Abstract
This article demonstrates how human–animal interactions are uniquely important to the negotiation of group identity and its boundaries. I use ethnographic, interview, and archival historical data to examine Alberta, Canada’s province-wide rat control program and its decades-old claim to ‘rat-free’ status. Using an approach to culture as systems of shared meaning, I investigate the significance of this institutional rat control effort and why being ‘rat-free’ is a meaningful distinction in Alberta. I argue that this rat control program is one element of an overarching project of border policing and ‘boundary work’ that continually works to define the limits of Albertan collective identity. Rat control contributes to this project both by clarifying the actual geographic borders of the province and by narratively constructing a notion of Albertan identity. This analysis provides useful and widely applicable insight into the unique capacity of animals to participate in boundary work, owing to their dual identities as cultural objects and elements of the biophysical landscape, which makes them instrumental in negotiating both spatial and symbolic boundaries.
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