Two scarlet macaws at ARCAS Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre, Guatemala – as smart and sharp-beaked as they look!
Last month at the Taking Animals Apart conference at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Rosemary workshopped her paper, “Putting animals back together / taking commodities apart”, for journal submission. The paper is based on participant-observation research she conducted at ARCAS Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre in northern Guatemala. Each year ARCAS receives 200-700 animals: cardboard boxes stuffed with baby parrots, crates full of lizards, monkeys with leashes ringing their necks. Most of these animals were confiscated while being either smuggled for the pet trade or kept illegally as pets. Seized animals represent a fraction of overall trade in and out of Guatemala, and of global trade, worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Forming wild animals into commodities within this sprawling bio-economy’s circuits is accomplished by severing animals from their social, ecological, and familial networks – “taking animals apart” – and replacing these systems with human-provided supports: food, shelter, diversion. ARCAS’s animals, however, fail to fully materialize as such biocapital, and yet remain alive. “Rehabilitating” these failed commodities – or putting these traumatized and often ill animals back together – for successful return to the wild often takes years, and is attempted through various biopolitical and misanthropic technologies that aim to divest animals of ties to humans, and ultimately destroy these links entirely. Rosemary’s objective is to shed light on the unique dual processes of making and unmaking live commodities – or taking animals apart and putting them back together – and to consider their political and ethical preconditions, as well as implications for geographical theorizing.
For more detail about the conference, see takinganimalsapart.weebly.com, or Rosemary’s Artemia blog post: blogs.ubc.ca/artemia/2012/06/05/life-meets-death-in-a-flesh-eating-beetle-colony.
Photo: Rosemary Collard
