Animal appetites: The metabolic relations of pest control in Aotearoa New Zealand
Courtney explores how practices of food, feeding and eating widen and complicate the attachments between pests, people, and the places they share.
Dr Courtney Addison – Snr Lecturer in School of Science in Society - Te Herenga Waka | Victoria University of Wellington
The ngāhere (forests) of Aotearoa are busy with life, and most of it is eating something. A national eradication effort now aims to eliminate three varieties of introduced pests, whose status as problem is secured in terms of their gustatory excesses. Indeed, the question of who eats who and with what consequence is at the heart of conservation here; more than simply ‘matter out of place’, the pest as eater emerges as a key protagonist in Aotearoa’s multispecies politics. These gustatory logics now inform pest control research and practice, which relies largely on toxins that target species need to eat, or traps that they need to interact with, usually attracted by an edible lure. Accordingly, ‘pest tech’ harnesses animal appetites through timing (e.g. to coincide with food scarcity) and attention to animal preferences (e.g. for differently scented lures). Attending to one particular poison, 1080, this talk explores how practices of food, feeding and eating widen and complicate the attachments between pests, people, and the places they share.
Courtney Addison is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Science in Society. An anthropologist and Science & Technology Studies scholar, her work explores the politics of poisons use in conservation, and the human-animal relations engendered through pest control. Courtney is an editor of Science, Technology, & Human Values, and co-organiser of the upcoming AusSTS conference.
This seminar will be held ‘in person’.