Animals Count

How Population Size Matters in Animal-Human Relations

Nancy Cushing, Jodi Frawley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351210621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Australie et de l'Océanie

Whether their populations are perceived as too large, just right, too small or non-existent, animal numbers matter to the humans with whom they share environments. Animals in the right numbers are accepted and even welcomed, but when they are seen to deviate from the human-declared set point, they become either enemies upon whom to declare war or victims to be protected.

In this edited volume, leading and emerging scholars investigate for the first time the ways in which the size of an animal population impacts how they are viewed by humans and, conversely, how human perceptions of populations impact animals.

This collection explores the fortunes of amphibians, mammals, insects and fish whose numbers have created concern in settler Australia and examines shifts in these populations between excess, abundance, equilibrium, scarcity and extinction. The book points to the importance of caution in future campaigns to manipulate animal populations, and demonstrates how approaches from the humanities can be deployed to bring fresh perspectives to understandings of how to live alongside other animals.

1 Why count animals?

Nancy Cushing and Jodi Frawley

One crow sorrow, two crows joy

Three crows a letter, four crows a boy

Five crows silver, six crows gold

Seven crows a secret that should never be told¹

John Berger, in his influential 1977 essay “Why look at animals?”, argued that until the nineteenth century, other animals were with humans at the centre of their worlds, not only economically and productively but also imaginatively, spiritually and emotionally.² He posited that as modernisation occurred in the West, real animals were increasingly marginalised from these roles, leaving Western peoples still talking about other animals, thinking with animal metaphors and nostalgically looking at representations of animals – in Disney films, nature documentaries, zoos and children’s toys. The impulse to count animals is closely linked with this habitual looking, a means of systematising it, and like looking, it is associated with our continuing practices of seeking meaning from them. The traditional English rhyme which opened this chapter invokes the oracular properties of animals, offering a set of rules by which to understand the message conveyed by the crows, who predict the future on a personal scale.

Expanding the scope of such predictions to the level of communities or whole regions, the size of animal populations is also understood as foreshadowing prosperity or bad fortune. Whether animal populations are perceived as too large, just right or too small, their numbers matter to the humans with whom they share environments. Animals at the human-declared set point are accepted and even welcomed, but as they deviate from it, they become enemies upon whom to declare war or victims to protect. We count animals as we look at animals, in part to reassure ourselves of their continued presence in our lives. Counting animals shapes the ways we interact, manage, protect, love and vilify these environmental companions.

Animal numbers have been of particular interest in Australia, a continent colonised by Europeans just as the process of marginalising animals discussed by Berger was beginning.³ Australia is unique in having a highly distinctive fauna, with 87% of its mammal species, 45% of birds, 93% of reptiles and 94% of frogs being endemic, but also as an entire continent governed since 1901 by a single political entity, the Commonwealth of Australia.⁴ As a nation, Australia is still emergent, not having yet entirely escaped the influence of the colonising nation, Great Britain. Australians struggle with their contemporary racial and cultural diversity and to achieve reconciliation with their First Nations, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. From the perspective of its non-human animal population, despite its large landmass, Australia shares characteristics with other smaller islands which can make them both refuges from predators and disease but also places of particular vulnerability when ecologies are disrupted. Being an island nation has encouraged a high level of awareness of the distinction between native and introduced species and a tendency to identify the nation with native animals. These features have made animal studies an area of great interest amongst Australian environmental humanities scholars and Australian-based studies useful points of comparison and contrast for animal studies researchers internationally.⁵

In this collection, we explore how the size of an animal population impacts the ways in which they have been viewed in settler colonial Australia, and, conversely, how perceptions of the correctness of animal populations have effects on animals. Playing on the double meaning of our title, we also seek to demonstrate that just as animals are not passively looked at but actively return that gaze, they are not only objects to be counted but also subjects who count. Although Berger argued that animals in the postmodern world were incapable of looking back at humans, others have rejected this premise, including Derrida, who reflected on the meaning of the shame he felt when looked upon, naked, by his cat.⁶ The unflinching appraisal by the cat reminds us that animals have their own historical roles and take actions that have consequences. In both regards, drawing attention to how animals count is timely in the Anthropocene, as awareness grows of precipitous falls in the numbers of many free-living species, unprecedented rises in populations of intensively farmed animals and shifts in the populations of those being pushed into new areas by habitat loss and climate change. Animals will continue to count and be counted as we struggle to learn how to share dwindling living space and resources.

Animal typologies: invasive and native, free-living and domestic

The animal subjects of this book existed in varying relationships with the settler colonial society established in Australia from 1788. These were new and separate from the relations between non-human species and Australia’s First Nations peoples, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups who had inhabited the continent together for some 60 000 years. Indigenous Australians understood animals not as resources but as partners in their social and spiritual lives. They kept their country healthy through ritual techniques which encouraged biodiversity and accepted population fluctuations as part of annual and climatic cycles. When faced with novel introduced species post contact, the First Nations peoples accommodated themselves to the new situation rather than resisting it, harvesting different animals to meet their needs and incorporating new species into their dreamings.⁷

Australia’s settler-colonists have been more interventionist and less successful at coexisting with other animals. The issue of invasive species dominates public and scholarly debate about animals in Australia where native species are understood as vulnerable and in need of protection and introduced species as excessively robust.⁸ Troubling this distinction, our studies show how some native animals, like locusts, thrived in the changed conditions of colonisation while exotics, including sheep, had to be carefully nurtured.⁹ Regardless of their place of origin, Australian animals defy simple categorisations, becoming pests to some human groups and resources for others.

Most of our studies are of free-living animals, including the cane toads and redfin perch that arrived as a result of colonists deliberately introducing them for economic and cultural reasons. These two animals, and many others like them, are now labelled pests.¹⁰ Libby Robin’s shows how, in the cane toad’s case, the category of pest has created local approaches to the animals that deny care and encourage cruelty.¹¹ Cane Toad Musters that promote the removal of the threat by killing them “one toad at a time” are juxtaposed with the approach of scientist Rick Shine, whose extensive fieldwork with his team of researchers has been enabling them to recommend a more nuanced approach to managing the toad’s presence in particular ecosystems. The story of the redfin, on the other hand, shows a different set of local and scientific approaches to a pest species. Jodi Frawley grapples with the varying ways that fishing communities in the Murray-Darling Basin and scientific advocates for native fish saw redfin. The meaning and importance of the category “pest”, with its superficial connotation of overpopulation, is challenged by the complexity of local stories set in specific histories and environments.

Carefully imported species that have thrived in Australian conditions are not the only invasive species whose numbers cause concern.¹² Others have arrived uninvited, accidentally loaded on ships and planes with more favoured cargo. Like the Argentine ants whose Sydney history is detailed by Adam Gall, having evaded Australia’s notoriously strict border controls, many reproduced sufficiently to climb to numbers which exceeded the tolerance for them. Gall shows how the lives of these invasive ants intersected with changing ideas about domestic spaces in the mid-twentieth century. In suburban Sydney, the shifting understandings of the effect of poisons modified the view of the ant numbers, as the original motive of protecting the environment from the ants was replaced by a concern to protect the wider ecology from the poison being used against them. Advocates for eradication make skilful use of numbers in a wide range of debates about invasive animals.

Some native species have made themselves similarly unwelcome within the settler society, especially those whose numbers bloomed in the changed conditions of a new Australia. Locusts, always present in Australia, thrived in the settler colonial agroecologies established in Victoria and Western Australia. Andrea Gaynor explores this phenomenon, pointing out that Aboriginal peoples’ oral traditions include stories of locust plagues associated with the boom-and-bust conditions that became more widespread with colonisation. Gaynor shows how the increased numbers of locusts were met with shifting military approaches that mirrored Australia’s changing war strategies through the twentieth century. Mosquitos, another insect native to Australia, were seen as excessive when settlements developed near wetlands and waterways that carried large populations of these animals. Emily O’Gorman investigates the swamplands that underpin the urban development of Toowoomba in Queensland. The mosquito, as a disease vector, became entangled in the medical and health trajectories of this city’s growth. Although myriad urban practices had made the swamps “unhealthy” in the nineteenth century, it was the environmental controls targeting excessive volumes of mosquitoes that forever changed the wetlands.

Other native animals, including silvereyes and thylacines, were equally subject to measures designed to reduce their numbers in the nineteenth century. The thylacine did not withstand this onslaught, but the silvereye, as shown by Julie McIntyre, lived on to share the special cultural status accorded to natives from the mid-twentieth century which nominally earns them greater tolerance and even protection.¹³ Silvereyes are one of several opportunistic native feeders on the introduced grapes which, along with a small range of animals introduced with vine stock, McIntyre argues are absent from the rhetoric of the wine industry which prefers to hide its toll on fauna. Although the silvereye is a good example of a resilient and adaptive native species, many others are now threatened or endangered because of relentless competition for space and resources. Australia’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act list of endangered species stands at 503, including 54 mammals, birds, fish and amphibians that have become extinct since colonisation.¹⁴

The politicisation of animal numbers is most evident in debates over how to address what are seen as damagingly excessive populations of introduced species that have become naturalised. Formerly domesticated animals, including pigs, camels, donkeys, horses and goats, grew as a concern warranting counting in the twentieth century. In some instances, these animals greatly expanded their numbers largely unobserved, resulting in a negative impact on the environment and Indigenous people. As Nancy Cushing shows, this was an unintended consequence in the case of pigs, as the pigs were offered and accepted a high level of autonomy within the animal husbandry practices of the nineteenth century.

How to count animals

The counting of this range of native and introduced animals has a long history in settler Australia. The most heavily counted have been those raised in commercial operations primarily for food and wool. Settlers counted the ancestors of these animals onto and off of the ships that brought them to Australia and carefully tracked their rising numbers as a measure of the success of the colonies.¹⁵As the nursery rhyme “The Man from Menindie” recalls, sheep were repetitively counted in and out of stockyards, night-time hurdles (enclosures) and saleyards. Such counting was in some cases undertaken by Aboriginal people working in the pastoral industry, who applied traditional methods of counting – such as counting by fives and then grouping the fives into tens – enabling them to “give the exact number of cattle in a group up to four or five hundred almost without a moment’s hesitation”.¹⁶ Historians using colonial records found sheep numbers to be a useful means of representing progress and employed them to demonstrate the rate of expansion into Aboriginal land, growth in employment and rising prosperity (see Figure 1.1). Although steep reductions in sheep numbers, as during the 1890s depression, served as shorthand for the still-fragile hold on the continent,¹⁷ Richard Waterhouse notes the impact of the apparent abundance of sheep, arguing that practices like washing wool before shearing by holding sheep under water in creeks persisted into the 1870s because, although some individuals drowned, sheep as a group were plentiful.¹⁸ Individual animals count for little within populations perceived to be abundant or excessive. Nicole Chalmer investigates the impact of the introduction of sheep in the south-west of Western Australia and finds that in the Esperance bioregion, sheep num...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Why count animals?
• Part I Excess
• Part II Abundance
• Part III Equilibrium
• Part IV Scarcity
• Part V Extinction
• Index