Photographer: Anna Redmalm (used with permission)
By Erica von Essen, and David Redmalm.
Even when it has a clear goal of safeguarding public health, public safety, sanitary conditions and industry (broadly ‘biosecurity’), hunting may be on thin ice with public acceptance. In urban wildlife management, culling wild animals that cause problems is now sometimes met with outrage from members of the public. People may feel attachment to particular animals, distaste toward the ways in which they are killed, or be inconvenienced having to face the cull taking place in a busy, public place.
Up until now, experts have helped managers predict cases of resistance to wild-animal culling by suggesting the resistance arises when animals are charismatic or valuable. In our study, we show that public resistance to culling is more complicated. Our approach is to investigate how social acceptance for culls is lost by culling wild animals in the wrong way, at the wrong time, and in the wrong places. We draw from thirty-two interviews and four participant observation events with municipal hunters and officers working to cull problem wildlife in Swedish cities. Our findings reveal that the smell, sight, timing, location and identity of the culler influence social acceptance. We also discuss the future social acceptance of culling wildlife for biosecurity reasons. Our results indicate that the shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach of doing so in cities may come to be challenged in the future.
Relational Thinking 