree, they also have similar criteria for opposing culls.5. We conclude by considering the future of the SLO of culling wildlife for biosecurity, including the subjective nature of its Revocation. This goes toward identifying parameters that make culls likely to produce controversy, hence granting some predictive value for managers in their planning.

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

“…The choice of strategy for taking care of a problem animal or population depends in part of the charisma of the animal, and on broader ideas of its cullability (which we have unpacked in von Essen and Redmalm, 2023b). Animal culling is not merely a question of removing biomatter out of place (compare Douglas, 1984) but a biopolitical strategy used to separate lives that are viewed as valuable from those that are framed as disposable.…”

“…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).…”

“…Some suggest that we have higher hygiene standards and increasingly reduced tolerance for mess (Blechman and Malamud, 2013). Indeed, recent agendas on biosecurity and One Health, emphasising the interdependence of human and non-human animal health, provides added impetus to 'clean' and 'control' interfaces where the public and wild animals intersect (von Essen and Redmalm, 2023b).…”

“…There is also emerging scholarship that show how animals have an agency to partly negotiate and contest their fates, by evading, sabotaging, resisting or otherwise contesting the order or culling (Barua and Sinha, 2022;Jarzebowska, 2018). Above all it seems that increasingly the public does not want animals culled, much less to see this taking place, but neither do they want to face the consequences of having them around (von Essen and Redmalm, 2023b). If a cull order is given, therefore, those in charge of meting it out must consider carefully the animal and situation.…”

“…Such self-critical reflections bring into sharp relief the long-standing identity of hunters as hands-on managers of nature and wildlife, eager to intervene: 'The natural world in the eyes of the hunter is not seen to be striving toward any equilibrium, but is characterized by stormy seas and dependent on human beings for stewardship and management' (Bogliogli, 2009: 39). In recent decades, this role has been criticised also by the public, who question the necessity of hunters' intervention in nature in the first place (von Essen and Redmalm, 2023b).…”