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Jean Hillier and Jason Byrne
Organization, May 2016; vol. 23, 3: pp. 387-406.
Is extermination to be the legacy of Mary Gilbert’s cat?
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 organizational practice. We propose
alternative practices emphasising the productive potentialities of biopolitics.
Keywords
Biopolitics, animals, cats, feral, regulation, management
Jean Hillier and Jason Byrne
Organization, May 2016; vol. 23, 3: pp. 387-406.
Is extermination to be the legacy of Mary Gilbert’s cat?
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.
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, on
April 9th, ‘after tea the cat caught a fine “rabbit rat” … [a] beautiful little animal’
(Hobson, 1839:np). 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
3
and domestic cats in Australia. The last six 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. Wholescale eradications are planned, with a Federal Threat
Abatement Plan (TAP) (DEWHA, 2008; DOE, 2015), 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).
Whilst such state-sanctioned eradication on this scale may not constitute the
organizational genocide that Stokes and Gabriel (2010) describe, we, nevertheless,
suggest that what may be described as practices of felicide raise important parallel
issues for organization studies. As Parchev (2014:458) observes, ‘the degree to which
governmental systems penetrate somatic life determines the manner in which
knowledge about humans and their environment is created’. With regard to humans and
cats, enfolding and interpenetration of 'naturecultures' (Haraway, 2008) is 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). Whilst
cognisant of vital differences between the governance of human and non-human animal
subjects, we agree with Palmer (2007:83) that Foucault's work on the 'repressive and
creative effects of power on bodies offers a range of tools for thinking through …
4
human/animal relations'. Whilst 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 a 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 organizational 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 advises us as researchers to focus on 'carefully defined institutions'
(2000a: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 nexi 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 (2011:27) describes current
manifestations of biopolitics as the ‘administrative and legal procedures that determine
the foundations and boundaries of biotechnological interventions’: 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.i
5
In the case of cats, this knowledge is highly contested (see Doherty, 2014, for example).
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 organizational 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:195) points out, that which is 'unsaid', silent, absent or othered, is as important
as the 'said' or present. The silent is 'an element that functions alongside the things said,
with them in relation to them within over-all strategies' (Foucault, 1981:27). 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, wild dogs and so on.
6
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;
1977; 2000a) 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:254)
explains, introduces a division between ‘what must live and what must die’ 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 Western Australia. 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).
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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, 2000a).
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.
DEHWA, 2008; DLG, 2010; DOE, 2015; Hartwell, 2014; RSPCA, 2011), claiming that
ferality entails an existence outside of human control. For most organizations 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 (2011:1) also classifies ‘unconfined’ animals as
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unowned, not being under the direct care of humans. Cats are regarded as property to be
owned, often having little intrinsic value.ii
Is lack of confinement or ownership, however, sufficient justification for an animal’s
death? Killing feral cats is normalised as 'predacide' by government organizations
(Marks, 2014) because feral cats are themselves killers. Subjectificated as abnormal
‘monsters’ (Foucault, 2003a, 2003b), feral cats dwell outside, or excepted from, the
normal bounds of ownership, domestication and animal rights. Whilst Foucault
recognises the existence of such a state of exception, however, he regards it as a normal,
unexceptional mechanism of disciplinary power (Lecture of 17 March 1976).
Whilst 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 five million to 18 million (AWC, 2014), with the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) citing 15-23 million (Borschmann and Groch, 2014).
The main focus of ‘damage’ is predation.
The Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC) (2014) and Environment Minister Hunt
(2014a), 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
9
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; 289) suggests,
reifies ‘a specific historical moment that ignores the changing and dynamic nature of
ecologies’.
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:np). Such acute symptoms, however, rarely occur in
non-immunocompromised humans. The WA DLG (2010:11) also emphasises the
nuisance of ‘inappropriate behaviour, such as noise, marking of territory, digging,
fighting and unwanted entering of property’ as a major concern for the human
population.
10
Monstrous cats or monstrous policies? The architecture of regulation
There is a wide range of organizational practices engaged in attempts to control feral
and non-feral cats. They range from local authority, State and Federal programs 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 DPAW, 2013a; 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 six months and over (ie pre-puberty) and compulsory
registration with heavy fines of up to $5000 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 $5000 plus removal and care costs) if identified, or
the cat will be destroyed and disposed in three days if unidentified, in seven 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 Threat Abatement Plan (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
11
(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 (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
(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.
Whilst 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,
2013b). 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
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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 (2000b) terms an 'antinomy of
political reason': 'the coexistence in political structures of large destructive mechanisms
and institutions oriented toward the care of individual life' (2000b:405). Institutions,
such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (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 introduces the concept of biopolitics in 1974: 'for capitalist society, it
was biopolitics, the biological, the somatic, the corporal, that mattered more than
13
anything else' (Foucault, 2000c:137), before further elaborating his ideas in subsequent
years: 'the body is a biopolitical reality' (Foucault, 2000c: 137),iii 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 (1994:1391) exhortation to
those in other academic domains to use his work as a tool-box, whilst Foucault’s work
directly refers only to humans, we suggest that it may be usefully extended to include
non-human animals.iv
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) 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, 1981:136). 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
14
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’ (1981:138).
Biopolitics utilises mechanisms, such as state legislation, municipal statutes and so on,
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 notion 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 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' (2000b:416), and that 'in the name of life necessity:
massacres have become vital’ (1981:137). 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 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
15
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?' (Foucault, 2003b: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). ‘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 (2011:119) comments,
systems of knowledge ‘make the reality of life conceivable and calculable in such a way
that it can be shaped and transformed’. Foucault (1984a:73) 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'. 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 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'
16
(2014:12). This 'problem' involves complex questions of parrhesia (speaking freely)v
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' (2005:381). 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). Further, 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).vi
17
For Foucault (1984b: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,
1984b: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, 1973, 1977, 2000a). Dividing practices are modes of manipulation
justified by science and scientific classification, and performed through social and
spatial exclusion, including death (Foucault, 2000a:460).
Objectivation of the subject is inseparable from issues of power. Foucault (1981:92-93)
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
18
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’.
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 (2000a) 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
knowledges and truths, for instance. In contrast, a relationship of power, for Foucault,
acts indirectly on others via their actions. Further, Foucault 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' (2000a:342): enablement to act through
resistance and unpredictable response (Foucault, 1981). 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 (2000a:342) use of
scare quotes round "free" could imply his scepticism on the idea of unconstrained
19
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' (2010:101).
In his lecture of 10 January 1979, Foucault 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' (2008:19). Knowledge as an expression of power upon life. Foucault
(1980a:194-195) 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’. 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
20
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
affects 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). Whilst
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 eight 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,
21
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
seeks to explore how practices, events and experiences are constructed and actualised.
As a heuristic tool, dispositifs 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 knowledges, 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.
Whilst 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:np), 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
22
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 (2014a) 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:np), 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:np) with the
potential to ‘morph into a far more savage beast’ (Hunt in Auldist, 2014:np).
Furthermore, Woinarski (2014:np) claims that ‘predation by feral cats was the single
factor that contributed to most extinctions since European settlement of Australia’.
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'.
23
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 (eg DPI, 2007)vii, most likely, Marks (2013) argues, due to their harrowing
unpalatability. Marks (2013:54-55) 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' numbs empathetic understanding of its subjectivity. Nevertheless, the RSPCA
(2011:3) 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’. We conclude that knowledge is a very general category
of organization; organizing 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’ (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:np). It follows that the only ‘good’ cat is a
24
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 who are deemed
to be either feral, unhealthy, aggressive, unidentified or unclaimed, are euthanized.
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
25
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
26
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 programs, 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, to 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 (2000a:342), exercised over free subjects who possess
a range of modes of behaviour. WA field trials for PAPP indicated ‘no significant
reduction’ 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 who swallowed the bait appear to have vomited, survived
and recovered, though 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
27
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
$1,000,000 AUD 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 (ie feral) cats
28
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:np) 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 peoplesviii and endemic flora and fauna through the
ideology of terra nullius. Moreover, the Eurocentric conceptual framework, manifest in
the infamous ‘White Australia Policy’,ix 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;
29
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 Wilschke-
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:np) 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' (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
30
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. Further, 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, human/non-human
animal binaries should be made redundant.
Organizations 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
31
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,
1981:137) of native mammals. The theatres of organizational 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 (RSPCA, 2011;
DOE, 2015). It is important to recognise that no regulation and eradication programs
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, whilst claiming to reduce these very actions.
32
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, 2000a:343), to promote new
forms of subjectivity and suggest other, alternative practices to that of felicide.
In what Marks (2014:2) refers to as 'the ethical no man's (sic) land lying between animal
welfare and conservation science', 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 organizational 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
33
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 (2015:47) points out, 'labels' such as 'feral'
objectivate the cats and 'settle' 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:np) 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'. 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
34
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.
Conclusions
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.
Whilst Foucault's work may have been anthropocentricx, we suggest that his concepts
can help us to see human-non-human animal relationships in new waysxi, 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
35
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 who have responsible owners matter, cats who generate
income for pound operators matter.
As Blencowe (2012:194) writes, ‘arts of government, power and legitimisation plug into
a plethora of experiential truth- and other-games’. 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:np).
The dispositif of ferality situates the life of one species in a direct relationship with the
disappearance of another. As Lemke (2011:42) comments, ‘it furnishes the ideological
foundation for identifying, excluding, combating, and even murdering others, all in the
name of improving life’. Native mammals are objectivated as having ‘rights’ to live
unmolested in their particular domains (Smith, 1999:296). Robbins and Moore (2102:4)
refer to such a view as ‘restorative nostalgia’ for a ‘native’ environment, which can
never again exist.
36
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 knowledges,
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 organizational policy and practice may become unconscionable.
37
Acknowledgement
Comments from the three referees and John Pløger, plus discussion with Jonathan
Metzger on incompossibility, have significantly strengthened the paper, for which many
thanks.
Funding acknowledgement
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public,
commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
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Notes
i It is important for us to declare here that we are both cat lovers and responsible custodians of cat
companion animals.
ii See the classic legal definition by Blackstone, in England 1769, who distinguished between animals
raised for food and those ‘kept for pleasure, curiosity or whim [such as cats] … because their value is not
intrinsic, but depending on the caprice of owners’ (cited in Young, 2001: np).
iii See also Foucault, 1981, 2003b, 2007, 2008.
iv Also see applications of biopolitics to non-human animals by Buller (2008), Chrulew (2011), Cole
(2011), Doré (2013), Ojalammi and Blomley (2015), Shukin (2009), Thierman (2010) and Wadiwel
(2002).
v We unfortunately have no space to explore the concept of parrhesia in this paper.
vi Of course, interpretation of non-human animals' 'power' is inherently done by humans within human
systems constructed to limit resistance.
vii The Department of Primary Industries’ Landcare Note (2007: 2) carefully avoids issues of effects on
non-target species, stating only that when used in accordance with the product label and directions for
use, ‘the chance of non-target poisoning is greatly minimised’.
viii The colonial government in Western Australia once managed Aboriginal people as if they were a class
of animal, bringing them under the control of under the Department of Aborigines and Fisheries (1909-
1920).
ix The 1901 Immigration Restriction Act (known as the White Australia Policy) excluded non-British and
non-European immigrants from Australia.
x With regard to Foucault's own lived experience, however, we suggest that he would have regarded his
feline companion, Insanité, as a 'partner' rather than a 'thing'.
xi See, for instance, Haraway (2008) and Thierman (2010).
