Abstract
Urban areas are a messy more-than-human interface for humans and synanthropic wildlife. Norms for what constitutes a ‘problem’ animal to be culled, a displaced animal to be rescued, or a species nuisance whom one simply has to let live, are undergoing rapid change. We investigate the changing expectations that municipal hunters experience that they have from society in relation to managing problem wildlife in cities. Adding to the literature on the constitution of ‘problem’ animals in human environments, we show what happens to these animals in the practical sense, and what informs this decision. Our point of departure is to ask by what rationales hunters consider lethal interventions in urban nature to be legitimate, and which they find to be morally problematic. In a discussion, we reflect on what this says about, and means for, multispecies coexistence. Through interviews and go-along participant observation with 32 municipal hunters in Sweden, we show how municipal hunters wrestle with growing unease about new custodial roles they are expected to inhabit, as facilitators of the natural order, as garbage collectors of society for unwanted wildlife, and as enforcers of an interspecies code of conduct for the city. Based on this analysis, we discuss the relative standing of reparative, sacrificial, aesthetic, goodwill, practical, categorical and situational rationales for culling. This paints a picture of hunters as more conflicted about their control of urban nature, in challenge with the stereotypical idea of the professional hunter as a ‘natural born culler’. It also shows a city of parallel planes of multispecies coexistence, where some species and animals get a pass more than others.
When municipal hunters ‘kill in the name of protecting the domestic “urban” sphere’ (Oelke et al., 2022: 69), these hunters may be said to police the more-than-human right to the city. This is a job that includes culling wild animals for their perceived spatial and behavioural transgressions – animals in ‘the wrong places at the wrong times’ (Herda-Rapp and Goedeke, 2005: 2). The stakes of culls are high: protect public health and safety, and safeguard the interests of industry and infrastructure (Braun, 2013). Because the mandate of municipal hunters has grown in scope and complexity in recent years (Oelke et al., 2022; von Essen and Redmalm, 2023a), with ‘conflicting missions and messages’ (Hunold and Mazuchowski, 2020: 2), or altogether lacking management plans for these hunters to follow (Widemo, 2021), the hunters on the ground have a high level of discretion on whether or not to lethally intervene in the lives of unruly wild animals, and with what motives and methods.
By examining municipal hunters’ understanding of their tasks, we demonstrate how these hunters enforce parameters for multispecies coexistence – or intolerance oppositely – in cities. Far from being ‘natural born cullers’, we show how hunters wrestle with growing unease about new custodial roles they are expected to inhabit: facilitators of the natural order, garbage collectors of society for unwanted wildlife, and enforcers of an interspecies code of conduct. Indeed, in recent years, hunters are sceptical about being increasingly expected to form part of a ‘rationalized hunting machine’, over-managing nature, even in cities (Oelke et al., 2022: 80). 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).
Responding to Horta (2010a): ‘What should be the ends we should aim for when we intervene in nature?’ (p. 164), we ask the following research questions: By what right, and with what methods, do municipal hunters consider it legitimate to intervene in urban wildlife? And what does this reflect and mean for multispecies coexistence in cities going forward? Our synthesis identifies hunters’ underlying rationales for culling wildlife from 32 hunter interviews and follow-alongs in three cities. These rationales are reparative, sacrificial, situational, categorical, practical, goodwill and aesthetic. Some of these rationales have been raised in this journal: as in killing squirrels in wildlife management (Crowley et al., 2018); indirectly when culling animals (Chao, 2023; Holloway et al., 2022) and in relation to managing risk in nature (Hawkins and Paxton, 2019). As yet, however, research has not inquiried as to the relative degrees of legitimacy that these rationales command. Nor has research fully engaged with what these rationales mean for wildlife, in terms of their ability to navigate human societies and play by the rules so as to not get culled. Hence, adding to the plethora of literature on the constitution of ‘problem’ animals (Nagy and Johnson II, 2013), our paper clarifies what happens to these problem animals in the practical sense. We thus join scholarship on what ‘the good city’ might look like from a point of departure of more-than-human coexistence and ‘interspecies sociability’ (Hunold and Mazuchowski, 2020), where municipal hunters become the de facto caretakers of multispecies urban areas.
We begin by reviewing scholarship on the more-than-human right to the city, including how wild animals exist in parallel planes to ours (Bishop and Malamud, 2013) in variable liminal, border and denizens configurations. We also summarise how these animals can lose the more-than-human right to the city and necessitate removal, by colouring outside the lines of expected behaviour. We show that disciplining out-of-place wildlife in cities is a complex matter where lethal interventions and selective tolerances for certain animals or spaces are practiced. Following this, we present a method section, followed by findings from the study. A discussion synthesises the logic by which municipal hunters feel it is justifiable to intervene and not, in the form of legitimate and illegitimate rationales for culling. We conclude by problematising what this says about, and means for, multispecies coexistence in cities today and in the future.
Wildlife in the city: The good, the bad, and what to do with them
The city is a lively contact zone for ‘more-than-human encounters’ (Steele et al., 2019) and ‘multispecies relations’ (Arcari et al., 2021). To talk of the urban space as a space of multispecies relations does not simply mean that many species thrive in the city, but also that humans and other animals are entangled and shape each other's lives in overlapping ‘more-than-human life worlds’ (Whatmore, 2002) in ways that makes it impossible to conceive of the urban without taking non-human animals into consideration. These entanglements are far from ‘noninnocent’ as Haraway (2008) puts it since the ‘the fleshly historical reality of face-to-face, body-to-body subject making across species’ often means a competition for the same resources and spaces where humans usually have the upper hand. Thus, a more-than-human city is also a conflict zone (Wadiwel, 2018), in which those wild animals that take up residence have to do so on the terms of people. They must adapt to new environments, often spiked and laced with hostile architecture to deter them (Barua and Sinha, 2022), and learn to ‘live in plain sight without being seen’ (Hunold and Lloro, 2022). Those wild animals that dwell in our midst are variously described as liminal (Jarzebowska, 2018), synanthropic (i.e., animals that live close to humans, see e.g., Van Patter, 2021), commensal (Arcari et al., 2021), denizens (Donaldson and Kymlicka, 2011), or feral if descended from a domestic population (Gordon, 2022). Many of these terms describe the kind of coexistence that is based on, for example, coming together to feed (from Latin commensal) or otherwise using human resources and infrastructure (Blechman and Malamud, 2013).
A good urban animal
To be a good urban animal, Alagona (2022) writes, there are a number of parameters on one's behaviour, mobility, origin, lineage, time on the street (see e.g., Gordon, 2022). This refers less to the animal's adaptability to city life, and more to its image in public perception. In classic theories on speciesism and non-human charisma, scholars have found that the degree to which they are accepted is greatly dependent on their aesthetic appeal (Horta, 2010b). Barua and Sinha (2022) write that the urban is often ruled by aesthetics and ‘codes of appearance’, based on what should and should not belong. Aesthetics are not merely visual, but auditory, gustatory, olfactory and relates to various assets that an animal is seen to have through the eyes of humans (Hubbard and Brooks, 2021). Although there remain a few enduring recipes for universal appeal, norms for charisma are also changing somewhat unpredictably with culture and context (Knegtering, 2009). In accounting for our selective tolerances and allowances for certain animals, Lorimer (2007) disaggregated non-human charisma, based on prior ideas of umwelt (Von Uexküll, 1992) and affordances. He explained how animals can affect us in ecological, aesthetic and corporeal registers. These include, broadly put, the utility of the animal, its appeal, and our emotional connections to it. The animals that approximate one or more forms of this charisma, may be welcome to co-dwell in cities, or else tolerated in ‘limited irruptions’ (Hubbard and Brooks, 2021). If these cherished animals should perish or be culled, a ‘differential allocation of grievability’ (Butler, 2004: xiv; Redmalm, 2019) typically means that there may be an emotional backlash to their loss. All in all, the aggregate results of different charismatic profiles results in a ‘cultural hierarchy’ (Hirschman, 1994: 624) according to which humans treat other animals differently.
A bad urban animal
Even if traditionally tolerable or even liked animals should, for example, congregate in great numbers and become overabundant (Blechman and Malamud, 2013; Lorimer, 2007), or ‘habitually frequent the wrong places at the wrong times’ (Herda-Rapp and Goedeke, 2005: 2), they may forfeit their right to dwell in the city as individuals or species. When this happens, liminal city-dwelling animals are often given derogatory labels, including trash, garbage, pest, nuisances, vermin, scavengers, outlaws, vagrants, rabble and more (Bishop and Malamud, 2013; Gordon, 2022; Nagy and Johnson II, 2013). These are animals ‘…without economic value, those deemed to be worthless, by-products of dominant power structures, out of place, unwanted, unclean, and those failing to fulfill their intended purpose’ (Gordon, 2022: 197). They are at the edge of eviction, and said eviction may manifest from deterrents to create aversive condititoning to relocations to lethal interventions.
Disciplining and culling unruly wild animals
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. Typically, lethal interventions may be a last resort for animals that are rare or charismatic. In these cases, and wherever feasible, a disciplinary approach may try to ‘teach’ wildlife to behave. Boonman-Berson et al. (2016) showed this teaching of bears, to whom humans left intermediary devices in the landscape to communicate no-go zones. This may be done partly through non-lethal means, including using features like electric fences, effigies, fladry, spikes or noise to keep bears away from a certain area on the one hand, and wildlife passages, artificial nests and feeding on the other hand to draw them elsewhere (Bhardwaj et al., 2022). This has been successful, for example, in dealing with urban pigeons (Blechman and Malamud, 2013).
Three strike policies or disposable, overabundant animals may instead compel lethal interventions by which their lives are weighed against each other and against humans’ ideas of the ideal urban space. On a straightforward level, culling wild animals is seen as necessary to restore what some see as an appropriate balance in the city and to minimise harm to people and wildlife alike. However, even culling is said to proceed along a partly disciplinary route: it ‘teaches’ wildlife populations correct behaviour by removing bold individuals, and in sending a message to other animals who watch their conspecifics die. Attempting to communicate to wildlife in this way may be understood as violently enforcing an interspecies etiquette (von Essen, 2022; Warkentin, 2011).
Living with unruly urban animals
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). It is moreover unclear where we are headed in the future, both when it comes to responding to animals’ cues, and when more generally it comes to accommodating an ‘animal urbis’ in which ‘the breath, life, soul and spirit of the city … is embodied in its animal as well as human lifeforms’ (Hubbard and Brooks, 2021). 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).
On the other hand, there are now several examples of multispecies conviviality in cities, where beloved animals are fed, merely appreciated, or seen to belong (Alagona, 2022). 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. The following paper is anthropocentric in its scope as it focuses on municipal hunters’ understanding of their practices, although, as we shall see, non-human agency can be traced in some of these accounts through animals’ resistance against the urban order as it is perceived by humans, as well as norms for non-human charisma.
Exploring the conflicting roles of municipal hunters
Twenty-two interviews with municipally contracted hunters across Sweden, and ten interviews with municipal officials responsible for wildlife management, were conducted concerning the often-challenging task of removing problem wild animals in urban areas. This includes both individuals and populations—traffic injured wild animals, out of place wild animals who have wandered into people's gardens, shopping centres, or even houses, and animals whose behaviour poses a sanitary or safety threat. These hunts are not of their choosing, but assignments they are called on to protect public interests, for a paid fee or some other form of compensation – and sometimes as volunteer wildlife managers. The hunters held hunting licenses and in addition often supplementary firearms training for densely populated areas or euthanizing wounded wildlife following for example car collisions. The hunters also had affordances to dispatch animals who may otherwise be exempt from hunting, out of season, and in areas where hunting is not ordinarily allowed (SFS, 1993: 1617). In our respondent sample, which was achieved from a combination approach of snowballing and contacting municipalities directly, the hunters often held an educational background of some sort in wildlife management, however short. As externally contracted by the municipality, their backgrounds were variable, although most of them were experienced small-game and moose hunters. Most were 45 to 60 years in age, they were all born in Sweden with a couple of exceptions, and all of them were male.
A recent survey of Swedish municipal hunters found that wildlife management plans were only in place for about eight percent of all Swedish municipalities, and it was frequently not even known by hunters whether plans existed or not (Widemo, 2021). In our study, none of the hunters said that culling quotas were stated in their contracts with the municipality. Consequently, it was usually up to the hunters to make the ultimate decision: to cull or not to cull, to relocate, let be, or otherwise.
The cities in which the hunters were active included large cities like Stockholm, Malmö, Gothenburg and Uppsala where they were often one of several cullers, but also small towns where they were the sole culler in the municipality. Geographically, cities were both coastal and inland and had varying amounts of green areas and parks. Demographically, some of the bigger cities included are more multicultural with higher immigrant populations and hence potentially more diverse ways of relating to wildlife. Each city also carried its own informal, changing ‘risk portfolio’ (Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982) for what animals it did not want and which they tolerated. One of the biggest cities included in the study (Malmö), for instance, now prided itself on being a coastal city tolerating seagulls. Some inland cities, by contrast, we learned had strict zero-tolerance policies on wild boars, like Nyköping.
Interviews were semi-structured and lasted between one and two hours. In addition, participant observations were conducted with municipal hunters during four hunting trips in three different cities in Sweden. Interviews were transcribed, anonymized and coded for themes using Nvivo. The data collection and data processing took place from 2021 to 2023. Nvivo was deployed in a thematic analysis of the material (Braun and Clarke, 2006; Vaismoradi et al., 2013). In an initial stage, hunters’ ambivalence towards culling wildlife emerged as a central theme. However, the aggregated interview material seemed inconsistent as the respondents could use similar arguments to defend decisions both to cull and not to cull wildlife. For example, the natural order, biodiversity and biosecurity were cited in sometimes seemingly contradictory manners. Here, we discovered that the rationales for culling needed to be put into context of the perceived roles of municipal hunters as either facilitators of a natural order, as garbage collectors or as enforcers of an urban interspecies code of conduct.
While we regard these three roles as distinct and coherent, an individual hunter could express views belonging to two or three roles in the same interview. In a second stage of the analysis we focused on defining the culling rationales that we originally found, and to show how they cut through the three distinct roles of municipal hunters. These rationales were all rooted in one of the municipal hunting roles. Therefore, in a discussion following the results section, we account for these rationales, connect them to previous research, and discuss their implications for multispecies coexistence in cities.
Garbage collectors or wildlife stewards? On forms of intervention in urban nature
A key tension in the municipal hunters’ accounts is that between the expectations placed on them to be hands-on ‘cleaners’ of the city on the one hand, and on the other hand their own desire to take a more hands-off approach to wildlife management against these expectations, to allow for more multispecies conviviality. However, culling was used regularly but was then usually framed as a necessary precation in order to facilitate ‘a balance between people and animals’ (R4) – a balance which in turn would enable a hands-off approach. All hunters we interviewed emphasised their autonomy in decision-making: when to cull, when to attempt to relocate or rescue an animal and when to walk away: ‘There's no directive for us to “do this, do that”, or like an annual calendar with quotas’ (R30).
A policeman hunter in charge of coordinating the municipality's hunters, and thus giving orders, suggested that as soon as the hunter got to the place of the problem animal, he was happy to defer to the ‘intuitive judgment’ of this hunter on how to act (R20). Similarly, when hunters were given orders from the police authority, for example in cases with traffic injured wildlife, it was up to the hunters to choose the course of action: ‘They’ll [the police] tell me: you know best here […] you know what to do’ (R22). The relative ambiguity of the legislation combined with the absence of management plans for different species, enabled hunters to make place-based and situational judgments. In this results section, we hence now account for three different expectations for hunters’ role in the city: (1) facilitators of the natural order, (2) garbage collectors of society and (3) lawmen enforcing an interspecies code of conduct. These represent different degrees of control and micromanagement of urban nature and may, at times, be difficult to reconcile.
Facilitators of the natural order
When faced with decisions to cull or let live, a surprising number of hunters expressed a will to let (urban) nature take its course. Occasionally, the nature's course approach would collide with regulations and legislation, as when faced with a categorical ‘zero tolerance’ for wild boar in major cities. However, as it transpired through interviews, more often this approach collided with prevailing norms of urban wildlife management and the public's demands on culling animals. In the municipal hunters’ perspective, letting nature take its course was sometimes linked to a vision for a multispecies city. As one hunter said: ‘It's life quality for people to see a deer, and we can’t have this zero tolerance policy that we want to eliminate them all, because we’ve realized it's actually OK to keep a moderate size population’ (R4). He added: ‘what you want is for there to be a balance between people and animals’. Indirectly, many hunters spoke of facilitation in terms of maintaining this elusive, and often subjective, balance between people and wildlife. One hunter, located in Stockholm, pointed to the ‘wow’ factor of simply coexisting with wildlife and getting to see and take pictures of them in the wild, yet so close to the city. He added that minding one another's spaces, and showing consideration, were key to coexistence, arguing that ‘there's gotta be a balance’ and that we would otherwise ‘totally sterile cities’ (R15).
That wildlife was categorically welcome, but situationally out-of-place and requiring intervention, was a refrain repeated by many: ‘There's no ambition on our part to remove all foxes in an area because they serve their function in nature, they’re needed there. It's more about trying to regulate, like removing problem individuals who have become tame and bold’ (R6). Several anecdotes about how problem animals losing their shyness demanded swift lethal intervention surfaced in our interviews, like a roe buck outside city in southern Sweden who had learned to steal people's packed lunches in a recreational area after people had been feeding it leftovers. The roe buck would ‘hop up on the decking when people were eating in the summer, he would just stomp on up ahead and push little kids away’ (R15). This was a typical way of framing problem animals: as disturbing peace, as boundaryless greedy opportunists, and sometimes also as a threat to children. The implication was that these animals would threaten to throw the nature–culture relationship off balance, and that people themselves were often to blame for originally leading these animals astray on a path of delinquency.
Many of the municipal hunters also criticised the public's selective tolerance toward cute animals and their knee-jerk eagerness for less aesthetic critters to be culled, despite these presenting similar problem impact, such as rats and rabbits, or wild boars: ‘the cuter the critters, the bigger the villains we are, and vice versa’, as one hunter put it (R15). The same hunter noted how he and his team had been served cake by the public when they had dispatched a wild boar problem in the area in a western Swedish county, but were routinely yelled at for shooting rabbits. Another hunter further north in an area with an even greater number of boars added: ‘People definitely don’t have the same ethics when it comes to a wild boar as to a moose. It's more like a nuisance, which of course isn’t all it is, it's a nice animal too’ (R15). Fear and lack of knowledge on the part of the public around new wildlife species like the wild boar drove up pressure on hunters to intervene, when the municipal hunters’ preferred solution was simply to educate people on how to live with them: ‘The pig itself isn’t a predator or anything, it's not going to eat you or your children, which people seriously believed at one point’ (R15).
All interviwed municipal hunters pressed on the importance of ‘letting live’ when it came to those individual animals that the public often pressured them to cull. Three-legged deer was one example: ‘In many of those cases I do nothing so long as they look okay. There’re so many limping deer, from traffic collisions or having gotten stuck somewhere. But a lot of the time they heal, just like we do, if we hurt our arm or leg’ (R6). Another hunter in a large city admitted that with repeated pressure to cull a three-legged deer, because ‘it sure can look gnarly for the public to see these animals’ (R4), it was sometimes just easier to cull the animal in question than to fend off calls from concerned citizens, even if he disagreed on the necessity of the intervention, as injuries were a natural occurence. According to the hunters, the public also often struggled to understand the harms associated with culling aesthetically displeasing animals in times when animals may be nursing young: ‘The fox is a recurring problem and people get upset with us when we tell them we can’t put it down, even if it has a mangy tail, because it may well be a female […] it might be getting back to its pups’ (R28).
Likewise, hunters were averse to making more extensive interventions, such as engineering eradication campaigns or enlisting Judas animals (as is done in Sweden to exterminate invasive racoon dogs), or in introducing predator species, some regarded as unduly aggressive. A hunter said ‘it's a bit like… don’t fuck with mother nature, you know? It can go wrong […] you’re in a bit of a moral grey zone there’ (R15). Speaking about implanting and exterminating wild animals, another hunter offered: ‘You shouldn’t play god unless there's a very good reason […] we started messing with things and then it often goes to hell’ (R21).
To live and let live extended also to general upkeep of green areas, which members of the public often pressured them to maintain. ‘The park administration will get a lot of calls that it looks messy because there's a fallen tree somewhere’, as one hunter expressed it, and argued that many citizens feel the same way of unexpectedly encountering wild animals (R2). Equally, while some hunters were sympathetic to people's concerns for garden damage from rabbits or deer, they were occasionally conflicted about culling these animals for the relatively esoteric reason of preserving people's tulip beds: ‘They go crazy about that sort of thing’ (R15). Another hunter explained: ‘I really try to ask that person calling to complain, “how hard is it really for you?” The deer lays here with her two fawn, she's given birth to them behind your bush. It's not really the end of the world’ (R15). He added that most nuisances ebbed and flowed with nature's cycles, culminating in summer when animals had their babies, and if people just waited, they would move on: ‘three weeks from now you won’t have this problem. They’ll have forgotten all about it. So that's how I try to work’.
The garbage collectors of society
By being tasked to some jobs, hunters felt they edged closer toward being the garbage collectors of society than facilitating the natural order. Several of the interviewees suggested that some of their tasks ‘left hunting behind altogether’ or ‘really went away from wildlife management’ (R7). Among other things, they expressed frustration with being called to the scene of an accident where the wild animal was already dead, because the police did not know what to do with it. Similarly, certain jobs pushed hunters more into pest control than hunting: ‘there's been this increase [in calls about] wasps’ nests, because they’ve figured out we’re much cheaper to use than to send for Anticimex [a pest control business]’ (R7). A hunter with a self-professed ‘hatred’ of snakes admitted to having had been forced out to cull some vipers, a protected but unwanted species because ‘the people simply needed my help’ (R15). He said he drew the line at culling slugs. Recalling his frequent calls to collect cadavers, a hunter in another municipality lamented ‘this really isn’t my job’, but admitted that he still did it: ‘I was called to cull a rabbit at a daycare center, and there's this old dead magpie. “Oh can you please bring it with you”? Of course I do it, but it's not really my job’ (R23). At the same time, as several hunters underlined, the dead animals that people consider to be ‘garbage’ are also someone's food. Therefore, it was common practice to leave cadavers or injured animals in urban nature, although this was done selectively in order not to alarm passers-by: ‘There's really no purpose to it, to remove all injured animals from nature because then you’re really depriving other animals of their food’ (R6). To facilitate communication and build relationships with members of the public, some hunters we interviewed were locally known and had given their phone numbers to residents. This meant, however, that in some areas, people would call up the hunter for everything and anything, at all hours.
This lack of glamour in assignments connected to what they saw as an expectation by the public for municipal hunters to operate out-of-sight and at odd hours, invisibly disposing of unwanted animals without confronting the public with the actual killing, as expressed in an illustrative quote: ‘They don’t want to see these corvids about, but they don’t want to see them get killed either’ (R21). Most hunters pressed on the importance to operate clandestinely at early hours of the day, or late at night, but also admitted noises from the hunt, however minimised, could disturb and antagonise people in their homes. Just as garbage disposal is often organised to minimise humans’ contact with their waste, municipal hunting was conducted so that people would see as little of it as possible, although they benefitted from the interventions.
Finally, the dead animals who had been injured or shot by the municipal hunters were not necessarily considered garbage. In some cities, culled animals were used as heating fuel in power plants. It was also common for hunters to bring home dead birds to use when training hunting dogs. A few hunters also said that they sometimes used dead animals in their cooking, although they were conscious of a taboo on utilising roadkill for meat. At one interview, a municipal hunter showed us that he had a moose carcass from a traffic accident hanging in his garage, waiting to be flayed, cut up, and put in the freezer. While perceiving themselves to be garbage collectors in the eyes of the public, the interviewees themselves denied this label through the way they approached both living and dead animals.
Enforcers of an interspecies code of conduct for the city
Despite qualms about micro-managing urban nature, hunters took their job seriously insofar as many painted a picture of their mandate as policing wildlife conduct. That is, by selectively culling, or deterring wildlife via non-lethal means, animals who had edged out of an unspoken free zone and become a problem, they could communicate and enforce a kind of interspecies code of conduct to these animals. Bold individuals were removed, thus encouraging shyness in remaining individuals, and garden-trespassing deer were culled while the ones in city-adjacent forests were left alone. Similarly, feeding stations were carefully located to draw away deer from trafficked areas and toward the woods. One hunter in Dalarna county explained this arrangement as communicating with deer: ‘So when they start walking in the morning, they don’t have to go down to the farms to feed because we’ve put food with them where they sleep. So they stay put on their side of the road’ (R14). He argued that in terms of enforcing this spatial code of conduct, miscommunication to wildlife could be costly: hunting in the wrong areas sent the wrong signals to wildlife, such that hunting them in the forest – where the public may have preferred for shooting to take place, out-of-sight and out-of-mind – just made them seek sanctuary in urban areas so that paradoxically the deer: ‘…find the gardens to be safe now’ (R4).
Several other cases manifested hunters culling individual animals that had transgressed spatially, behaviourally or temporally. If a deer ran over someone, ‘with real physical contact; or if they are roaming about at a day care center, they’ve definitely crossed a line’ (R20). This implied a cull to restore order and safety and, perhaps to signal to other deer this was unacceptable deer behaviour. Equally, shooting geese on public beaches was a way of reasoning with them, as the main objective was not to decrease the population, but to deter the geese from these areas. ‘I think it gives you a pretty immediate effect […] the problem can cease entirely at that beach’ (R6). In other cases, an aggressive moose had had to be dealt with, drunk on fermented apples, near a daycare centre, a shopping mall or highway: ‘we try to scare them off first, but after three strikes you have to make the call [to cull]’ (R22). Others were reluctant to extend three-strike policies to conflictful animals, pushing for culls for preventative purposes: ‘It's a sensitive issue yeah, but you got a moose running amok in traffic… it's just hard to reason with a moose’ (R27).
When it came to intervening for public safety, hunters reflected on heightened awareness in recent years, even over their own hunting careers, of controlling wildlife for biosecurity and hygiene reasons. Thus, the hunters had also become enforcers of disease prevention measures. They often talked about the necessity of culling birds in public areas, not just as an aesthetic consideration, but also to protect the public from diseases that could be caught from their excrement. One hunter lamented on children accidentally consuming animal faeces, including those of free-ranging cats, in sand boxes. At the same time, a hunter who was regularly called to resolve biosecurity threats for industries admitted that ‘what constitutes a sanitary hazard is actually pretty subjective’ (R21). Mangy-looking foxes or unnaturally behaving individuals were typically sacrificed to, among other things, present further damage, zoonoses or contagion to other individuals. As we could see above, however, the threshold for making this sacrifice differed across hunters and seasons.
Finally, hunters saw that culling sometimes had to be done on a reparative rationale: if humans had displaced or introduced a population, these animals had to be dealt with – particularly ones conditioned to feeding. The hunters pressed on this being the fault of people, and not the animals, who had simply adapted to a niche left for them. Nevertheless, the niche – including feeding at garbage dumps – needed to be communicated to wildlife, as via an ecology of fear approach, as a no-go zone. To do so required culling in combination with other forms of deterrence.
Discussion: Legitimate and illegitimate interventions in urban nature
Reflecting on their mandate in urban wildlife management, Swedish municipal hunters painted a picture of conflicting wills and the need for ethical principles to anchor their choices for culling or sparing lives. When hunters spoke of facilitating a natural order rather than micro-managing wildlife, they also indicated that the public had to be educated about proper behaviour in relation to wild animals: feeding, for example, represented an artificial intervention in the ecosystem (Blechman and Malamud, 2013). To both preserve an animal urbis or multispecies spirit, and to not aggravate the public by removing a charismatic animal they favoured, these hunters had to think carefully about the rationales by which lethal removals were considered necessary and legitimate. We now present what these are, and which rationales they deemed problematic; these include: reparative, sacrificial, retributive, categorical, situational, aesthetic, goodwill and practical.
First, hunters pressed on the absence of blame on the animals’ part, stating that ‘we humans’ are responsible for their predicament – it is humans who create garbage heaps where animals feed, release pets who form self-reproducing urban populations, or condition animals to human presence through approaching them. In extension to this, hunters felt they had little choice but to step in and correct what they saw as obviously disrupted ecologies for which humans were to blame. This may be understood as the acceptance of hunters of the
Second, hunters often thought in terms of promoting the greater good, weighing benefits against the death of the animal. This was particularly evident in the case of removing diseased, contagious individuals – often mangy foxes – both to minimise their suffering and to prevent further spread of the disease. This may be understood as signifying the legitimacy of a
Third, wildlife was theoretically welcome in the city, but could forfeit their right to the city under certain circumstances. Under these circumstances, the hunter was dutybound to remove it, using lethal or non-lethal measures as suitable. While hunters had varying personal tolerances for the transgressions of wildlife, which also seemed to vary on the species and where they erred, they agreed that culling on this situational rationale was legitimate, thus exercising their role as ‘facilitators’ and ‘enforcers’ of the order. Indeed, in
In our case, public safety was a priority, such that culls in the interest of protecting this were one of the few points that were explicitly legislated. But hunters also reflected on the increased importance of culling for biosecurity, which entailed more personal judgement. The congregation of animal populations in some areas, near vital interests (like kindergardens and parks) and their build-up of excrement that could pose a sanitary health risk, required lethal interventions. This was often done with conflicting emotions as situational killing often meant culling healthy animals who had ended up in the wrong place, such as a moose eating plants in a botanical garden. In such cases, the animal's life was considered valuable, yet also treated as a biopolitical resource ultimately disposed of to ensure an urban landscape in balance. Culling situationally out of place animals was also a cornerstone in enforcing an interspecies code of conduct, discouraging habituated or aggressive individuals as well as interventions serving the function of maintaining a ‘landscapes of fear’ where one did not permit animals (Gieser and von Essen, 2021; Horta, 2010a).
This communicative approach to teaching animals was not always foolproof. Some species learned quickly, like geese, others were tenacious, and certain animals were difficult to reason with on a practical level, like large ungulates, because they were not easily frightened. Situational aberrations by different species carried different implications: a fox might get away with being too bold, but as several of the respondents noted, a moose acting out of the ordinary presents a more significant threat. Hence, situational culling has different thresholds for different species, making the rationale itself somewhat situational – here, contingent on the different animals.
While the situational rationale for killing is generally accepted across multiple actors, critical scholarship opposes the idea of wildlife tolerance being ‘contingent on the animals’ good behavior’ (Hunold and Mazuchowski, 2020: 4). Indeed, some rightfully question whether wild animals can truly learn to be well-behaved citizens in this way, having the capacity to ‘uphold certain rules of engagement’ (ibid., p. 8). von Essen and Allen (2016) argued that imposing such expectations on wild animals necessarily invites them into the domestic realm of Zoopolis (see further Donaldson and Kymlicka, 2011), binding them not only to negative duties but also to more precise standards for behaviour in different situations and with different people. Not only is it debatable whether wild animals can approximate rules of conduct, but the contradictory nature of some of these rules also make them difficult to defend. For example, Alagona (2022) suggested, on the ideas of Bailey, that to be a good urban animal is to be ‘smart, friendly, and relatively tame’ (p.34). However, given that wild animals in our cases appeared to forfeit their right to life if they are both too aggressive and too friendly (‘habituated’ or ‘tame’ in terms of feeding by humans or playing with them), they seemingly enjoy a narrow range of acceptable behaviours in practice. Hence, we declare their relative neighbourliness to be a Goldilocks dilemma: they must be friendly but not too friendly. Colouring outside the lines thus becomes easy for animals.
We can contrast these situational risks posed by animals with, for example, with
The hunters’ emphasis on culling those animals who strayed from the codes of conduct, rather than for exhibiting natural behaviour of its species, seem to support there being some taboo to categorical killing on their part. However, the respondents’ different thresholds of tolerance for what triggered lethal control did seem to differ across species, and they recognised that the public also held these idiosyncrasies, such as when it came to wild boar and rats. Damages caused by the latter two species were often comparable to those caused by deer and rabbits, but the cuter species were given a pass, reflecting aesthetic charisma (von Essen and Redmalm, 2023b). Hunters were critical of this categorical culling thinking, in addition to admitting they themselves were inevitably guilty of it. In these cases, however, the charisma that drew them to various species was more diverse than mere appearance, including also assessments of the species’ ecological charisma, for example, a kind of utility. Although sparingly relied on, the categorical rationale can be found in relation to all three roles: some categories of animals tend not to be part of an ideal ‘natural order’; some animals were considered to be ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas, 1984), thus approached as garbage in need of removal; last, some animals’ behaviours were seen as in line with an interspecies code of conduct, while the same behaviour in other species were perceived as a problem.
Several pushes for culls came from people who did not like the look of certain animals or what they did to their gardens, reflecting Barua and Sinha (2022)'s urban ‘rule by aesthetics’. Some of these calls, however, may well have been from a benevolent place, believing that three-legged deer were suffering and in need of euthanasia. As hunters explained, however, the look of an animal alone was not sufficient grounds to cull it, as it could be misleading. Equally, they were sceptical toward being called in to save people's flowerbeds, especially when no non-lethal measures had first been tried by the homeowner. We see this as there being low legitimacy of aesthetic culls among hunters.
Hunters sometimes decided that although their own convictions told them not to intervene, they had to do so for other reasons. One of these was practical. Typically, if the situational threat was posed by a rare or valued species – like a moose or an endangered bird – multiple actors tended to want to find a non-lethal solution, even a rescue. But hunters acknowledged that this was not always feasible, particularly if support for rehabilitation was lacking, or if the animal in question was difficult to rescue by being large, aggressive or not taking well to human handling. One such example in other research is Freya the Walrus who repeatedly sought contact with humans in several European harbours. She was widely popular and given a persona by the media, and thus to some degree her life was considered potentially grievable. However, authorities also saw her as a threat to human safety. Moving her was considered too complicated and expensive, and she was thus shot in the Oslo fiord by a wildlife manager (Sollund, 2023). We see such cases as
Finally, a related reason for intervening in urban nature even when municipal hunters disagreed with, or were on the fence about the necessity of the intervention, was to appease the public in order to maintain a long-term relation. If there were repeated calls and concerns about a particular (healthy) fox, or a three-legged deer, it sometimes behooved the hunter to simply cull it rather than fend off further calls and risk undermining their standing among the public by refusing to cull. We may think of this in terms of
Natural born cullers: Changing roles
We return now to reflect on what the relative legitimacy of intervening in wildlife for these respective rationales tell us about how municipal hunters police the non-human right to the city. How do they see their mandate in relation to wildlife/nature? Garbage collectors? Micro-managers? Facilitators of the natural order? Policing enforcing the interspecies code of conduct? We observe that the role of facilitors and enforcers exhibit some similarity in ascribing an active role to hunters in relation to urban nature. Both involve mediating the people–wildlife interface. It can be argued, however, that they communicate in two opposite directions. As facilitators of the natural order – by for example educating people about wildlife – hunters are ostensibly trying to adapt the urban society to live with unruly nature and wild animals. By contrast, when hunters assume the mantle of enforcers of an interspecies code of conduct, their task is to teach wildlife to stay away from certain spatial and behavioural zones of the city. They used culls, aversive conditioning and ecology of fear to do so.
Finally, while there are now discourses on a more hands-off relationship to nature, such as rewilding (Lorimer et al., 2015), it seems clear that there are also counter-discourses that in many ways seek to expand our management of (especially urban) nature and wildlife. This has been legitimated in large part due to concerns of One Health and biosecurity. With threats to public health, to sanitary conditions, of zoonoses and contagion, culling for biosecurity is increasingly a trump that overrides any sentimental attachment to wildlife or romantic ideas of letting nature be. Broz et al. (2021) term the development ‘veterinarization’, which we may understand as a ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ pre-emptive approach that builds a new strong biosecurity rationale into wildlife culling (von Essen and Redmalm, 2023b). It is particularly present in cities where the human–wildlife interface is risky (Alagona, 2022; Bateman and Fleming, 2012). Taken to its extreme, such an approach has given up the biopolitical management of life, that although it is often instrumental nevertheless concedes that non-human life is inherently valuable, and instead treats animals as pure biomass, cultivated, nurtured and cropped when called for.
The biosecurity rationale give license to culls in ways that hunters themselves are not always comfortable with (Epstein et al., 2021; Urner et al., 2021; von Essen and Redmalm, 2023b). Some declare it unnecessary or ‘dirty work’ (Emond et al., 2021), ‘labour’ (von Essen and Tickle, 2020) and a thankless job (Rippa, 2021) – in short, garbage management. Far from promoting lively multispecies cities, lethal interventions ‘follow a veterinarian logic embedded in the inner workings of industrial agriculture’ (Oelke et al., 2022: 69). This includes new sanitary routines, proper disposal of bodies, ‘calculations, maps and plans’ (ibid., p.80) to the extent that some hunters now question their hand in nature, even in cities, where they feel that it is a mistake to make the hunter into ‘a super-regulator at the control panel of nature’ (ibid.).
In cities, the animals are the trespassers, existing on parallel planes, in our shadows, and with an minimalist ethic of avoiding contact. But this too may be changing. In this space, municipal hunters may be understood as ‘actively trying to work out a new ethic for living with animals’ (Alagona, 2022: 99), including establishing an ‘interspecies etiquette,’ ‘one that strives to be approachable and receptive to animal others’ (Warkentin, 2010: 116). Warkentin took this as a more individual-level, corporeal attunement to animal others but, we suggest on the ideas of hunters in this study, an etiquette may be established also on species and population levels for coexistence. Although culling is as a expected a standard tool for the municipal hunters, we have also shown how they sometimes adhere to Warkentin's (2010) ideal of a ‘practice of peace’, which could potentially open up for new ways of considering a sustainable multispecies city. Hunold and Mazuchowski (2020) write that ‘new imaginaries of urban human–wildlife coexistence are sorely needed’ (p.2), which we believe points to a new for further research on those at the interface of human–wildlife encounters in cities.
Conclusion
Municipal hunters act as boundary agents between (urban) nature and culture and, increasingly, as enforcers of the non-human right to the city. Unlike professional slaughterers, whose killing of animals is hedged by rules, regulation and repetition, we engaged with hunters whose discretion and mandate over culling decisions and methods were a great deal more open. Rather than acting as clerks, carrying out orders given by municipal managers, these hunters are expected to make culling decisions based on their personal experience, their local knowledge, their own practical judgement and their personal understanding of humans’ role in urban nature and vision for multispecies coexistence.
We found decisions to intervene or not in urban nature were related to three different perceived roles among hunters: as eco-oriented facilitators of a natural order, as practically oriented garbage collectors, and as justice-oriented enforcers of an interspecies code of conduct. The latter included attempts at communicating an etiquette to both the public (don’t feed wildlife, etc) and to wildlife (stay away from kindergardens). By tracing backward from hunters’ reflections around morally problematic culls on the one hand, and jobs they were clearly comfortable with, we gleaned series of rationales for culling: aesthetic, categorical, situational, goodwill, practical and sacrificial. In contrast to previous scholarship that often presents the hunter as the ultimate hands-on steward of wildlife, we showed that they may be reluctant managers who feel pressured by other developments in society, the command-and-control ethos of biosecurity.
Highlights
The more-than-human right to the city is enforced by urban municipal hunters who come with their own ideas about multispecies coexistence.
They unwittingly enforce an interspecies code-of-conduct on people and wildlife on how to behave on parallel planes in the city.
We demonstrate the existence of several rationales for culling and their legitimacy among municipal hunters, which variously reflect visions for multispecies tolerances.
Hunters experience tensions between being garbage collectors, interspecies police and facilitators of a natural order or balance.
The idea of the municipal hunter as a ‘natural born culler’ may at times be exaggerated, as results indicate municipal hunters often prefer to let (urban) nature run its course.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Svenska Forskningsrådet Formas (grant number Formas Dnr 2019-01168).
