To catch a predator: Regimes of killing the mink in Sweden

Abstract

This paper examines regimes of killing the American mink (Neovison vison) in Sweden, a species introduced through fur farming and now targeted as invasive due to its ecological impacts. While policy frames mink control as a necessary conservation intervention, eradication remains unlikely; I conceptualize and interrogate management attempts to cull mink as distinct regimes of killing that differ in temporality, scale, technology, and forms of human/animal encounter. In this way, the paper brings attention not to the justification of killability of an invasive species, as much contemporary biopolitical scholarship focuses on, but the hows and whos of the regimes of killing. Drawing on ethnographic material, I contrast solitary, routine trapping, often embedded in domestic and land-based stewardship, with organized culling hunts involving multiple participants, dogs, and coordinated technologies. These regimes appear to align with different hunting modalities including distributed, anticipatory forms versus immediate, collective confrontation. However, I show they also share underlying features, including reliance on landscape knowledge, the redistribution of responsibility, and the management of both presence and absence in the act of killing. I situate these practices within broader debates on animal welfare in invasive species management. Given the limited literature on mink specifically, I draw on EU guidance to show how welfare is unevenly distributed across methods: trapping concentrates risks around device performance, restraint, and delayed death, while hunting foregrounds pursuit, stress, and the possibility of wounding. Rather than treating methods as simply humane or inhumane, the paper highlights how different regimes produce distinct configurations of suffering, skill, and accountability. I argue that these killing practices not only manage animal populations but also enact particular human/animal relationships, revealing how care, control, and violence are differently organized across conservation contexts.

Introduction

In Europe, the North American mink (Neovison vison) is entangled in multiple regimes of killing. Once introduced through industrial fur farming, the species is now widely classified as an invasive alien species and, where possible, is subjected to control through hunting, trapping, and coordinated culls (Melero et al., 2012; Melero et al., 2018). The rationale for such interventions is primarily ecological: mink are known to threaten native biodiversity, particularly ground-nesting birds in coastal environments (Bonesi and Palazon, 2007). Vocal animal rights activism has mobilised against killing mink in fur farming in the past fifty or so years (Kleibert et al., 2020), having succeeded in focusing scientific scrutiny, enacting standards for minimum welfare standards (such as Council Directive 98/58/EC) and even bringing countries like Sweden into a phase out of the fur farming industry altogether. Yet when it comes to the killing of wild mink, neither the justification nor the methods have been scrutinized or even questioned.

This paper examines how current mink killing is organized through distinct regimes of killing: which I define as socio-material arrangements that shape how death is enacted and the killing practices distributed. Focusing on the control of wild mink in Sweden, this paper compares two dominant modes of killing: organized hunting and lethal trapping. At first glance, these practices appear to represent a clear distinction. Hunting involves direct, embodied encounters between hunters, dogs, and prey, often framed in terms of attentiveness, skill, and immediacy (Gieser, 2018a). Trapping, by contrast, appears to delegate the act of killing to a mechanical device, separating the moment of human intervention from the moment of death. For this reason, and as I will show, trapping has frequently been positioned – both in the literature and by those hunters – as a more controversial or morally ambiguous form of killing (Corsín Jiménez and Nahum-Claudel, 2019; Vitali, 2010).

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with hunters and residents in the Stockholm and Uppland archipelago, I argue that hunting and trapping are best understood not as oppositional practices, but as differently configured regimes of killing that redistribute agency, temporality, and ethical responsibility in distinct ways. Moreover, the hunter versus trapper opposition breaks down at several points. Both practices involve anticipatory forms of knowledge, distributed agency across human and non-human actors, and ongoing negotiations of presence and absence in the act of killing. At the same time, they differ in how killing is organized across time, how responsibility is assigned, and how moral assessments are made, on both sportsmanship and on animal welfare. By bringing these practices into the same analytical frame, the paper challenges simple distinctions between direct and indirect killing, presence and absence, and skill and automation.

Empirically, the paper contributes a grounded account of how invasive species control is enacted through everyday practices that rely on citizen participation, local knowledge, and improvised infrastructures (Crispo et al., 2011; Martin and Lea, 2020). In Sweden, where institutional support for mink management is relatively limited compared to neighbouring countries, such practices depend heavily on volunteer hunters, landowners, and conservation initiatives. In this way, they leverage biosecurity citizenship (Shortall and Brown, 2020) to enrol civilians in the ‘fight’ against invasive species. Trapping appears as a way of doing this, having a lower threshold for entry than hunting. But sustaining motivation for such work is sometimes challenging when there is no commodity value to the mink today, either as meat or fur (Stien and Hausner, 2018; von Essen et al., 2025a).

A brief historical background

The loss of the mink's commodity value today must be understood within a broader historical and cultural context. Historically, the presence of American mink in Europe is closely tied to the expansion of the fur industry in the twentieth century ¹ , through which the species was introduced and subsequently escaped and was released into the wild (Jernelöv, 2017). Publicized escapes are generally associated with activists protesting the fur farming industry. However, during periods of scarcity around the Second World War, hunters and farmers also introduced mink to the wild to supplement their income (Harris and Yalden, 2008). From the outset, the rapidly proliferating mink were quickly incorporated into longer-standing traditions of controlling mustelids as vermin and competitors, particularly where they were perceived to threaten game species and coastal birdlife (Bonesi and Palazon, 2007). In Sweden, the mink population grew exponentially from the mid-1940s to the 1960s and then stabilized for two decades before exploding again and tripling to its peak in the 1980s (Jernelöv, 2017). At all times they have been hunted. Contemporary practices of hunting and trapping build on, and reconfigure, these earlier regimes of extraction and pest control.

Contribution of paper

Theoretically, this paper contributes to multispecies studies and biopolitical scholarship, especially its strand of necropolitics focused more surgically on examining how death practices are enacted (Jarzebowska, 2018; Mbembé and Meintjes, 2003; van Heijgen et al., 2025). It shows how different killing regimes enact and reconfigure human-animal relations and redistribute ethical responsibility across humans, animals, and technologies. It also speaks to emerging debates on animal welfare in invasive species management, where questions of suffering, necessity, and moral justification remain unevenly developed if at all addressed (Mankad et al., 2019; Palmer et al., 2026; von Essen et al., 2024). By attending to both the continuities and transformations in how mink are killed today, the paper highlights the ethical and political ambiguities that underpin contemporary conservation practices and their dark underside of culling that which threatens it.

The analysis proceeds as follows. First, I outline the theoretical framework for understanding regimes of killing in invasive species management. I then present the methodological approach and fieldwork on which the paper is based. The empirical sections examine hunting and trapping in turn, before a comparative discussion that traces their convergences and tensions. I conclude by reflecting on the implications of these findings for debates on animal welfare, ethical killing, and multispecies relations in conservation.

Theoretical framework: regimes of killing, multispecies relations, and the politics of invasive life

Killing as practice: from industrial slaughter to situated “death work”

Regimes of killing can be understood as socio-material arrangements through which animal death is organized, enacted, and made meaningful. Studies of industrialized slaughter have emphasized the routinization, standardization, and distancing of killing, in which death is organized through “rules, routines, repetitions” (Marvin, 2006: 17) and how workers are spatially and affectively separated from the act of killing (Wadiwel, 2015). In other words, it is controlled and regulated. In contrast, research on hunting has highlighted the situational nature of the hunt, including its forms of embodied skill, attentiveness, and direct encounter, often framed through ideals of fair chase and ethical conduct (Knight, 2003; Marvin, 2003; von Essen, 2017).

Bringing these perspectives together, scholars have conceptualized animal killing as a form of death work (Sanders, 2010), emphasizing its moral ambivalence and the ways in which care, responsibility, and violence are entangled in practice (Holloway et al., 2022). Recent work has further shown that recreational killing can involve forms of environmental stewardship and ethical reflection, which complicates simple oppositions between e.g., instrumental and respectful relations to animals (Shephard et al., 2024). Killing some to save others, a biopolitical or necropolitical practice, has been at the forefront of this journal for years, adding both width and depth in case studies from across the world (Crowley et al., 2018; Johnston, 2026; Kornherr, 2025). However, much of this literature has focused on either highly industrialized contexts or on paradigmatic forms of hunting, leaving less examined those practices that combine elements of both: such as trapping, which occupies an ambiguous position between mechanization and situated engagement. More than an analytical concern, an enduring hierarchy of animal death work, often relegates trapping to mere slaughter or ‘dirty work’ done by those who are not real hunters (Emond et al., 2021).

Multispecies and relational perspectives: distributed agency and more-than-human practices

To account for this ambiguity, the paper draws on multispecies and relational approaches that conceptualize human-animal interactions as distributed across heterogeneous assemblages of humans, non-human animals, and material devices. This literature emphasizes how action, such as coordinating dogs in a hunt toward the prey animal, emerges through “conjoint cross-species conduct” (Brown, 2015) and material-corporeal relations (Peltola and Heikkilä, 2015). Beyond dogs, this perspective has involved attention also to the role of landscapes, technologies, and even other wildlife in shaping the unfolding of the hunt (van Heijgen et al., 2024), as well as to the ways hunters must attune themselves to the movements, perceptions, and behaviours of their prey (Gieser, 2018b). Such perspectives resonate with Uexküll's notion of Umwelt, which highlights the species-specific worlds through which animals perceive and act (Von Uexküll, 1992). Successful hunting – and, as this paper shows, also trapping – depends on the ability to anticipate and temporarily inhabit these perceptual worlds.

Anthropological studies of traps extend this relational perspective by examining how killing can be delegated, distributed, and temporally extended through material devices (Spriggs, 2016). Traps have been described as “surrogate hunters” (Nelson, 1986) and as “mechanical servants” (Brandstetter, 2012), embodying both physical and intellectual labour. Traps can be understood as sites where human intention, animal behaviour, and material affordances converge, requiring careful calibration and ongoing adjustment (Corsín Jiménez and Nahum-Claudel, 2019). In this sense, trapping exemplifies what Gell (1996) describes as distributed agency where action is dispersed across persons and things.

Temporality and the organization of killing

A further dimension through which regimes of killing can be instructively distinguished is temporality. In hunting, Marvin's (2003; 2006) distinction between eruption and irruption captures the alternation between anticipation and sudden, intensified action. Hunting unfolds within a relatively bounded temporal frame, in which moments of waiting, tracking, and encounter are closely linked. By contrast, trapping has been theorized as a practice that “twists time” (Spriggs, 2016), separating the moment of human intervention from the moment of capture. As Corsín Jiménez and Nahum-Claudel (2019) argue, traps involve “prefiguring a moment of capture distant in space and time,” projecting the hunter's intentions into an uncertain future. This creates a form of presence-at-a-distance, in which the trapper remains affectively and cognitively engaged with the trap despite physical absence (Anderson et al., 2017). Temporality thus becomes a key axis along which different regimes of killing are organized, shaping not only how killing occurs but how it is (morally) experienced and interpreted.

Ethics, responsibility, and the problem of “good killing”

These configurations of agency and temporality are closely tied to questions of ethical responsibility. In hunting, ethical evaluation often centers on ideals of skill, control, and fair chase, which position the hunter as directly accountable for the animal's death (Causey, 1989; List, 1998; Peterson, 2004). Trapping, by contrast, has historically been associated with at least some degree detachment and moral ambiguity, precisely because the act of killing is delegated to a device.

Nevertheless, relational perspectives complicate this distinction by showing that responsibility is not simply a matter of proximity. Even in trapping, responsibility is distributed across the design, placement, and maintenance of the trap, as well as the knowledge practices that underpin its use. Both hunting and trapping raise questions about animal welfare, particularly in contexts where killing is justified in the name of ecological management. Emerging work on invasive species management highlights the relative underdevelopment of welfare considerations in such contexts, where the moral status of target species is often diminished (Smith et al., 2022). The fact that humane trapping standards for many invasive species originate from the fur industry context also means there is little interest in devising truly compassionate forms of killing, insofar as these exist. Still, in indigenous cultures in North America, it has been shown that both trapping and hunting involve rituals of asking for permission or forgiveness: they are hence not morally separated (Nelson, 1986).

The politics of invasive species: classification, legitimacy, and normalized killing

Finally, this analysis is situated within critical scholarship on invasive species, which has shown that such classifications are not purely ecological but also political, cultural, and historically contingent (Gelink and von Essen, 2025; van Dooren, 2011). While there is no space here to relay the scholarship on this topic even in this journal, the designation of a species as “invasive” legitimizes particular forms of intervention, including widespread killing, while obscuring alternative ways of relating to these animals (Mazhary, 2021). Scholars have highlighted how such categories can naturalize violence and frame certain species as legitimate targets of eradication (Crowley et al., 2018).

Whether the mink is a welcome guest or an unwanted outsider hinges on whom you ask in Sweden. But despite its cute appearance and occasional appreciation by tourists in the archipelago, there appears a consensus that it is poses a threat to native species and therefore needs to be controlled where the damage is severe (Jernelöv, 2017). The status of the mink today intersects with longer histories of perceiving mustelids as vermin, competitors, and objects of extraction (Bonesi and Palazon, 2007). These histories help explain both the normalization of lethal control and the uneven moral scrutiny applied to different killing practices, as outlined in the introduction.

Method

As part of the project BIOrdinary: Biodiversity dilemmas in ordinary places mink culling featured as one case study of managing invasive species in ordinary places: that is, outside of protected areas and in connection with people living around them. In this case study (2023–2025), which I focused geographically around the Stockholm and Uppland archipelago, I conducted interviews with mink cullers, trappers and hunters in the local areas, and one veterinarian (via phone). The work of the Interreg funded project FAMNA (2017–2020), “management of American mink in the Bothnia-Atlantica area” (spelling out FAMNA in Swedish), including a report evaluating traps, provided a helpful background in place of a document analysis, given the scarcity of such texts on the topic in Sweden and elsewhere. I also had to reach out to Norwegian mink hunters on one occasion to supplement the paucity of experiences by Swedes.

I attended two mink hunts in the spring time of 2023 and 2024 at the invitation of the hunting leader. In addition to this, I visited three communities in the archipelago to discuss mink and bird population dynamics, and broader wildlife issues on their respective islands and inlets. Some communities had organised initiatives around sustainability, like Nämdö Green Archipelago, while others mostly controlled for mink in an ad-hoc way by individual hunters and trappers.

My conversations in the field took the form of focus groups and informal chats one-on-one. On several occasions, both in the field and at a mink seminar in Stockholm, I got to inspect (albeit empty) mink traps, including how they were set up—presented as an easy task. To contextualise findings, I was also able to refer back to my research on municipal cullers disposing of problem and pest wildlife, including in archipelago settings (von Essen and Redmalm, 2023). This research helped situation mink culling in broader dynamics of hunting unwanted species, including nascent considerations of animal welfare, aesthetics of kills before the public, and dilemmas of killing ‘cute’ species. The case study was approved by ethical review as part of the research project BIOrdinary: Biodiversity dilemmas in ordinary places at Stockholm University. For reasons of anonymity, my findings have been cleaned of identifying details like person or place names. In what follows, I now present the two regimes of killing one after the other, starting with the hunt.

Findings

Part 1: Hunt as eruption – multispecies equipage and choreography

Mink hunts are typically reserved for those coastal areas or islands where waterfowl are particularly endangered or where there has been a dramatic drop in native bird diversity. The goal is to thin out, if not eradicate, mink populations to allow for bird populations in particular to recover. Hence, it is not a typical everyday hunt where a hunter can grab his shotgun and dog and head out hoping for some luck, unless in prime mink habitat. A hunter says that theoretically, “You can just as well sit and wait on rocks where you’ve seen pups, often in the month of May. But it's patient-testing.” Despite having no clear commodity value at the end, the organised mink cull, like most hunts, is multifunctional in terms of involving also enjoyment, camaraderie, training with dogs and being out in nature. Spring and late summer or early autumn are preferred times, as the mink is bold and dispersing, claiming territory. A hunter tells me: “An early morning in August is ideal, the young mink are out playing and very curious, so it's very effective [to be out hunting]”. In the spring, a lucky shot can also target pregnant females, thus also eliminating future offspring.

The mink hunt is likened to two other hunts by two different informants: a Norwegian hunter who is professionally employed to cull mink in Norway states that it is almost like a “miniature moose hunt”; and a Swedish hunter who is on one of this first mink hunts in the archipelago likens it to black grouse shooting in the mountains. But the mink hunt is unique in many respects. It straddles the interface of marine and terrestrial, involving elements of both (such as boats ² ); while it utilizes dogs same as most Nordic hunts, mink hunters have also embraced the leaf-blower to flush mink out of crevices: it seems that modern problems require modern solutions. When flushed out, the mink steals away like a projectile atop cliffs, under brushes, and underwater. The hunt needs to be multi-person, multi-vehicular, and multispecies. Hunters drive to the archipelago and then take a boat out to reach the small islands where mink reside. A division of labor, in terms of dog handlers, shooters, occasional boat captains and, if needed, secondary shooters, characterizes the hunt in a relatively small area.

Multispecies triads and quartets come in

The role of dogs during the mink hunt is an example of the “material and corporeal relation” (Peltola and Heikkilä, 2015, 716) and “conjoint cross-species conduct” (Brown, 2015) mentioned above. The mink hunt typically features a diverse cast of dogs at various stages in their lives, at various sizes and temperaments. The preferred dog is one that is light enough to bounce off cliffs and quickly and agilely pursue the mink; one that doesn’t need the endurance of coursing dogs, and is not so tiny as to get into a crevice and scuffle with mink. A hunter tells me that he “had a terrier that was good sport but not great at precision”, meaning that a good mink hunting dog needs to precisely mark where the mink is, and not bark aimlessly. To train dogs on mink, they are often introduced to scents, traces or even dead mink as puppies. This inauguration into killing is common to most hunts where the dog is to specialize on one species and not pick up on and get distracted by other species during the hunt. The process can extend also to breeding the right sort of dogs: while there is no ‘mink dog breed’, selecting for the right temperament and skill may be seen as shaping the agency of a dog already in prior generations. Hence, while the dog has much space for improvisation during the hunt, much of this has ideally been circumscribed by breeding and training for the right sort of agency.

At the start of the hunt, the dog smells the mink, its burrow or where it has recently been, and uses its nose to trace its current whereabouts. Upon finding traces, the dog will bark to indicate. The hunter tells me that the bark should come “when having clear contact, and not before”, but incessant barking can pretty much be heard all throughout the hunt. The dogs spur on each other's excitement, barking themselves up into a frenzy, digging together, and even tousling over the mink carcass when the hunt is done. A skilled dog handler will be able to tell from the nature of the barking at which phase the dog is in in terms of contact. I’m further told that as a hunter, you need to not only be in tune with your dog, but also to be one step ahead, and “operate with an idea of where the mink is, or will be”.

The leafblower, for which a permit is required, is the last thing to enter the picture if needed, typically if and when the mink manages to hide away in burrows and crevices. The leafblower with its noise and air, flushes out the mink and into plain view for a shot. In one of the hunts I attended, one hunter shot the mink with a pistol, whereupon it bounced off the cliff, critically injured but still moving, into the water. A second hunter, perched on a high ground on a cliff beside them, shot it with shotgun shell in the water, and a third hunter shot it as well just in case. A dog was sent to retrieve it, in bitingly cold March waters. The operation was declared “hell of a team work”, that took approximately 20 min in total.

Disposal and clean-up duty

With these sorts of shots, with the wild mink's small size, and with varying quality coats throughout the year, it is not a priority to try to obtain the mink's fur from the prey, once so prized that they were behind the bringing of North American mink to Europe in the first place. I ask about the role of the fur today, and the hunters declare it is a bit “taboo” or “politically incorrect”, but in a light-hearted way. The Swedish term they use is “ej omsättbar”, meaning the fur's inability to be put into a market today.

The quarry is wrapped up in a sack with the other mink from that day. The total tally is not substantial, but added together, a mink hunter who specializes in this can get over a thousand per year in some regions. Still, the hunter I’m with tells me that it is not for everyone: a strong desire to eat what you kill deters some hunters from mink and predator hunting generally. Instead, the task is borne out of a mix of biosecurity duty, attachment to place and ecosystem, concern for bird populations, and recreation. Nevertheless, as the next section will make evident, there are not enough hunters devoted to mink culls, necessitating the enrolment also of citizens. It can be noted that in Norway, the state organisation SNO employs professional hunters specialized in mink, which is not done in Sweden. The Norwegian hunter jokes about the “wild west connotations” of such a profession – almost a modern-day bounty hunter – particularly as the mink is on the so-called ‘black list’ in Norway (meaning invasive species list). This ‘license to cull’, it seems, is borne as both a badge and burden.

Part 2: hunt as irruption – trapping is ‘available for anyone!’

When it comes to trapping as a regime of killing, who traps is a more open question than who hunts (Proulx, 2022). Hunters require education and licenses and land rights to harvest wildlife, all limiting who becomes a hunter. The subset of hunters who are interested in and dedicated to mink hunting is even smaller. Trapping, by contrast, is done also by conservationists, by researchers, and even by civilians. Hence, this particular regime of killing is open also to non-hunters. In Sweden, it is recommended and a goal for managers that each landowner in the archipelago keeps a trap set for mink. No hunting education is needed, merely ownership of or agreed access to the land and a hunting card (“jaktkort”), which grants rights of hunting on the land or an agreement with the hunting rights holder to trap there. The Swedish Hunting Association states on their website that “This is so that everyone can do their part for biodiversity”. At a mink seminar I attended in 2023, a female island resident stood up to affirm this point, but also highlighted a particular demographic who could do more in the battle on the mink: “Summer guests are the ones who should be doing their part. We who live here year-round know how problematic [mink] get. But these guests just think it's cute to see playful mink at their jetty.” At the same seminar, a mink hunter added that if every owner of a jetty in Sweden had a trap, the effect on mink would be immense. Already here, then, the everyman and accessibility connotations of trapping are emphasized.

In the absence of state support, in the Stockholm Archipelago, Minkakuten (‘mink emergency’) offer their services to facilitate mink trapping by citizens. It is important to note that Minkakuten is an initiative of a birds conservation organisation, Roslagen Sea Bird Association. Hence, they have a vested interest in wanting to eliminate mink from the archipelago. Through Minkakuten they lend traps or offer purchases at subsidized costs; they provide guidance and consultation, and they also offer a course on mink hunting that includes a module on trapping. The what, where's and how's of trapping are explained so that the trapper can maximise success. Incentives are also in place, including diplomas and (highly modest) prize money for special contributions toward biodiversity. Such subsidies and stipends for invasive species management are arguably a new, politically correct form of bounty in the twenty-first century (von Essen et al., 2025a). However, funding is often scarce, not governmental, but rather based on private grants, and is therefore not a significant source of motivation.

The mechanics of animal trapping

Trapping works by luring, immobilizing and killing the mink. Among Mason (1900)’s classical three-part typology of inclosing traps (including cages, pitfalls, dams and pounds), arresting traps (nooses, snares, bird lime and mechanical jaws), and killing traps (deadfall, missile, point-impaling), it is chiefly the latter that are used for mink. The trap used for mink is the slagfälla or Gävleborgsfällan (brand name), which has to be put together by the purchaser. Evaluated as part of the FAMNA mink culling project in the Swedish Baltic, the alleged ‘super-trap’ from New Zealand, GoodNature A18, did not prove successful against mink in Sweden, whereupon the FAMNA project members had to contrive their own versions (they also tried customizing the trap to Swedish conditions first). In terms of kill traps being further divided on the basis of the kind of force released upon the animal (physical, gravity, elasticity), gravity is used in the case of the mink, pressing down on an unsuspecting mink with lethal force. It is interesting that human force is not listed as one in Mason's trapping force, although as we shall see a trapper's intellectual and experiential knowledge are needed at a prior stage to set up the trap to leverage these physical forces.

Adapting Mason (1900)'s deconstruction of a trap into a working part, mechanical part, a manual part, and an animal part, the mink trap involves all of these. Proulx (2022) suggests that trapping systems also be conceptualized to include trapping devices and their parts, their sets of construction, and the use of baits and lures. Today, it is likely that an additional part of this system can also involve remote surveillance, for example as smart technology providing the trapper with an alert of capture, or a livestreaming camera in or around the trap (Poerting, 2023). This has been especially true of live-capture traps for mink, as animal welfare legislation decrees maximum intervals of checking the trap (at least twice a day according to a mink trapper I interview). In Norway, the camera Uovision UM595–2G has been used to monitor mink in traps, in combination with a trap alarm that notifies if the trap has been triggered (FAMNA, 2020).

Trapping mink requires situated knowledge of the mink: its umwelt, preferences and habits. In this way, it is not dissimilar to a regular hunts. Successful traps necessarily need to “incorporate, precipitate and even prefigure particular kinds of environmental relation that rely on a trapper's ability to temporarily adopt, mimic, or ‘dress up in’ the different perspectives or Umwelten of their animal prey” (Spriggs, 2019). What draws animals into a trap differs not only from species but also from individual animals, times of the year, weather conditions or general circumstances.

The lure in question may be categorized into five broad types: food (including water or salt licks), mates, safety, novelty and competitor. Hence an animal will seek out and trigger a trap when searching for goods that it prioritizes at that point. This has been an important trial-and-error campaign to successful trap mink. For most of the year, owing to its generalist diet, the mink is not wanting for foods. Trappers recall painstakingly fitting their traps with all manner of smelly food baits, which will not tempt most shy mink when food is readily available to them without crawling into a new foreign object. However, as part of tailoring traps to seasonal preferences, food baits may be somewhat more successful in winter time when natural foods are somewhat scarcer. Equally, when mink pups disperse to find new territory in early autumn, they tend to be bolder, less attentive, and more risk-taking, particularly the males. At this time, trappers have more success.

The fatal attraction for capturing mink in Sweden has proven to be baiting them with the scent glands of their conspecifics. If breeding season is on, and a mink picks up a mate's scent in the trap, they will seek these out and become trapped and killed in the device. Swedish trappers in the FAMNA project reverted to this strategy after a while of finding scant luck with food baits. If a female mink is caught, there may be good chances of catching several males after (Harding, 1906), turning the female mink into an unwitting Mata Hari or judas animal (von Essen et al., 2025b). There are some historical reports of ‘doubling up’: using baits that mix both their own mink musk and fish oil (Harding, 1906). In the present day, the Swedish Hunting Association also suggests one can add artificial scents, and to “cosy up” the trap with for example goose feathers.

Trapping lore traditionally emphasizes the necessity of making traps as unintrusive and innocuous as possible, including ‘seasoning’, ‘smoking’, ‘cleasning’, ‘weathering’ them or purging them of human traces (Harding, 1906; Spriggs, 2016). Harding's field guide to mink trapping emphasizes ‘brushing out of human scent’ and taking care to make surroundings look as natural as possible (1906: 39). But recent research also suggests a number of animals may seek out new places simply out of novelty and curiosity. Some species appear “drawn to places where humans have made what seem to be obvious alterations to the land” (Wishart, 2019). A mink is hard-pressed to ignore a good hole, for example. Felines may be happy to explore a box trap. Weasels and stoats are notoriously curious, readily exploring piles of stones. Again, this appears also a personality-dependent variable, with bolder individuals, such as young mink males, succumbing to traps. By contrast, trap-shyness can develop quickly among mink, particularly females, according to multiple experts I spoke to (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

One of over 1200 mink observations at a Goodnature trap in Landegode and Vågøya. Reproduced from FAMNA.

The moral harms in outsourcing death work to a trap

Trapping has become more controversial in recent decades. Animal welfare concerns, reflecting changing public moral values, have brought some traps into disrepute. What is perhaps surprising is that a significant portion of the critique has come from hunters themselves. Indeed, in much of literature on hunting, trapping is denigrated to a lesser form, not real hunting, by not adhering to ethical standards of fair chase and sportsmanship (Cartmill, 1993; Corsín Jiménez and Nahum-Claudel, 2019; Knight, 2003; von Essen et al., 2020; Vitali, 2010). Plato, famously, declared trapping (and fishing) as the work of a ‘slothful hunter’ who had outsourced the work of killing and who behaved with duplicity. On this rationale, mink trapping would seem to disqualify among hunters on a virtue ethics assessment, rather than for example a utilitarian one: it is its inelegance and lack of aesthetics that offends, or the laziness of seemingly not doing the kill oneself. For Gell, the trap is a “surrogate hunter”, which has been recognized by several others (Nelson, 1986), adding to the idea that it provides a mechanical servant doing the hunter's job (Corsín Jiménez and Nahum-Claudel, 2019). This critique of the lesser trapper has been perpetuated most strongly in contexts where classism, elitism, and colonialism structure hunting communities. Allegations of trappers as ‘unsporting’ (Loo, 2001) often materialize as rhetoric to exclude some groups from the resource of wildlife (von Essen et al., 2019).

When it comes to mink traps, there are outstanding concerns about welfare aspects that reflect broader criticism on trapping mammals especially. These as a rule do not originate from hunters. Recent studies suggest that although we have readily observed outward signs of stress in captured animals (Masilkova et al., 2021), we may have missed subtle manifestations, such as noradrelanine in blood, an animal equivalent to adrenaline (Fahlman et al., 2020). Still, trapping invasive species appears to have been largely – if not wholly – exempt from some of the moral qualms attached to trapping native species. This led the IUCN to produce a manual, from an expert assessment at the European Commission, on emerging welfare standards in invasive species management, in 2022. IUCN declared that extant International trade standards such as ISO (1999a, 1999b) and the Agreement on International Humane Trapping Standards may be inadequate given that they are largely trade-oriented standards.

A Swedish hunter-veterinarian tells me of the 1980s legislating of traps for mink and declares that of the 200 traps they evaluated at this time, 150 were approved. Clearly, traps have fairly minimal standards, even if this was prior to EU standardisation. The IUCN's evaluation further suggested the 300 s till unconsciousness criterion was too long for killing traps for animals such as mink, advocating for a 30 s time maximum (Smith et al., 2022). While the IUCN committee and subsequent technical report was an important step in starting a discussion on welfare costs in invasive species management broadly, there is still little oversight of or specialized research on humane welfare standards in trapping (Fahlman et al., 2020; Gentsch et al., 2018). This likely reflects that the species targeted for trapping in the first place, at least kill-traps, are not thought as valuable as game or protected species.

Nevertheless, great strides have still been made from the early years of mink trapping – particularly in North America where its fur was coveted by trappers – as old accounts typically speak of “Stop Thief Traps” which may immobilize or partly maim the mink, often leading to the mink to gnaw off its own foot or leg (Harding, 1906). Harding's manual describes some of the horror of maimed mink: “I wonder how many readers have ever heard a mink scream when in a trap? I think it is the most blood-curdling hair-raising noise I have ever heard; it is equal to the scream of a panther” (1906: 113). The hunter-veterinarian who has been involved in developing legislation for trapping standards in the 1980s, tells me how previous decades live capture traps, even when having certain standards for e.g., checking them over the day, are unideal as the mink is highly stress-sensitive. He adds: “Back then, you could drown them, if you had the wrong sort of ammunition and gun. It wasn’t pretty”.

One thing that is arguably less addressed in ongoing discussions is the collateral damage of traps, i.e., the implication of non-target species or individuals. In the FAMNA mink project, a muskrat tended to climb and build a nest on an experimental floating trap meant for mink, whereupon the raft capsized. In this case the outcome was mere sabotage, but in other cases bycatch means fatal harm to the non-target animal. Other species have been known to get at the bait meant for mink without triggering the trap (Harding, 1906). Some species are seen as more ‘trap-prone’ than others, such as rabbits, but not mink. This presents a challenge to devising a successful mink trap: it needs to tap into the unique preferences of the mink while not appealing – or even fitting – those of other species. The Gävleborgfälla used for mink partly guards against bycatch by having a protective tunnel of 30 cm.

Discussion: regimes of killing and the redistribution of agency, temporality, and responsibility

In the two analyses above, I examined hunting and trapping as two dominant regimes of killing the invasive American mink in Sweden. Rather than treating these as discrete or oppositional practices, the analysis suggests they are best understood as differently configured socio-material arrangements that redistribute agency, temporality, and ethical responsibility across humans, animals, and technologies. In doing so, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on animal killing by moving beyond a simple distinction between direct and indirect forms of death work.

Agency: from embodied encounter to delegated action

A first point of contrast concerns the location and distribution of agency. In hunting, agency is dispersed across a multispecies assemblage of humans, dogs, and technologies, unfolding through coordinated and embodied action. As in other forms of recreational hunting, the kill is embedded in practices of attentiveness, anticipation, and situated judgment (Marvin, 2003). Yet as the ethnographic material shows, this agency is not solely human: dogs play a decisive role in locating and driving the mink, while tools such as leafblowers, or intercepting boats, actively shape the conditions of encounter. Hunting thus aligns with relational accounts of human-animal interaction, in which agency is distributed across species and material elements (Brown, 2015; Peltola and Heikkilä, 2015).

In trapping, by contrast, agency appears at first to be delegated to a mechanical device. The trap has often been described as a “surrogate hunter” (Nelson, 1986) or “mechanical servant” (Brandstetter, 2012), performing both the physical and intellectual labor of killing. The alleged delegation of the work to the trap is never complete, however. The trap effectively condenses prior human action – design, placement, baiting – and depends on an intimate understanding of animal behaviour and Umwelt (Corsín Jiménez and Nahum-Claudel, 2019; Spriggs, 2016; Spriggs, 2019). In this sense, the trap does not eliminate human agency but reconfigures it across time and material form, leaving what Gell (1996) describes as “distributed agency” embedded in the device. Lennon (2026) in this special issue further nuances this dimension of traps, considering how DIY versus off-the-shelf models also involve different labor at different times. The mink trap falls somewhere in the middle: it is factory made but requires assembly, set-up, placement and baiting. Just as one would not accuse the hunter of delegating killing to his shotgun, then, the trap is a product of different actors’ labor at different times.

Temporality: eruption, anticipation, and deferred killing

At first glance, hunting is characterized by a relatively bounded temporality, in which anticipation and encounter unfold within the duration of the hunt. Drawing on Marvin's (2003; 2006) distinction between eruption and irruption, the mink hunt combines moments of waiting, tracking, and anticipation with sudden, intensified bursts of activity: flushing, shooting, and retrieval. These phases require hunters to operate with an immediate, only somewhat forward-looking sense of the mink's movements, but within a shared temporal frame of the hunt itself. Still, there is clearly planning to the hunt, in terms of logistics, readying weapons, collecting dogs, checking weather and equipping the team in advance. At the close of the hunt, little ceremony is made of the mink; it is not butchered or field-dressed or eaten.

When viewed through a lens of killing, trapping extends killing across more dispersed and asynchronous temporalities. The act of setting the trap involves projecting into an uncertain future, “prefiguring a moment of capture distant in space and time” (Corsín Jiménez and Nahum-Claudel, 2019: 392). As noted in studies of trapping more broadly, this creates a form of presence-at-a-distance, in which trappers remain affectively and cognitively engaged with the trap even in their physical absence (Anderson et al., 2017; Brightman, 1993). The moment of killing itself is temporally detached from human presence, yet remains tied to prior acts of anticipation and subsequent acts of checking, retrieval, and disposal (and even killing if the trap failed). Trapping thus “twists time” (Spriggs, 2016), redistributing the temporal burden of killing across multiple moments rather than concentrating it in a single event.

Despite these differences, the analyses also reveals important continuities. Hunting, too, involves anticipatory projection, as hunters attempt to anticipate the mink's movements moments ahead of the present at a micro level of the hunt. Conversely, trapping ultimately culminates in a moment of confrontation, when the trapper returns to the device and encounters the animal, dead or alive. In both regimes, then, killing is not a singular act but a process unfolding across time, involving shifting configurations of presence and absence in relation to the killing technology and the prey. One instructive way of interpreting this may be to examine pre- and afterlives of killing.

Ethical responsibility and the problem of “good killing”

These differences in agency and temporality have significant implications for how ethical responsibility is understood and contested, if it is so at all. The hunter is expected to minimize suffering through precision and control, even as the hunt itself may involve prolonged pursuit, multiple shots, and the active participation of dogs. As such, hunting exemplifies what has been described as the moral ambivalence of death work, in which care, respect, and violence are entangled (Mazhary, 2021; Rose, 2008; Singh and Dave, 2015). In Sweden, strict taboos on sloppy hunters, too aggressive dogs, or stressful chases generally control for unethical hunting practices. However, as we saw, dogs can be unpredictable and spur each other on, resulting in stress and injuries on the mink prior to the kill – as an invasive species with no afterlife in meat or fur, care does not have to be taken to the same extent as other game species. Still, there is little collateral damage of other species involved in the mink hunt, as these are scared away by the noise and presence of people, and hunters control the situation by taking aim only at mink.

Trapping, by contrast, has often been criticized for its apparent detachment from the moment of killing. This raises concerns about both animal welfare and moral accountability. Historical accounts of trapping practices, including those involving maiming or prolonged suffering (Harding, 1906), continue to inform contemporary critiques, even as modern trap designs aim to ensure rapid and humane death. Recent efforts to standardize trapping practices, such as those advanced by the Smith et al. (2022), reflect growing concern with welfare standards in invasive species management, though these remain unevenly developed (Fahlman et al., 2020; Gentsch et al., 2018).

The EU manual on vertebrate IAS welfare is useful insofar as it treats humaneness not as a binary distinction between “humane” and “inhumane,” but as a comparative assessment of welfare impacts across methods. It also separates the welfare effects of capture, restraint, pursuit, or handling from the mode of death itself. This distinction is important for mink culling: a kill trap may, when functioning optimally, produce rapid unconsciousness, but failed strikes, non-target captures, prolonged restraint, or delayed checking can generate serious welfare harms. Conversely, shooting may produce a rapid death when accurately placed, but in the mink hunts described here, difficult terrain, dogs, flushing technologies, moving prey, and repeated shots complicate any straightforward claim to humaneness

All in all, ethics comparison developed here complicates the assumption that proximity necessarily entails greater ethical responsibility, or that distance entails its absence. While trapping removes the human from the moment of death, it also requires careful calibration of conditions intended to produce a swift kill. Conversely, hunting, despite its emphasis on skill and immediacy, may involve extended periods of stress for the animal, particularly in highly coordinated culls involving multiple actors and technologies. As such, neither regime can be straightforwardly aligned with a singular ethical ideal.

Blurring boundaries: the instability of killing regimes

Taken together, my findings suggest that the boundary between hunting and trapping is more porous and unstable than is often assumed. Hunting incorporates elements of trapping, as when animals are funneled into constrained spaces or effectively immobilized through coordinated action. Trapping, in turn, involves forms of anticipation, attentiveness, and embodied knowledge typically associated with hunting. This resonates with broader anthropological insights into the fluidity of trapping and hunting practices, including the “noun-verb tension” of traps as both objects and actions (Bateman, 2003; van Heijgen et al., 2024), as well as accounts of hunting practices that rely on entrapment, seduction, or environmental manipulation (Willerslev et al., 2015). Bait hunting, for example, presents a highly comparable activity. It is used for few species in Sweden, like wild boar.

Rather than representing distinct categories, hunting and trapping emerge as points along a continuum of killing practices, differentiated by how they configure relations between humans, animals, and technologies. This perspective challenges binary distinctions between presence and absence, action and delegation, and skill and automation, instead highlighting the hybrid and relational nature of killing in practice.

Implications for invasive species management

These insights have broader implications for understanding the ethics and politics of invasive species management. The designation of mink as an “invasive alien species” (Melero et al., 2012) legitimizes widespread killing while often obscuring the moral complexity of the practices involved. At the same time, as scholars have noted, such classifications are themselves historically contingent and politically charged (von Essen et al., 2024). The relative acceptance of lethal control, particularly in decentralized, citizen-based forms such as trapping, reflects not only ecological concerns but also longer histories of perceiving mustelids as pests or competitors ((Bonesi and Palazon, 2007).

By foregrounding the diversity of killing regimes, this paper highlights how ethical responsibility is not simply a matter of individual intention but is shaped by the configurations of practice through which killing is carried out. Whether through the multispecies choreography of the hunt or the distributed temporality of the trap, these regimes produce different forms of engagement, detachment, and accountability. Understanding these differences is crucial for ongoing debates about animal welfare, humane killing, and the role of humans in managing multispecies landscapes.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have interrogated the two dominant modes of killing (wild) mink: trapping and hunting. A third modality, slaughter in the fur industry, still comprises a considerable volume of mink killing in the world, but is actively being phased out. By contrast, trapping and hunting are becoming increasingly important strategies in combating wild mink as an invasive species in Europe. This has even meant the normalization of mink trapping in the archipelago as done by citizens – if in rhetoric and not yet in widespread practice. By contrast, I have shown how the mink hunt is a more cumbersome choreography of actors involving humans, vehicles, weapons, dogs, and infrastructures such as regulatory dispensations. In terms of death work, the mink hunt features distributed agency: weapons and dogs and ultimately the hunter. It is consolidated in time for the duration of the chase. By contrast, trapping a mink involves agency that is consolidated into a material device, but more distributed across times: setting up, removing oneself, and checking back, unfold as separate steps. In both killing forms, moreover, endo-and exo-energies may be understood to manifest, corresponding to irruption and eruption. This involves negotiating the hunter's absence and presence. Finally, the welfare costs of a mink hunt are arguably much higher than those of a (properly functioning) trap due to the stressful modality of the activity. However, given what may be many civilians’ aversion to trapping mink on their own, preferring to let hunters take care of them in culls, the social costs and acceptance of the respective killing forms may not line up with the welfare costs on the mink. While much scholarship on necropolitics and invasive species has focused on killability, this paper hopes to start a conversation about how we kill and whom this enrols as the agent of execution. All in all, however, although hunting and trapping are separate practices to any fine-grained analysis of killing, they must ultimately be understood also as two sides of the same coin: a necropolitical project aimed at lowering the species number and distribution in the Swedish archipelago.

Highlights

• Mink killing in Sweden occurs through two contrasting regimes: collective hunting and everyday domestic trapping.

• Hunting features multispecies choreography, immediacy, and dramatic confrontation; trapping disperses agency across devices, time and place.

• Both regimes use landscape, involve collateral risks, and negotiate the presence/absence of the human killer.

• High welfare costs in hunts contrast with social acceptability; traps are mundane, accessible, yet morally contested.