Holding Discomfort: Reducing Polarisation Around Killing for Conservation

• Published in: Australian humanities review no. 73; pp. 42 - 70
• Main Authors: Palmer, Alexandra, Willing, Lauren, McLaughlan, Laura
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bundoora Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) 01.02.2025
• Subjects: Animals; Feminism; Nonnative species; Philosophers; Australia
• ISSN: 1325-8338; 1325-8338
• DOI: 10.56449/14685502

While critical animal studies scholars tend to oppose killing for conservation, animal geographers and those in related fields often take an interest in how conservation logics justify killing some animals to save others, without necessarily judging such logics as wrong (though this is sometimes implied) (Biermann and Anderson; Crowley et al., 'Killing Squirrels'; Hodgetts; Lorimer and Driessen; Srinivasan). [...]Haraway argues that one might have good reasons to kill animals, but those doing or supporting the killing must not take refuge in what she refers to as the 'solace of Sacrifice': that is, she argues it is not sufficient to rely on the idiom of sacrifice, of animals dying for a greater good, to make killing easy and obviously right-'no balance sheet of benefit and cost will suffice'. [...]Haraway does not argue against ever killing animals, but rather wants the complexity and difficulty of this task to be acknowledged and explored, rather than the abstract notion of sacrifice for the greater good serving as a sufficient, ready-made rationale. In Plumwood's early work, she troubles moral dilemmas and polarised views between human virtue and animality/nature by offering 'the reconstruction of relationship and identity in terms of a non-hierarchical concept of difference' (Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature).