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Abstract

Once imported to Australia as rodent controllers, cats are now regarded as responsible for a second wave of mammal extinction across the continent. Utilising the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics, we investigate critically the institutional field of cat regulation in Australia, exemplified by the Western Australian Cat Act 2011 and the Federal Environment Minister’s 10-year campaign to eradicate feral cats. Analysis of the biopolitical dispositif of ferality, and its elements of knowledge, subjectivation and objectivation and power processes, illustrates the dispositions through which what might be regarded as felicide has become organisational practice. We propose alternative practices emphasising the productive potentialities of biopolitics.

Keywords

Animals biopolitics cats feral management regulation

Introduction

On 30 August 1835, Mary Gilbert and her cat disembarked from the schooner Enterprize on the north bank of the River Yarra in south-east Australia and founded what has become the city of Melbourne. The tabby cat was the first non-indigenous animal in the new Yarra settlement, but was soon followed by others intended as rodent controllers. Some four years later, Lady Franklin was accompanied by her cat on her overland journey from Melbourne to Sydney. However, as noted by travelling companion, Dr Hobson (1839), on 9 April, ‘after tea the cat caught a fine “rabbit rat” … [a] beautiful little animal’ (p. n.p.). While Hobson’s diary does not reveal whether the rat survived, the incident forms one of the first accounts of a cat taking a native animal.

Australian inhabitants have long displayed a schizophrenic love–hate relationship with cats. Cats were imported to Australia as part of European colonisers’ acclimatisation and to deal with plagues of mice and rabbits (Smith, 1999). They were legislatively protected as the ‘final solution’ to Australia’s rabbit problem in the 19th and early 20th centuries (Rolls, 1969; Smith, 1999). However, as conservationist attitudes spread in the late 20th century, positive sentiments towards cats reversed and they became what Ginn et al. (2014) term ‘awkward creatures’. In 1996, Member of the Western Australian (WA) Parliament, Richard Evans, called for the biological eradication of all feral, stray and domestic cats in Australia. The last 6 years have witnessed a significant upsurge in ‘the war against cats’ (Borschmann and Groch, 2014), such that Australia is said to be ‘in the grip of intense anti-cat feeling’ (Hartwell, 2014: 1). Cats are now regarded as evil and destructive. Wholesale eradications are planned, with a Federal Threat Abatement Plan (TAP) (Department of the Environment (DOE), 2015; Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (DEWHA), 2008), the WA Cat Act (WA, 2011) and the Federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt’s campaign to eradicate feral cats within a decade (Andrews, 2014; Hunt, 2014a, 2014b).

While such state-sanctioned eradication on this scale may not constitute the organisational genocide that Stokes and Gabriel (2010) describe, we, nevertheless, suggest that what may be described as practices of felicide raise important parallel issues for organisation studies. As Parchev (2014) observes, ‘the degree to which governmental systems penetrate somatic life determines the manner in which knowledge about humans and their environment is created’ (p. 458). With regard to humans and cats, enfolding and interpenetration of ‘naturecultures’ (Haraway, 2008) are strong. Revered by some Indigenous Aboriginal families, recognised as effective rodent control and offering positive mental health benefits to older people and those with chronic illnesses, cats and humans share many similarities (Murphy et al., 1999). While cognisant of vital differences between the governance of human and non-human animal subjects, we agree with Palmer (2007) that Foucault’s work on the ‘repressive and creative effects of power on bodies offers a range of tools for thinking through … human/animal relations’ (p. 83). While Foucault’s conceptualisation of power is not, in itself, institutional, it does acknowledge the role of institutions in relational processes of power. We suggest, therefore, that Foucauldian-inspired critical investigation of the institutional field (Burrell, 1988; Mohr and Neely, 2009; Starkey and McKinlay, 1998) of cat regulation enables analysis of the organisational practices and power strategies, including those of classification (Suddaby, 2010), through which relations between humans and non-human animals (cats) are effectively controlled.

Michel Foucault (2000b [1982]) advises us as researchers to focus on ‘carefully defined institutions’ (p. 342), to understand power ‘in its most regional forms and institutions’, at the points where power ‘is invested in institutions, is embodied in techniques and acquires the material means to intervene, sometimes in violent ways’ (both quotations Foucault, 2003b: 27–28). As such, we utilise the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics, and its emphasis on nexus of body–relation–practice, to tease apart the ontological and epistemological apparatus of cat regulation and to critically analyse how the protection of life is bound up with the proliferation of death. Lemke (2011) describes current manifestations of biopolitics as the ‘administrative and legal procedures that determine the foundations and boundaries of biotechnological interventions’ (p. 27): interventions to save native mammals and to cull and/or eradicate those subjectivated as threats or pests. As we indicate below, biopolitical processes centre on powerful subjectification of somatic life as an informational knowledge network.¹

In the case of cats, this knowledge is highly contested (see, for example, Doherty, 2014). Subjectivation as ‘feral’ engages extremely blurred interpretive boundaries. Yet far-reaching political decisions have been taken with regard to regulation (containment and elimination) of cats. We regard cats as material objects ‘whose integrity is formed and progressively transformed through multiple layers of information production’ (Barry, 2013: 15) in particular ways, in order to achieve a specific organisational vision of the forms of life that state institutions can and should support and those others which may be ‘let’ or caused to die (Cavanagh, 2014).

In what follows, we critically explore the notion of ‘feral’ animals, particularly cats. We argue that ‘feral’ cats are not coherent, singular objects, but are rather the effects or products of fractional relations within the institutional field of regulation. Feral cats are presences enacted into being within representational practices. But, as Foucault (1980a) points out, that which is ‘unsaid’, silent, absent or othered, is as important as the ‘said’ (p. 195) or present. The silent is ‘an element that functions alongside the things said, with them in relation to them within over-all strategies’ (Foucault, 1981 [1976]: 27). In our feral cat story, the silent encompasses environmental damage and species loss caused by humans and practices including hunting, pesticide-laden agricultural cultivation, over-grazing, urban sprawl, altered and inappropriate fire regimes, together with the impacts of other often-introduced predators such as red foxes and wild dogs.

We outline Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and its inherent elements of knowledge practices, modes of subjectivation and power processes. We explain Foucault’s (1965 [1961], 1977 [1975], 2000b [1982]) ideas about the objectivation of the subject through what he terms ‘dividing practices’, the means by which certain members of society (we include non-human animals here) are deemed to possess undesirable characteristics and are consequently divided/excluded from the norm. We then draw on these elements to analyse the current WA legislation and Federal initiatives. The population of animals is divided into classifications of species and subspecies, which, as Foucault (2003b) explains, introduces a division between ‘what must live and what must die’ (p. 254) in order for the maintenance of the population as a whole. This places a positive value on death or feral felicide. Regarding the productive potential of biopolitics, we suggest possibilities for new forms of cat subjectivities and alternative practices to those of feral felicide.

What is a feral? What does it do?

In the 1990s, the slogan ‘Ferals are foul’ was emblazoned on bookmarks, stickers and educational leaflets distributed by the State conservation department to school children in WA. The feral eradication message, then as now, was a self-evident truth. Feral animals threatened native biodiversity: ferals were destroying rare endemic flora and fauna and this alone warranted their destruction. ‘Eradication of exotic organisms, especially ferals, is an opportunity to simultaneously do good science and good conservation’ (Coblentz, 1990: 264).

As the quote from Coblentz exemplifies, the term ‘feral’ has been identified with a wide range of meanings, from ‘exotic’ (non-native, abnormal) or ‘alien’ (Hartwell, 2014) to the unowned, as we indicate below. Humans manage through schemes of classification where each item has its ‘proper place’ conceptually and materially (Foucault, 2000b [1982]). Cats, therefore, have a ‘place’ which, as we will show in WA, is as sterilised, indoor, owned and registered pets.

The place of (feral) cats in urban and rural areas is a contested one, both in Australia and internationally. Unlike in places such as the Forum in Rome, Tavistock Square in London and the Greek islands, where feral cats are regarded as aesthetically attractive and afford pleasure to humans, in Australia they tend to be blamed for decimating bird and mammal populations and spreading disease.

In Australia, where a vestigial angst appears to linger about whether European biological invaders or introduced species belong in the landscape, feral animals challenge orthodox conceptions of their being ‘brought into line’ (Clark, 2003). Several commentators draw a distinction between ‘strays’ or ‘escapees’ and ferals (e.g. Department of Local Government (DLG), 2010; DEWHA, 2008; DOE, 2015; Hartwell, 2014; Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), 2011), claiming that ferality entails an existence outside of human control. For most organisations involved in the field of cat regulation, the defining classification is that of ownership. For DEWHA (2008), DLG (2010) and DOE (2015), strays and ferals are regarded as ‘unowned’, while the RSPCA (2011) also classifies ‘unconfined’ (p. 1) animals as unowned, not being under the direct care of humans. Cats are regarded as property to be owned, often having little intrinsic value.²

Is lack of confinement or ownership, however, sufficient justification for an animal’s death? Killing feral cats is normalised as ‘predacide’ by government organisations (Marks, 2014) because feral cats are themselves killers. Subjectificated as abnormal ‘monsters’ (Foucault, 2003a [1999], 2003b), feral cats³ dwell outside, or excepted from, the normal bounds of ownership, domestication and animal rights. While Foucault recognises the existence of such a state of exception, he regards it as a normal, unexceptional mechanism of disciplinary power (Lecture of 17 March 1976).

While we do not dispute that introduced species, such as cats and feral cats, in particular, do kill other mammals and birds, the numbers of cats and extent of damage are impossible to calculate accurately. Numbers and damage are extensively modelled, often based on extrapolation from small areas. Estimates of numbers of feral cats in Australia range from 5 million to 18 million (Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC), 2014), with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) citing 15–23 million (Borschmann and Groch, 2014). The main focus of ‘damage’ is predation.

The AWC (2014) and Environment Minister Hunt (2014b), for example, claim that each night a feral cat will kill an average of five native animals (‘native’ is undefined), totalling 75 million across Australia. The Threatened Species Commissioner claims that cats are responsible for 80 million native animal deaths a day and 29 billion a year (Andrews, 2014), while Ham (2014) accuses cats of killing 30 native animals each a night, a sum total of 164.25 billion per annum. Additionally, the influential Action Plan for Australian Mammals 2012 (Woinarski et al., 2014) attributes the extinction of 20 mammal species in Australia to cats. Others claim feral cats as threatening the extinction of 80 species in the State of Victoria alone (Ham, 2014). Such eco-nationalistic logic proffers a simplistic dualism between ‘native’ species (present in Australia prior to the invasion of Europeans) and exotic or invasive species. Natives are highly valorised, which, as Van Dooren (2011) suggests, reifies ‘a specific historical moment that ignores the changing and dynamic nature of ecologies’ (p. 289).

Cats are also blamed for carrying ‘some heinous people diseases, including rabies, hookworm, and toxoplasmosis, an infection known to cause miscarriages and birth defects’, according to Butler (2011: n.p.). Such acute symptoms, however, rarely occur in non-immunocompromised humans. The WA DLG (2010) also emphasises the nuisance of ‘inappropriate behaviour, such as noise, marking of territory, digging, fighting and unwanted entering of property’ (p. 11) as a major concern for the human population.

Monstrous cats or monstrous policies? The architecture of regulation

There is a wide range of organisational practices engaged in attempts to control feral and non-feral cats. They range from local authority, State and Federal programmes for regulation to fencing, poisoning, shooting and biological control, to trap–neuter–return. In WA, some municipalities have amended their Town Planning Schemes (which manage land use) to ban cats from residential estates, while others encourage the enactment of cat-exclusion covenants for entire estates or individual properties (see, for example, Department of Parks and Wildlife (DPAW), 2013b; Lilith, 2007). The WA Cat Act 2011 enacted strong cat management legislation to ensure that responsibility for management of animals is transferred directly to their owners. Regulations include compulsory sterilisation and microchipping for cats aged 6 months and over (i.e. pre-puberty) and compulsory registration with heavy fines of up to AUD5000 for non-compliance. Cats may be seized from public or private property and taken to a ‘cat management facility’ where the cat should be returned to its owner (fine AUD5000 plus removal and care costs) if identified, or the cat will be destroyed and disposed in 3 days if unidentified, in 7 days if unclaimed or immediately if the facility operator believes the cat to be ‘feral, diseased or dangerous’ (WA, 2011: s3, 34).

The Federal Draft TAP (DOE, 2015) advocates that States take a cost-effective approach to cat management and regulation. At the local scale, the Plan seeks support for local government 24-hour containment requirements for domestic cats (DOE, 2015: 18). As fencing, trapping and shooting and trap–neuter–return are cost-ineffective (expensive and relatively unreliable) over vast geographical areas, the Australian Environment Department (DOE, 2014, 2015) encourages the use of air-dropped Curiosity^® bait, which is in the process of development and assessment (due for completion in 2016), but which is anticipated to reduce feral cat numbers by 80% (Arup and Phillips, 2014). The meat-based bait contains a pellet of para-aminopropiophenone (PAPP), which results in hypoxia, seizures, coma and death, but which the RSPCA agrees is a ‘humane’ toxin (DOE, 2014). Curiosity® could eventually replace the broad-scale use of sodium fluoroacetate of Eradicat^® 1080 baits.

1080 is a chemical compound banned in most countries internationally. It causes an inhumane, ‘prolonged and horrific death’, taking some 20–40 hours for the animal to die (The World League for Protection of Animals (WLPA), 2010), throughout much of which animals are ‘likely to be conscious and capable of suffering’ (Sharp and Saunders, 2012: 7). Non-target animals, including native species, domestic cats, dogs and livestock may also be poisoned inadvertently. While the WA government policy on Management of Pest Animals (DPAW, 2014) states that officers should undertake humane pest management activities, there is currently no WA-ratified Code of Practice (COP) or Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for humane feral cat euthanasia, rather only for that of native species (DPAW, 2013a). Feral cats thus exist in a state of exception of planned eradication rather than euthanasia. Cat management largely equates to sterilisation and ‘breeding out’ of domestic, non-pedigree ‘moggies’ and eradication of ferals. Yet, as Rose (2014) points out, humans cause far more damage in terms of suburban noise and nuisance and species deaths than do so-called animal ‘pests’.

To summarise, cats are socially constructed as not belonging in the Australian landscape. Suffering of feral cats is made silent when baits are dropped across 3,900,000 hectares of WA and in arguments centred on cost-effectiveness. The institutional field of cat regulation declares that cats are a sort of ‘enemy’ (Clark, 2015), whose lives

are not legitimate lives within the context of contemporary ecologies, and as such that their deaths are not only condoned (as they often are in legislation) but also in an important sense demanded for the sake of any genuine conservation. (Van Dooren, 2011: 290; emphasis in original)

Such human moral schizophrenia (Francione, 2000) with regard to cats resonates with what Foucault (2000c [1988]) terms an ‘antinomy of political reason’: ‘the coexistence in political structures of large destructive mechanisms and institutions oriented toward the care of individual life’ (p. 405). Institutions, such as the RSPCA, State Departments of Conservation and local government authorities care for the welfare of non-human animals, but are also involved in their extermination or ‘euthanasia’.

Biopolitics: knowledge, subjectivation and power

Michel Foucault (2000a [1974]) introduces the concept of biopolitics in 1974: ‘for capitalist society, it was biopolitics, the biological, the somatic, the corporal, that mattered more than anything else’ (p. 137), before further elaborating his ideas in subsequent years: ‘the body is a biopolitical reality’ (p. 137).⁴ He describes the ways in which governmental institutions and civic society inscribe their imprint on bodies—in this case, cat bodies—as the entrance of living species into the calculus of political rationality (Foucault, 1980a: 143). In the spirit of Foucault’s (1994 [1974]: 1391) exhortation to those in other academic domains to use his work as a tool-box, while Foucault’s work directly refers only to humans, we suggest that it may be usefully extended to include non-human animals.⁵

Foucault’s concept of biopolitics assumes the dissociation and abstraction of life from singular beings to the population as a whole. ‘As a result, “life” has become an independent, objective, and measurable factor, as well as a collective reality that can be epistemologically and practically separated from concrete living beings and the singularity of individual experience’ (Lemke, 2011: 5). This separation facilitates the definition of norms and standards and the management or ‘government’ of individuals and collectives through practices of normalisation, correction and exclusion.

In his earlier work, Foucault (1977 [1975]) explores the notion of sovereign power as the power of the sovereign to seize ‘time, bodies, and ultimately life itself’: ‘to put to death or to let live’ (both quotes Foucault, 1981 [1976]: 136). Sovereign power is a substrate power, disciplining individual bodies. Foucault argues that a different form of power—biopower, developed after the 17th century—seeks to regulate populations as a whole in the pursuit of a healthy labour force (or, in our case, a healthy native mammal population). Rather than the ‘making die and letting live’ of sovereign power, biopower is characterised by a more productive ‘making live and letting die’ (Foucault, 2003b: 247): ‘a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (Foucault, 1981 [1976]: 138). Biopolitics utilises mechanisms, such as state legislation and municipal statutes, to try to ‘control the series of random events that can occur in a living mass’ (Foucault, 2003b: 249), to predict those events and modify them if required in order to manage and maximise the life opportunities of selected beings. The notions of diversity and differences within a population become important dividing mechanisms in—ostensibly speciesist or racist (Foucault, 2003b: 239ff)—practices of determining who or what will live or die. In biopolitics, there is no contradiction between maximising life and perpetrating death (Blencowe, 2012: 97). Foucault (2000c [1988]) suggests both that ‘since the population is nothing more than what the state takes care of for its own sake, the state is entitled to slaughter it, if necessary’ (p. 416) and that ‘in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital’ (Foucault, 1981 [1976]: 137). In order that the lives of some species populations may continue, it can be necessary to sacrifice those of another, such as the cat, Felis catus. Biopolitics, the politics of biopower, may become effectively thanatopolitics—the politicisation of mass death, or felicide.

Foucault (2003b) asks important questions of how might the power to kill or murder operate in a technology of power which takes life as both its object and objective and which functions to improve life and prolong its duration:

How is it possible for a political power to kill, to call for deaths, to demand deaths, to give the order to kill, and to expose not only its enemies [feral cats] but also its own citizens [native species, domestic and farm animals and so on] to the risk of death? (p. 254)

As our analysis of institutional cat regulation will illustrate, the two forms of power are often found linked together by an intermediary assemblage of relations (Foucault, 1981 [1976]). ‘They are not independent entities but define each other’ (Lemke, 2011: 37), with biopolitical arguments, administrative and legal procedures smoke-screening, legitimating and enabling the actions of sovereign power.

There are three key elements of biopolitics: knowledge, subjectivation and power. Biopolitics is closely tied to statistical knowledge which opens up biopolitical spaces and defines subjects and objects of intervention. As Lemke (2011) comments, systems of knowledge ‘make the reality of life conceivable and calculable in such a way that it can be shaped and transformed’ (p. 119). Foucault (1984b) argued that each society has its own regime of truth: an assemblage of knowledge, techniques, institutions and procedures—often related to scientific discourses—which give value to statements such that they function as ‘true’ (p. 73). Truth is thus linked to systems of power and the procedures which (re)produce it and to the effects of power which it induces. In later work, Foucault (2014 [2012]) turned to ‘get rid of’ the notion of explicit power/knowledge in favour of developing ‘the notion of knowledge in the direction of the problem of the truth’ (p. 12). This ‘problem’ involves complex questions of parrhesia (speaking freely)⁶ and of rhetoric, the ‘art of persuading those to whom one is speaking, whether one wishes to convince them of a truth or a lie, a nontruth’ (Foucault, 2005 [2001]: 381). Analysis should investigate questions of what knowledge is assumed relevant to truth and rendered present and what is marginalised and made silent, who is afforded authority over ‘knowledge’ and the construction of truth and who or what submits to it.

Foucault’s notion of the regime of truth is linked to that of subjectivation, in which individuals constitute themselves and are constituted by others according to ‘evidence’. Although traditional readings of Foucault’s work on power relations would suggest that non-human animals cannot be treated as subjects, an increasing corpus of work offers a counter-reading which argues for their subject-hood. Bussolini (2010), Despret (2005, 2015a, 2015b), Palmer (2002, 2007), Thierman (2010) and Van Dooren (2011, 2015), for instance, claim that animals are not inert objects or ‘things’ without capacities to act or react, but are subjects shaped by a variety of forces and ‘who respond to that shaping in many different, and idiosyncratic ways’ (Thierman, 2010: 98). Furthermore, as the above authors illustrate, non-human animals can exercise, or are exercised by, power in meaningful ways, resisting and affecting events, to the extent that cats are known to refuse food and die of hunger rather than take food in laboratory experiments (Hearne, 1986).⁷

For Foucault (1984a: 942), individuals can perform as subjects who exercise power and/or as objects on whom power is exercised:

a question of determining under what conditions something can become an object for a possible knowledge, how it may have been problematized as an object to be known, to what selective procedure it may have been subjected, the part of it regarded as pertinent.

In short, ‘what are the processes of subjectivation and objectivation that made it possible for the subject qua subject to become an object of knowledge, as a subject?’ (Foucault, 1984a: 942). Cats’ lives are objectivities because they have been objectified by humans in concrete practices such as regulation. As such, Foucault encourages us to address practices as a domain of analysis, especially what he termed ‘dividing practices’ (Foucault, 1965 [1961], 1973 [1963], 1977 [1975], 2000b [1982]). Dividing practices are modes of manipulation justified by science and scientific classification, and performed through social and spatial exclusion, including death (Foucault, 2000b [1982]: 460).

Objectivation of the subject is inseparable from issues of power. Foucault (1981 [1976]) states that power

must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallisation is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies. (pp. 92–93)

In Foucault’s work, power is an active, relational process. It is a productive force in both its capacity to repress and to enable. Foucault (2000b [1982]) describes a relationship of violence as acting on a body or thing, forcing, bending, breaking, destroying or closing off all possibilities: repression through legislation and the silencing of alternative knowledge and truths, for instance. In contrast, a relationship of power, for Foucault, acts indirectly on others via their actions. Furthermore, Foucault (2000b [1982]) claims that power is exercised ‘only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are “free”, … who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments, may be realized’ (p. 342): enablement to act through resistance and unpredictable response (Foucault, 1981 [1976]). However, as Hearne (1986) and Despret (2005, 2015a, 2015b) indicate above, non-human animals possess capacities of resistance and response. Thierman, moreover, argues that Foucault’s (2000b [1982]) use of scare quotes round “free” (p. 342) could imply his scepticism on the idea of unconstrained human freedom. As such, it would undermine interpretations of Foucault’s work as differentiating between humans in possession of free will and non-humans with an ‘instinct driven, robot-like existence’ (Thierman, 2010: 101).

In his lecture on 10 January 1979, Foucault (2008 [2004]) claims that an objective of his work is to ‘show how the coupling of a set of practices and a regime of truth form a dispositif of knowledge-power’ (p. 19)—knowledge as an expression of power upon life. Foucault (1980a) describes a dispositif as ‘a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid’ (pp. 194–195). A dispositif is thus an assemblage of elements, both present and absent, including laws and covenants, plans and campaigns, scientific reports, cat registration forms and microchips, impoundment buildings, toxic bait and so on. It is the particular relations between the elements which is important. As such, Foucault adds that the dispositif has a strategic function as ‘strategies of relation of forces supporting, and supported by, types of knowledge’ (Raffnsøe et al., 2014a: 7). It tends to perform in response to something; perhaps a threat or dis-order.

A dispositif refers to the strategic ways in which practices are set up or disposed and to the attitudes and discourses (dispositions), which actualise these practices (Hillier, 2011). It is a particular configuration at a particular time which orients power relations and resistances (Bussolini, 2010): an ‘arrangement’ which makes ‘certain social tendencies or inclinations more likely to occur than others’ (Raffnsøe et al., 2014b: 4). At any time, several dispositifs may be in play. It is the relations between them which affect their influence. For example, a legal dispositif may have greater impact (such as exclusion of cats from residential estates) if special disciplinary dispositifs are established (trapping and extermination of individual cats).

New dispositifs may emerge as new guidelines for action, applicable to the social interplay, make themselves known at any given time (Raffnsøe et al., 2014b). While Thierman (2010) identifies a general dispositif of animality, we suggest that in Australia there has emerged a dispositif of ferality, which dominates the institutional field of cat regulation.

Analysis: the biopolitics of extermination

In the first 8 months of implementation of the WA Cat Act, cat impoundments increased, from an estimated 746 impoundments in 2012 to 3705 from January to August 2013 (Shel, 2014b). As Shel (2014a) emotively reports,

overzealous rangers, now with powers to heavy cat owners, began trapping pets, with rescue groups struggling to cope to accommodate the unclaimed. Cat haters have felt empowered to seize cats belonging to their neighbours, while councils have enacted trapping programs, targeting those animals unlucky enough to find themselves without an owner.

Foucault was always interested in concrete practice situations. Analysis of dispositifs DISPOSITIFS SHOULD BE ITALICISED seeks to explore how practices, events and experiences are constructed and actualised. As a heuristic tool, dispositifs DITTO allow researchers to conceptualise ‘those spaces where living beings (both human and non-human) become subjects’ (Thierman, 2010: 110). Our Foucauldian analysis of the institutional field of cat regulation provides insights into situations where people and cats as ‘awkward creatures’ coexist in particular sites as it interrogates the relations between them. The bodies of cats are enfolded through a dispositif of ferality in a biopolitics of struggle and contestation between various actors. We attempt to demonstrate the manifest interrelated knowledge, practices of subjectivation, objectivation and power relations which have formed the conditions of possibility of recent cat regulation strategies, highlighting the said and the unsaid, the regimes of truth and dividing practices performed by scientists, rescue organisations and politicians as well as resistances from the cats themselves.

While ecologists admit that ‘it is difficult to assess the relative contribution of feral cats to fauna declines as altered fire regimes, introduced herbivores, fox predation and climate change have also occurred’ (Doherty, 2013: n.p.), there is a distinct regime of truth regarding feral cats as responsible for the devastation and extinction of native species (Hartwell, 2014). The TAP (DOE, 2015) is presented under the rubric of environmental biosecurity. The science grounding the various initiatives is contestable, however: claimed numbers of cats and predation rates vary widely, with classifications of feral, stray, domesticated, unowned and owned cats often conflated. Predation, ‘damage’ and ‘nuisance’ by dingoes, foxes, domestic/farm and wild dogs and other species are absent. Simulation modelling using logistic regression is frequently used to estimate numbers and kill rates of cats, yet the ‘small print’, of the models’ goodness of fit and other limitations as a probabilistic predictor often limited to binary categories, is rarely acknowledged (see, for example, Mark and Goldberg, 2001). Figures, as reported by Minister Hunt (2014b) and journalists Borschmann and Groch (2014), lose sight of the complex association between that which is present in the data and that which is not.

Subjective imagery is rife. As ‘fur-clad outlaws’ (Smith, 1999: 297) causing a national ‘catastrophic decline’ in animal numbers (Hannam, 2014: n.p.), the issue is perfect for media headline writers. Domestic cats are depicted by scientists and politicians as ‘one day away from going feral’ (Woinarski in Borschmann and Carlisle, 2014: n.p.) with the potential to ‘morph into a far more savage beast’ (Hunt in Auldist, 2014: n.p.). Furthermore, Woinarski (2014) claims that ‘predation by feral cats was the single factor that contributed to most extinctions since European settlement of Australia’ (p. n.p.). Listing 20 species of extinct native mammals, he continues, ‘feral cats have now eliminated them, subverting our natural heritage’. This raises questions, not only about scientific accuracy but also about the constitution of Australian ‘natural heritage’. Franklin (2006) and Hartwell (2014) challenge the data, with the latter claiming that

if cats had done even a quarter of the damage claimed for the past 200 years, there would be no small native animals of any description left in Australia. While there is no denying that cats kill wildlife, they are also convenient scapegoats for wildlife depletion due to human activities.

Truths are also fragile with regard to the effects of toxic baiting. Detailed impacts of Eradicat® 1080 bait, used extensively in WA, are elided in publicly available information (e.g. Department of Primary Industries, State of Victoria (DPI), 2007),⁸ most likely, Marks (2013) argues, due to their harrowing unpalatability. Marks (2013) suggests that because decision-makers never see and hear (and do not wish to do so) what happens to a poisoned animal in the field, the cats’ ‘silence’ (pp. 54–55) numbs empathetic understanding of its subjectivity. Nevertheless, the RSPCA (2011) argues the need for action despite uncertainty and that, given the threat that cats present to wildlife populations, ‘lack of full scientific knowledge should not prevent measures being taken’ (p. 3). We conclude that knowledge is a very general category of organisation—organising science and expertise, truth games and relationality (Blencowe, 2012).

‘Australian society consists of a mixture of people: [those] who love pets and those who do not’ (Department of Sustainability and Environment, State of Victoria (DSE), 2004: 4). Cats are subjectivated both as ideal pets with therapeutic value for the elderly and as ‘mopping up the remnants of Australia’s rich and unique biodiversity’ (Borschmann and Groch, 2014: n.p.). It follows that the only ‘good’ cat is a neutered, if not exterminated, cat. The WA Cat Act and Minister Hunt’s 10-year eradication plan seek to ensure that the only cats remaining in Australia are rendered suitable for home life where they can become appropriate objects for affection (Griffiths et al., 2000). Cats are an introduced, alien or invasive species. They have been subjectivated as ‘un-Australian’ (see critique by Franklin, 2006, 2014), deserving of ‘species-cleansing’ (Franklin, 2011) in the cause of reinstating a more ‘pure’ or ‘legitimate’ Australian fauna.

Feline pets have become subjectivated as pests. Impounded urban cats that are deemed to be feral, unhealthy, aggressive, unidentified or unclaimed are euthanised. Usually, placid pets may behave ‘aggressively’ to being seized and impounded and the ‘disposal’ decision is inevitably a subjective one. As Shel (2013), a self-identified Director of Pet Rescue, comments, there are ‘cats who matter and those who don’t … Cats who have owners matter. Cats who generate income [for pounds] matter’. Other cats do not matter. Such dividing practices draw attention to the way in which valued life (of native species, owned cats) emerges ‘only as other lives [feral cats] are abandoned, damaged or destroyed’ (Ginn, 2014: 540).

Foucault (1980a: 196) claims that knowledge is justified, not by truth per se but by claims that are accepted as being valuable or true. In turn, these claims are justified by other claims. Knowledge, therefore, is a series of contingent networks of mutually reinforcing justifying claims. Inevitably, knowledge claims involve processes of power. Knowledge is both produced by power and produces power.

With regard to development of the WA Cat Act and the Environment Minister’s threatened species protection campaign, those with knowledge of institutional systems were able to utilise, manipulate and benefit from those systems. The 59-page Consultation Paper on the Proposal for Domestic Cat Control Legislation (DLG, 2010), for instance, referenced material almost exclusively which supported its arguments for regulation and control. The short consultation feedback questionnaire presupposed that cat identification must occur. It did not ask a preferred age for sterilisation, while costs and benefits were requested in quantifiable economic terms. Only a few respondents made ‘other comments’, such as proposing a night curfew. Most (436 of 502 public responses) simply addressed the set questions. Discussion of alternative strategies was thereby constrained. The WA Cat Act 2011 then enacted the proposals into statute, awarding local government municipalities and pound operators extensive powers to enter properties, seize cats, impound and dispose of them: repressive power now being performed as outlined above.

Gosling and Baker (1989) have stressed the productive power of interaction between scientist experts, policy-makers and funding agencies. Professor Woinarski, as an award-winning ornithologist and lead author of the influential Action Plan for Australian Mammals 2012, performs power as an articulate, expert scientist able to marshal strong arguments to support his claim that cats are an environmental disaster. The Action Plan served as a powerful intermediary in persuading the Environment Minister to activate the threatened species campaign. Together with op-ed pieces in public-friendly media and contributions to ABC prime-time programmes, Woinarski has successfully persuaded the Australian population to support negative subjectivation and the extermination of feral cats.

As Environment Minister, Greg Hunt has the institutional power to ratify the findings of the Action Plan, fund and appoint a Threatened Species Commissioner and establish the terms of reference for the position. The Minister can also fund research, such as for development of the Curiosity® PAPP bait. It is at this juncture, however, that we begin to discern the possible productive force of power as enablement of feral cats through unpredictable response and what might be regarded as resistance. Power as a technique of social relations is, for Foucault (2000b [1982]), exercised over free subjects who possess a range of modes of behaviour. WA field trials for PAPP indicated ‘no significant reduction’ (p. 342) in the feral cat population after baiting as no tagged cats appear to have consumed the bait (Johnston et al., 2013). Trials in South Australia suggested only a 16% decrease in cats. Cats that swallowed the bait appear to have vomited, survived and recovered, although most were later located and killed (Johnston et al., 2012). Non-consumption and vomiting perform positive acts of resistance, albeit simpler than those which Foucault (1980b) may have envisaged and which were, in this case, unsuccessful as the cats were later killed. It would appear, therefore, that the relationship between feral cats and government institutions is that of violence rather than of empowerment.

From felicitous felines to ferocious ferals and beyond

Antipathy towards (feral) cats may be linked to fears about a loss of human control over Australian nature. Cats represent disruption of an ecological order which conservationists value. As such, the inherent non-nativeness of cats is emphasised as dividing practice. In the institutional field of cat regulation, science is rhetorically invoked as ‘truth’ to persuade the public and politicians that cats are a problem and that ‘something must be done’. Numbers and lists of species are cited extensively, although it is often debatable as to what the numbers refer. All cats or simply feral cats? What is the definition of feral? All animals or simply native mammals? What is the definition of native? How have the numbers been calculated? Texts and statements are presented so that there is only one conclusion that readers can make: in Australia, cats are invasive pests which destroy our native heritage; therefore, they do not belong; therefore, their lives are not legitimate. The Draft TAP (DOE, 2015) proposes spending over AUD1,000,000 on ‘community education’ to raise awareness of the impact of cat predation on ecological communities and to increase public support for feral cat management. Readers are enrolled into the objectification of cats and to enact policies to regulate all cats and exterminate all unowned (i.e. feral) cats.

Conservationists have tended to be insufficiently explicit (Robbins and Moore, 2012) in recognising or making present the impacts of other species, particularly humans, on the loss of Australian biota. A grand vilification narrative of ‘the cat did it’ renders absent the actions of other culprits and grossly simplifies complex disturbance ecologies. The cat, alone, did not ‘do it’, however. If habitat loss due to human activities is the biggest killer of wildlife in Australia and internationally (RSPCA, 2011) and the role of other predators (especially foxes, dogs and dingoes) is considered, it is difficult to disagree with Smith (1999: 301) and Hartwell (2014: n.p.) that the cat is subjectivated as a convenient scapegoat. That there is ‘mileage to be gained from stirring up hatred is a stand-out feature of contemporary Australian politics’ (Rose, 2013: 2). Whether ‘hatred’ of cats, non-native or feral species of animals or even of humans, some actors are eager to use knowledge as power to persuade public opinion towards particular strategies of control and regulation.

In Australia in particular, such logic opens up problematisation of broader issues. For instance, ‘introduced’ or ‘invading’ Europeans practised regulation, if not acts of extermination, on Aboriginal peoples⁹ and endemic flora and fauna through the ideology of terra nullius. Moreover, the Eurocentric conceptual framework, manifest in the infamous ‘White Australia Policy’,¹⁰ together with active ‘acclimatisation societies’ (which introduced European fauna and flora in efforts to assimilate the new land to the old), reinforced the idea of Australia as a deficient, empty land (Clark, 2003; Plumwood, 2005). Such colonial attitudes have undergone a reversal in the more recent past, such that ‘native’ species (those thought to be present in Australia before White colonisation) are now valued and conserved, to the extent of ‘species-cleansing’ those regarded as feral.

The dispositif of ferality is one based on silence, exclusion and repression. In this sense, several authors make connections to culturally loaded discussions of xenophobia, ecological patriotism, racism and fascism (see, for example, Grӧning and Wolschke-Bulmahn, 2003; Head, 2012; Head and Muir, 2004; Olwig, 2003; Smout, 2003). An ‘authentic concern with preserving the natural’ (Ferry, 1995: 105) has labelled owning, or even liking, cats as ‘un-Australian’ (Franklin, 2011). For Franklin (2013: n.p.), cats have become a useful anomaly for those ‘who want to uphold a state of anxiety about belonging and not-belonging in Australia’.

Claims about the ‘natural’ heritage of Australia silence the fact that ecologies change over time. Static conceptions of a pure, pre-European biota that must be restored are, therefore, anachronistic. Cat-endangered Western or Spotted-tail quolls, for instance, are themselves ‘native cats’ (Dasyurus) positioned ‘at the top of the food chain’ (Foundation for Australia’s Most Endangered Species Ltd. (FAME), 2015), preying on threatened species of birds, lizards, small and mid-sized mammals (bandicoots, possums), respectively, and could have dramatically affected ecological systems had cats not been present. Moreover, could it not be argued, as does Marks (2014), that introduced species in Australia are part of the colonial legacy and testament to ‘bygone values’ as a sort of cultural heritage? It should also be recognised that humans are part of nature, not separate from it. The colonial destruction of marsupial carnivores, such as the Tasmanian Tiger (Thylacine), set in motion the cascading loss of species, now being blamed on cats. If those carnivores were still around today, cats would be their prey. Furthermore, humans are the main cause of environmental degradation through habitat destruction accompanying land clearing for agriculture and urban development, changed fire regimes, over-grazing and use of chemical herbicides and pesticides—among other problems. We suggest that nature/culture and human/non-human animal binaries should be made redundant.

Organisations frequently manage through classificatory dividing practices: land use zones, protected/non-protected, urban/rural, domestic/feral. Categories such as these all relate to issues of who and what belongs or does not belong in certain places. If belonging is comprehended as a set of practices and processes rather than a known ontological condition (Instone, 2009), its varying meanings for different actors and the ways in which belonging is actively made present and rendered absent/excluded through the practices of humans and non-humans can be revealed. The institutional field of cat regulation materially performs biopolitical dividing practices of belonging and exclusion which include subjectivation of actors (as knowledgeable expert scientists and conservationists, concerned citizens) and the objectivation of domestic and feral cats, reification of certain knowledge claims as ‘truths’ and, through enactment of powerful statutes, the regulation, possible seizure and elimination of ‘unowned’ or ‘feral’ animal populations.

Sovereign power and biopower are folded together in cat regulation. The sovereign power of WA and Federal regimes acts on the individual bodies of cats under the mask of treating populations as a whole. Biopower makes the population of native mammals live by letting cat populations die. Sovereign power makes cats die so that native mammals are let live. It also makes feral cats die while domestic cats are let live. The ‘massacre’ of cats is regarded as ‘vital’ ‘in the name of life necessity’ (Foucault, 1981 [1976]: 137) of native mammals. The theatres of organisational decision-making and of politics rarely appreciate the complexities of relations between humans, non-humans and place. Ecological assemblages of human and non-human relations are difficult, if not impossible, to quantify, let alone to model and predict with any useful degree of accuracy. Complex issues are (over-)simplified. For instance, there is no single ecological ‘system’ from which removing (feral) cats would solve the problem of native species decline. Neither is there any simple ‘one size fits all’ solution (DOE, 2015; RSPCA, 2011). It is important to recognise that no regulation and eradication programmes can involve ‘humane deaths’ nor be confined solely to target species (the feral cat). Paradoxically, cat laws, such as in WA, encourage and increase the impounding and killing of non-feral as well as feral cats while claiming to reduce these very actions.

In the spirit of a biopolitics positively motivated by concern to protect, working with the dynamic aspects of a dispositif of ferality, we ask whether it might be possible to build on Foucault’s ideas of bringing into question the agonism between power relations and the intransitivity and irreducibility of freedom (Foucault, 2000b [1982]: 343), to promote new forms of subjectivity and suggest other, alternative practices to that of felicide.

In what Marks (2014) refers to as ‘the ethical no man’s [sic] land lying between animal welfare and conservation science’ (p. 2), even if the state of exception of ferality were to be maintained, perhaps we may, nevertheless, be able to deliver less poor welfare outcomes. This might involve bringing to attention the non-human suffering caused by 1080 bait (see, in particular, Marks, 2013) and organisational bans on use of 1080 across the whole of Australia. In addition, managers could be required to adhere to euthanasia guidelines, COPs and SOPs, if feral cats must be killed. Sharp and Saunders (2012) have prepared a Model COP for the Humane Control of Feral Cats (CATCOP) which is available nationally ‘as a guide only’ to ‘provide information and recommendations’ (DOE, 2015: 12) to managing agents. The draft TAP (DOE, 2015) also advocates development of new SOPs for all cat control tools, including toxic baiting.

Although these national moves could be regarded as an improvement on current practice, we suggest that there are several issues which should be considered. First, the prioritisation of cost-effectiveness, rather than humaneness, in selection of control mechanism will result in continued use of air-dropped toxic bait (DOE, 2015: 12). Second, by focussing on how feral cats ought to be ‘managed’ (excluded from small, controllable areas) or killed, there is silence on the question of whether they ought to be excluded or killed in the first place. As Clark (2015) points out, ‘labels’ such as ‘feral’ objectivate the cats and ‘settle’ (p. 47) the question of moral significance for us, telling us who should live and who should die in the name of some popular conception of what the environment ought to be. Third, the concept of humane killing concentrates on how, rather than why, a cat is killed, thereby deflecting attention from the issue above. Finally, COP guidelines could serve to rationalise the ethics of killing cats in the name of biosecurity, protecting threatened species, thus reducing killing to a simple regulatory question of compliance (Clark, 2015).

Revoking the state of exception of feral cats would entail recognising the enfolding of cats’ lives with those of humans and non-humans and accepting ecosystem change as inevitable. As Mathews (2004) explains, ‘it might mean that we should forego interventionist “management” and allow natural processes to reassert themselves, however distressing it might be to watch native plants and animals disappearing’ (p. n.p.). There will always be incompossibilities between the needs of different beings (fauna, flora, humans) which will involve the relative flourishing of some and imply the death of others (Haraway, 2008). Red foxes, wild dogs, dingoes, Tasmanian devils and quolls could be encouraged in Australia to suppress cats as their natural prey (DOE, 2015). A positive Foucauldian practice of biopolitics with regard to cats could place less emphasis on the thanatopolitics of making die and more on a politics of letting live.

Conclusion

Since Mary Gilbert and her cat landed in Melbourne, how cats are subjectivated and managed in Australia has changed significantly. From valued rodent controller to despised invasive predator, the Australian story is being ‘rewritten’ (Borschmann and Groch, 2014) to depict cats as a ‘furry killing machine’ (Stafford, 2013), an environmental disaster ‘worse than climate change’ (Auldist, 2014). Felix has turned feral (Woinarski, 2014), devouring his way through several billion native mammals a year. It has been a short syntactic and semantic transition for pets to become pests.

While Foucault’s work may have been anthropocentric,¹¹ we suggest that his concepts can help us to see human–non-human animal relationships in new ways,¹² to broaden consideration of forms of subject-hood, resistance and redirection of power and to open up new areas of social, political and ethical issues for critical investigation. A Foucauldian-inspired approach seeks to analyse institutions in terms of local attempts to find solutions to particular problems. As such, we have attempted to address the assumptions and character of contemporary management practices relating to the institutional field of cat regulation. A dispositif of ferality structures social fields of action, guides political practices and is realised through state apparatuses (Lemke, 2011: 44). Classification of cats as ‘feral’, or ‘unowned’ in urban areas, strips them of any moral status they might otherwise have (Clark, 2015). ‘Unowned’ cats in WA risk seizure, impoundment and death. We engage the concept of biopolitics to make present the conditions of the ferality dispositif. The dispositif as disposition organises the production of what counts and how it is counted: a ‘mattering’ (Blencowe, 2012). Native mammals matter, cats that have responsible owners matter and cats that generate income for pound operators matter.

As Blencowe (2012) writes, ‘arts of government, power and legitimisation plug into a plethora of experiential truth—and other-games’ (p. 194). Foucauldian biopolitics offers a way of understanding what is happening when scientists, conservationists, welfare activists and politicians rhetorically ‘play upon the heart strings’ (Blencowe, 2012: 194) of the Australian public regarding a ‘second wave of mammalian extinctions’ (Borschmann and Carlisle, 2014: n.p.).

The dispositif of ferality situates the life of one species in a direct relationship with the disappearance of another. As Lemke (2011) comments, ‘it furnishes the ideological foundation for identifying, excluding, combating, and even murdering others, all in the name of improving life’ (p. 42). Native mammals are objectivated as having ‘rights’ to live unmolested in their particular domains (Smith, 1999: 296). Robbins and Moore (2012) refer to such a view as ‘restorative nostalgia’ for a ‘native’ (p. 4) environment, which can never again exist.

Biopolitical analysis facilitates comprehension of how the institutional field of cat regulation differentiates populations of animal species as a whole, and Felis catus in particular, into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and how a dividing line is established ‘between what must live and what must die’ (Foucault, 2003b: 254). Biopolitical analysis makes present ‘the always contingent, always precarious difference between politics and life, culture and nature’ (Lemke, 2011: 31). It questions the assumptions beneath the unquestioned and behind legal actions and demonstrates how they are subject to ‘specific and contingent rationalities and incorporate institutional preferences and normative choices’ (Lemke, 2011: 122). Biopolitical analysis can make present the various knowledge, subjectivations, objectivations and power-plays which constitute the dispositif of ferality, and in so doing it may loosen present claims (Blencowe, 2012: 198) and open up possibilities of acting otherwise.

When Mary Gilbert brought her cat to Melbourne, she could not have foreseen what the legacy of her cat jumping ashore would be. Critical biopolitical analysis of the processes of cat regulation can encourage us to think differently, to ‘imagine new possibilities, to search for new freedoms and new identities’ (Bevir, 1999: 356). Transformative political action—whether banning 1080, mandating use of COPs or learning to live with ‘monsters’ and ‘awkward creatures’—can challenge relations of authority, open up new ethical domains and create new spaces for conduct in which felicide as organisational policy and practice may become unconscionable.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Comments from the three referees and John Pløger, plus discussion with Jonathan Metzger on incompossibility, have significantly strengthened the paper, for which many thanks.

Notes

Author biographies

Jean Hillier is emeritus professor of Sustainability and Urban Planning at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include poststructural planning theory and methodology for strategic practice in conditions of uncertainty, planning with non-human animals, and problematisation of cultural heritage practices in spatial planning. Recent books include Connections: exploring contemporary planning theory and practice with Patsy Healey (2015), edited with Jonathan Metzger; Deleuze and Guattari for Planners (InPlanning e-book, 2013); Complexity and the Planning of the Built Environment (2012) edited with Gert de Roo and Joris Van Wezemael, The Ashgate Research Companion to Planning Theory: Conceptual Challenges for Spatial Planning (2010) and Critical Essays in Planning Theory (2008) both edited with Patsy Healey.

Jason Byrne is associate professor in Urban & Environmental Planning at Griffith University, School of Environment and a member of Griffith’s Urban Research Program and Environmental Futures Research Institute. A geographer and planner, research interests include: urban nature, environmental justice and political ecologies of climate change adaptation. He previously worked as a planning officer, environmental officer and policy writer with the West Australian state government. He has over 70 scholarly publications, including the edited book ‘Australian Environmental Planning: Challenges and Future Prospects’ awarded the 2015 Planning Institute of Australia’s Cutting Edge Research and Teaching Award for National Excellence.

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Is extermination to be the legacy of Mary Gilbert’s cat?

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

What is a feral? What does it do?

Monstrous cats or monstrous policies? The architecture of regulation

Biopolitics: knowledge, subjectivation and power

Analysis: the biopolitics of extermination

From felicitous felines to ferocious ferals and beyond

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Notes

Author biographies

References