Hello and welcome to the Sydney health ethics research podcast. I am your host Diego Silva. Before introducing our guests, I want to acknowledge that we're recording on the unceded country, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. This is and will continue to be Aboriginal land I want to pay my respects to those who have continued to care country.
I'm really excited to be joined today by Sophie Chao to discuss her paper, bouncing back question mark kangaroo human resistance in contemporary Australia. And I think this is a really apt paper to be discussing on a rainy day here in Sydney, where we've had, since I've arrived in July 2019 bushfires followed by three years of what seems like constant rain and floods. So I think that these discussions around animal resistance and in the environment is absolutely critical. So Sophie, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you, Diego for being in conversation.
So we just want to start
off with, from your perspective, how would you summarize your paper?
Sure. So the paper in broad strokes examined the conflictual position of kangaroos in Australian cultural, ecological and social imaginaries. And it does so by unpacking the multiple different meanings of this organism, both as a native wildlife as a cultural emblem as a political symbol, and also as a targeted pest and as a source of meat. And it explores these different symbolisms through the lens of resistance and specifically animal resistance, to try to have, you know, to adopt a different perspectives on the story of animal victimisation, and animal killing, and instead perhaps invite us to consider the ways in which animals resist human control, and resist human commodification and so forth. So the paper explores this question of animal resistance through a number of lens. First, it looks at the ways in which kangaroos historically resisted epistemic capture under colonial scientific taxonomies of non human life. This was an organism that confused early naturalists because it seemed to be part mammal, part rodant, part ungulate. Its fifth tail was sometimes interpreted as a fifth leg. And of course, its mode of reproduction. And the famous pouch was a source of consternation and concern for many seasons, scientists at the time. So there's a kind of resistance here on the part of the species to fit within any established taxonomy of life. The essay then looks at the ways in which animals resist human control through the fact that they are they do not lend themselves to domestication or to large scale farming, in part because of the way that they move through hopping, in part because, in fact, they suffered from a condition known as capture myopathy, wherein, where they are kept in enclosed spaces, and they suffer from intense stress, which then causes an increase in lactic acid, which then changes the texture and flavor of it's very meat, making it unpalatable. And so there was a kind of vitalist resistance to the process of domestication that has been so much at the core of settler colonial endeavors in Australia. And then the essay looks at the ways in which animals resist consumption also through the fact that their meat is not particularly palatable to a lot of settler Australian communities. In part, that's because it's often described as chewy, too dark and sticky, in part is because it comes from a species that is wild and not untamed, which in turn, comes with all kinds of associations with, you know, links to wildness, and questions of hygiene, and sanitation. And so it's throughout all of these different angles, you see resistance, manifesting all kinds of different ways. And the essay is really trying to unpack that in order to bring the readers to ask themselves, what kinds of Justice are possible for kangaroo species in contemporary Australia? How do we think about animals and killability in the context of climate change? And precisely the kinds of extreme weather events that you've described? And how do we work our way through animal lives and deaths in context of culling, of conservation, and of commodification and all the sorts of complex environmental and ethical and economic dimensions that come with those kinds of questions.
It was a fascinating paper to read, in part, because it's, again, your discipline is an anthropology.
Yeah, that's right.
And it's always fun to read papers from subject areas that you're sort of not familiar with. One of the things I found really impressive was your ability to sort of tie these different ideas around resistance together. You talk about this a little bit in the paper, this idea of colonialism in kangaroo. And when I was reading about why people don't eat kangaroo, the idea of it being a dark meat was just kind of stood out. How do we how should we think about how do you think about kangaroo in the context of colonialisation? And also then, sort of efforts to decolonialise Australia?
No, absolutely. History is a settler colonial incursion and attendant landscape transformations are a huge part of the story of kangaroos. And I should clarify that when I say kangaroos here I'm referring to three of the over 175 different micropod species in Australia and I'm referring to the big red, the Eastern grey and the Western grey, which are the three most abundant and kangaroo species and also the ones that are targeted for culling as a result of their over abundance. You know, there's a huge body of scholarship and archival materials and the significance of kangaroos within Aboriginal Australian and epistemologies and ontologies, wherein they were cherished and valued as intimate and ancestral kin, as spiritual beings. And as as well as a sources of food. Aboriginal environmental management practices were absolutely key to sustaining kangaroo populations and in sustainable numbers. And kangaroos also are widely represented with an Aboriginal art. And since time immemorial. What happens after the arrival of settlers, is, first of all, the transformation of kangaroos into sort of objects of recreational hunting. And then the pathologisation of kangaroos as pests are vermin, two deeply colonially entrenched categories, and in the sense that these organisms were seen to pose a threat to agricultural practices, in light of competition over grasses and water. Between the ruminants who had been introduced by colonial regimes and the native kangaroo populations. Kangaroos tend to thrive in open pasture lands, rather than in forests. So there's a direct sort of point of contact, and some would say, competition between livestock and these wild species. And we there are all kinds of, you know, the story is, is colored by racial undertones, and some of which you have a, you know, gesture towards in terms of the characterisation of this meat. And sometimes that plays in different kinds of ways, right, the idea of kangaroo meat as bushtucker, sort of as sort of a, you know, romanticisation of this foodstuff is associated with wild places, and by extension, with wild peoples, you know, a kind of food that you eat when you are in the bush, on an adventure rather than at home. But there's also been a really interesting move more recently towards what's called kangaterianism among settler Australians primarily in urban areas, and which refers to people who consume only kangaroo meat as a source of red meat. And that's linked to some of the ethical drive that people see in eating wild meats rather than industrially produced sources of red meat. How all of this sits within broader attempts or endeavors to decolonise Australia is a very, very thorny question. And I think the recent, there was recently a parliamentary inquiry to the well being of kangaroos and conducted in New South Wales. And within that inquiry, there are a number of very powerful statements by Indigenous custodians and representatives who exhort us to consider the colonial roots of contemporary kangaroo controversies, particularly around kangaroo culling, and to situate those controversies against much longer histories of incursion and violence that the voices of Indigenous peoples are absolutely paramount. If we are to forge just multi species futures that take into account the philosophies, practices and protocols of peoples who have long sustained intimate relations with these organisms.
You mentioned just there at the end of your answer, something that you brought up towards the end of your paper, which is you spoke about multispecies justice. How are you using that term? And what does that mean in the context of thinking about kangaroos in Australia?
So multi-species justice is indeed a core concept that I'm thinking with at the moment. It's one that I've been researching in a very interdisciplinary and collaborative mode with colleagues in the Sydney Environment Institute. We published a book recently called the promise of multi-species justice. And the idea really is to try to think about the subject of justice beyond the individual, neoliberal, human, and instead to make space for non human beings, like animals, like plants, maybe even elements, spirits, ancestors, the deceased, also as rightful subjects of justice, and bearers of dignity and rights before the law. And so you can probably send some echoes here with contemporary movements towards the rights of nature or ecological rights and the recognition of rivers, for instance, as subjects of justice. It's an invitation to move away from assumptions of human exceptionalism, that we are the only or main kind of life that matters and to instead re situate ourselves within a much broader spectrum of life forms, who are all who all counted the world and who all have worlds that count. And how does this idea of multispecies justice play out in this article? I think it plays out most importantly, in the context of the deep seated tension that exists between the culling of kangaroos on the one hand, and the conservation of native wildlife on the other. It's an interesting case To think with kangaroos because most species that are culled, are in fact introduced or invasive species that are not native to the continent. A kanga is different, it is native to Australia and yet it is purportedly over abundant and purportedly having damaging impact as a result on the economic livelihoods of farmers and agriculturalists. So the key question for me here is, how do we think about kangaroo and the subject of justice, not just as individual organisms, in light of sort of animal welfare concerns, but also species as community to have their own modes of social relations, own kinds of kinships own kinds of social organisation? And rather we then reconcile the economic prerogatives faced by remote agriculturalists communities in Australia with the wellbeing and continuance of the species as well. I don't think there are simple answers to these questions, I think there are answers that we have to forge in conversation with all the different stakeholders who are involved. Biologists, ecologists, agriculturalists. corporations, government, of course, Indigenous communities, and it's that sort of dialogue across difference and across dissimilar interests in common that perhaps you can try to forge a different way of thinking about justice, and in doing so decolonise justice itself from its human centric sort of lens.
You mentioned the word interest there. I'm going to ask you a question that I don't think has an easy answer. So it's an unfair question to ask you, but I'm gonna ask it anyways, which is, how do we think across interests? So in bioethics, this is something that we that we do probably in a clumsy way, and imprecisely, but one of the things that I find fascinating about the idea of multispecies justice, is how do we, how do our human minds get around the very idea of an interest that is non human? And then how do we even balance that? I'm wondering what your perspective is, again, knowing that this is a bit of an unfair question.
That's fine. I mean, I think, you know, all of this work that I'm doing is set against the backdrop of the Anthropocene and climate change and I don't think there are any easy answers to any of these questions, but we need to stay with the trouble of trying to work our way through their stickiness. So yes, I mean, it's such an important question that you're asking this relationship between, you know, interests, and then perhaps by extension questions of non human agency, and intentionality, all of which are being grappled with in different ways by folks in the disciplines that I'm primarily in conversation with that environment, anthropology, and the Environmental Humanities and multispecies studies. You know, what can be gleaned from that scholarship, and also from the work I'm doing in the space of kangaroo human relations, is the fact that you know that there probably is no way in which as humans, equipped with our own particular cognitive and bodily affordances, we can really ever come to know what exactly intentionality or interest looks like, or feels like or tastes like or smells like for that matter for another than human being. And perhaps there is an exercise in humility there also to be practiced in recognising the limits of our capacity to know others and other others. And perhaps that in itself is a way of pushing against human exceptionalism and the particular ideas that we might have about cognition or sentience or intelligence. So if if intentionality and agency are not necessarily things that we can apprehend or grasp, but humans and the question for me, arises as to does one need to establish a sense of intention, or interest or agency in order to find ways of treating the nonhuman other justly or in recognition of the fact that they have worlds that count and that they count in the world, right. So perhaps here, I'm trying to think with the effects or the consequences of taking as a starting point, the assumption that there may be agency rather than taking that as a starting point, the promise of that possibility, and from there trying to think about what you know who benefits from interspecies relations, and who was harmed in the course of interspecies encounters? How does that then make us rethink our own positionality and dependence on the nonhuman other. And in the absence of, you know, a form of sentience or cognition or communication with humans that is accessible to us, how do we nonetheless, make space for agency in an age that is so much characterised by the dominance of human action and, you know, influence on the nonhuman world and the Anthropocene is the age of anthropoths, when humans have become the most influent geological force on the planet? What would it mean? How might we subvert that narrative by trying to look for forms of resistance, even in the absence of that sort of agency that we might recognise through our own human bodily and cognitive habitus?
One of the words that you kind of touched on there a few times and came up. It's I think, a central idea in your paper is this idea of intention, and intentionality. And it's a concept that comes up in moral philosophy in action theory, and in terms of how we think through responsibility. From the perspective of an anthropologist, how do you understand the idea of intention and intentionality? And again, how are you using it in this paper with with regards to resistance and animal resistance? In this case of the kangaroo?
I think we try and answer that question in conversation, perhaps less with scholarship and anthropology than in multispecies studies and independent humanities, simply because they have been very, very good to think with, in sort of working my way through these questions. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, thinking was sort of at least the animal kingdom, you could probably establish that any organism has a desire to live and would probably rather not die. Right. That's I know, that's probably a it's a very sweeping generalisation, but I think it is a good starting point, given how little attention really in dominant western systems is given to the interests or intentionality of the nonhuman in a very first instance, right? And it's that neglect of, of the very possibility of an intention to live and a desire not to not live. And that allows for industrial food production systems, and you know, slaughterhouses and factory farming and so forth. I think, you know, when we were thinking with the figure of the kangaroo, there is an intentionality that ethologists and behavioral scientists document among mobs of kangaroos to be social, to relate to others in the community, to nurture children to find words of subsistence that will sustain the community. Kangaroos, like most other organisms, and species don't exist in a vacuum. And they exist by virtue of their relationships to others, both within their kind and also grasses, fire and soils. And there's a whole complex ecology of beings who might not have an easily identifiable intentionality, but who are all acting and behaving in ways that sustain the sorts of nets and cycles and circuits of life and livability. I think the question of intentionality is also important to think about in the context of culling, right kangaroos are regularly subjected to culling across states in the country. The intention of culling is to control these populations in a way that can enhance and environmental sustainability and economic interests. So killing is very much, you know, systematised right culling as a systemic obliteration of life, perhaps in that context, then you can say that the very fact of kangaroo being and living is in itself a kind of intention not to die, right. And there is a resistance to, you know, human modes of control, controlling and containing populations. And perhaps in an age that is very much characterised through the sort of ongoing slaughter of non human life, perhaps being is a form of resistance, perhaps being suggested intention not to disappear, and perhaps in that intention to continue living lies, that kind of vitalist sort of resistance were being in the very first instance is already a kind of achievement.
I'm wondering, one of the things that always stands out when I'm having these conversations with these fascinating individuals like yourself, is where did this paper come from? What was the motivation? How did you get to this topic and writing this paper?
A lot of my scholarship in the last decade or so has really been centered on questions of human environment relations. And that's something I've explored primarily in Indonesia, where I've been conducting long term ethnographic fieldwork. And it's something that I'm now transposing in the course of a DECRA project to explore perceptions, practices and knowledges surrounding the human kangaroo entanglement. Where did this particular paper come from?
I might as I must admit, that resistance really wasn't a conceptual lens that I had originally conceived of in thinking through this DECRA project on kangaroo human relations. It was one that was brought to my attention, as with so many other fruitful topics, in conversation with colleagues in critical animal studies, who were at the time in the course of brainstorming what it might mean to take seriously the possibility of resistance in other than human life forms. So that's really getting me thinking about another narrative, another way of telling the story of kangaroo human relations, and one that was perhaps less about human action activity than about animals own ways of being and becoming and surviving, I suppose. So I guess the article sits within a broader research project concerned with questions of violence, questions of care and questions of justice in relationships between settler Australians and native wildlife. And it's also you know, part of a broader interest in what it means to live well with non human others in this ecocidal age, how we consider our own positionality as humans and in these relations of interdependence with our non human companion species to borrow Donna Haraway's term, and what that might look like in terms of forging more just multispecies futures in an age where extreme events are having devastating tolls, not just on on human beings, but also on humans, as we've recently seen with the black summer,
You mentioned this in the paper and kind of touch on this in the last answers just this idea of a good life, what constitutes a good life? One of the things I find really interesting is this idea of narratives. You mentioned children's stories that bring in kangaroos, and the way they're personified or not. And one of the things I find really interesting is the fact that you're providing a different narrative. And it seems to me such a vital part of thinking through the epistemology of the type, the epistemology of ethics, I guess, this idea that the very stories that we tell, shape, what we think ought to be the case. So if we come back to that ort, or if we come back to the concept of what is a good life, so much hinges on how the story is told?
Absolutely, yes, what is the good life and in whose perspective. It was really fascinating for me to delve into these children's stories, I'm not Australian, myself, I've been living here for six years now. And you know, so much of research is a sort of apprenticeship from the bottom up. And that was certainly the case as well for me. And you know, so much of this children's literature, it's fascinating, really, because, you know, the figures give you the kangaroo, for instance, Dot, these are figures that will have accompanied many Australian children from their very, very early years. And, you know, in these representations, the Kangaroo is a sort of cute cuddly charismatic figure, and which it continues to be for many Australians. But of course, it's also a targeted past. It's, you know, vermin. And I did some analysis of social media and news, discourses surrounding a kangaroo, you know, busts and booms. And there's some serious pathologising going on, you know, describing these these species as that, you know, sort of enemies, and you know scourges, you know, plagues at times. So, all kinds of really contradictory discourses are kind of held in tension around this sort of iconic Australian species. The question of the good life? Yes, I mean, some of the scholarship that I've been some of the interviews I've been conducting, rather, with stakeholders, including government, corporate, you know, general public animal welfare organisations, point to the fact that the wildness of this organism, which unlike factory farmed animals, isn't contained and captive may be part of what it means to be a good life. Right. And that's often what motivates kangatians to choose to use kangaroo meat, that idea that at least it will have had a free life before it was hunted, or the politically correct term. I believe it's harvested. Then, of course, yes, the whole conversation we could have about language. Yeah, culling or killing, for instance, right. It's another one. But then, of course, the question of the good life for me always made me wonder whether if there is a possibility of a good life for anything other than a human being, then is there such thing as a good death? Is there any ever Is there ever any circumstance where killing or kill ability is rendered justifiable, and who gets to decide that kangaroos of course, have long been a source of meat and important source of protein for Indigenous communities, and all kinds of rituals and protocols and gestures of respect, were at the heart of the practice of taking an animal life, be it kangaroo or other. Those are not the sorts of rituals of respect and protocols of reverence that are necessarily part of contemporary hunting slash harvesting procedures. And in fact, a lot of animal welfare reports suggest that, in fact, animal abuse in the kangaroo harvesting sector is rife. But that question of whether there can be a good death, I think is just as important to ask oneself as whether you know what counts as a good life? And that question of who gets to decide, right? Which humans get to speak on behalf or for kangaroos, in the absence of our ability to hear their own voices in their own right, and in their own terms? And then, of course, the question of when we think about death and life, and what sort of scale are we talking about? Animal Welfare activists would argue that the scale of a single life is what matters right? When it comes to harm and violence. Conservation scientists would argue that the species is perhaps a scale where the question of a good life and a good death matters more. We're thinking here through notions of ecological balance and equilibrium, which might justify the taking of some lives, if it is in the interest of sustaining a broader ecosystemic whole. Here, I think it's really important to think about when we're talking about organisms, as individuals as collectives, as communities as species as ecosystems, and then role broadly as you know, forms of life that are planetary also, and animals more broadly writ.
What's next for you? I mean, fascinating paper fascinating research. What are you working on? Where where's this paper taking you?
Thanks, I think a lot of the questions that you've been asking me to Diego are gonna be the next step for me, I'm gonna go away and think about them. So thank you for giving me much more food for thought I'm trying to. So of course, I'm working through this DECRA project at the moment. And it's really fascinating to now be entering the fieldwork stage, which means I'm going to be doing long term participant observation in four to five different field sites across New South Wales, to really get stuck into the complexities of, you know what it means to live with kangaroos. And I'm doing that in conversation with a range of different stakeholders who are in one way or another invested in kangaroo Life and Death ways. Agriculturalists animal welfare activists, animal scientists, kangaroo harvesting companies and so forth. And so that's really going to bring some rich ethnographic depth to some of what this paper was trying to begin to explore. And then I suppose conceptually, this essay ties into a broader research trajectory or agenda that's looking into questions of metabolic justice and metabolic injustice. As we were talking earlier, about multispecies justice, there's a direct direct connective tissue there and continuity. But metabolism is an angle that I'm been wanting to explore, because it's, I think, going to open some really interesting avenues for thinking about the relationship between food and eating and kangaroos as food and livestock as food in Australia. And then also the more metaphorical meanings of metabolism as processes of ingestion and transformation. And you know, transmutation to think with metabolism is to think about food and nutrition across differently positioned and differently privileged to guts, is going to bring you to the picture questions of race alongside ecology and species, and perhaps then in turn foster a kind of indigestion which I think is very well needed and very well warranted, if we're going to try to think our way through some of the sort of problematic ethics undergirding contemporary industrial food production systems in Australia and beyond.
That's fascinating. I, I've never heard of that before. So I'm really looking forward to research and looking forward to having you back on the podcast, when you've written those papers and having those conversations about metabolic justice.
That is correct
Metabolic justice. Fantastic. I want to thank Sophie and I want to thank you for listening to this podcast. This episode of The She research podcast, you can find the paper we discussed linked to the episode notes along with a transcript. She pod is produced by She network and edited by Regina Botros. You can find our other episodes on Spotify, radio, public anchor, or wherever you get your podcasts of quality. Thanks again for listening. Bye bye
