Trouble in the Cat's Cradle: Understanding tangled care in feral cat management and wildcat conservation

2018年，野猫(Felis Silvestris)被带到西德文郡，目前它们正在那里繁殖，一旦它们的数量增加到数百只，它们将被释放到达特穆尔，重新引入一个它们已经150年没有居住的地区。人们希望，它们的重新引入将促使景观重新野生，导致一个自我调节和可持续的生态系统，因为它们通过限制过多的猎物种群发挥关键的生态作用。它们被列为濒危物种，目前仅在苏格兰存活数百只，最近的研究发现，除了被猎场管理员杀死外，它们还与家猫(Felis Catus)杂交很常见，对它们的生存构成严重威胁。目前对家猫的研究集中在它们作为同伴物种的角色以及它们对野生动物的感知和实际捕食。在澳大利亚和美国，人们对野猫给予了一些关注，但在英国，估计有150万只野猫生活，社会科学文献很少。野猫不会表现出流浪猫的温顺，也不会容忍人类的陪伴，这给自然资源保护者带来了问题，因为它们的捕食技能对当地野生动物构成了想象中的或真实的威胁。它们的数量可以快速增长，但作为家养物种，它们受到《动物福利法》(2006)的保护，不能按照对话科学中的“问题”物种的常见做法进行扑杀。相反，在英国，人口控制需要其他方法，通常是“诱捕-绝育-释放”。在西南部，慈善机构猫咪保护组织带头发起了这一倡议，在德文郡和康沃尔的土地所有者同意的情况下，绝育的猫咪要么被放回原址，要么在私人拥有的土地上被放生。可以理解的是，德文郡的野猫项目对放行区的野猫感到担忧，确保它们之间的接触最少是理想的结果。强加于野猫和野猫身上的结构具有生物政治意义--但在保护的纠结中也有一些谨慎的做法尚未被理解。此外，保护科学对种群而不是个体的关注是有问题的。例如，Thom van Doreen敦促我们与濒临灭绝的人呆在一起，见证他们的痛苦、他们的暴力和他们的死亡，因为这样诚实的观看要求证人承担责任。他认为，真正关爱一个物种，必须从关爱组成该物种的个体开始。谨慎保护需要关注参与保护故事的所有成员的内在价值，这需要关注它们的路径及其多物种相互作用。通过这样做，van Doreen和其他人提供了丰富的多物种人种学，人类和非人类在关怀和暴力、学习、知识和成为的纠缠网络中莫名其妙地联系在一起。例如，在保护中存在着复杂的照顾问题，在这种情况下，照顾一个物种可能意味着“照顾”另一个物种。我打算把重点放在野猫给保护议程带来的“麻烦”上，并询问护理实践。尽管野猫表面上看起来是有限的--不是驯养的，也不是野生的--但它们在很大程度上是在有形的、纠缠在一起的活人网络中。我打算研究这个网络--这个“猫的摇篮”，从驯化的历史到杂交的礼物，从家养的历史到杂交的礼物，多物种故事中的“相处”，照顾和“照顾”。在野猫的故事中，谁是有反应能力的，又是如何反应的？我将寻求了解与野猫相交的生活方式，以制作一份多物种人种学，并针对德文郡野猫项目的紧迫性以及更广泛的保护议程，对野猫的管理提供至关重要的见解。

In 2018 Wildcats (Felis silvestris) were brought to West Devon where they are currently being bred, and once their numbers have increased to several hundred they will be released on Dartmoor, reintroduced to an area that they have not inhabited for 150 years. Their reintroduction, it is hoped, will instigate a 'rewilding' of the landscape, resulting in a self-regulating and sustainable ecosystem as they play a crucial ecological role by capping excessive prey populations. Classified as endangered, they currently just survive in their hundreds in Scotland, where recent research has identified that, as well as being killed by gamekeepers, hybridisation with the domestic cat, (Felis catus) - in most cases domestic feral cats - is common and a serious threat to their survival as a species.Current research on the domestic cat has focused on their role as companion species and their perceived and actual predation on wildlife. Some attention has been given to feral cats in Australia and USA but in the UK, where an estimated 1.5 million feral cats live, there is little literature from the social sciences. Feral cats do not exhibit the tameness of their stray counterparts and will not tolerate human companionship, presenting issues for conservationists as their predatory skills pose imagined or real threat to native wildlife. Their numbers can grow quickly, but as a domestic species they are protected under the Animal Welfare Act (2006), and cannot be culled as per common practice for 'problem' species in conversation science. Instead population control has required alternative approaches in the UK, commonly 'trap-neuter-release'. In the southwest, the charity Cats Protection lead on this initiative, where neutered cats are either released to their original site or on privately owned land with consent from land owners in Devon and Cornwall. Understandably, the Devon wildcat project is concerned about feral cats at the release zone and ensuring minimal contact between them is the desired outcome. There are biopolitical implications for the constructs imposed upon feral cats and wildcats - but there are also practices of care amidst the tangle of conservation that are yet to be understood.Furthermore, thefocus on populations rather than individuals in conservation science is problematic. Thom van Doreen, for example, urges us to stay with individuals on the brink of extinction and witness their pain, their violence and their death, because such an honest viewing demands responsibility in the witness. True care for a species, he argues, must begin with care for the individuals who comprise that species. Care-full conservation demands attention to the intrinsic value of all members involved in conservation stories, and that requires attention to their pathways and their multispecies interactions. By doing this, van Doreen and others have provided rich multispecies ethnographies whereby humans and nonhumans are inexplicably connected in tangled webs of care and violence, of learning, knowledge, and becoming. For example, tangles of care exist in conservation where care for one species can mean 'taking care of' another. I intend to focus on the 'trouble' of feral cats to conservation agendas and ask about practices of care. Despite the apparent liminality of feral cats - not tame, not wild - they are very much in tangible, and within tangled, webs of the living. I intend to study this web - this 'cats-cradle' following kin lines from domesticated histories to hybrid presents, the 'becoming with' in multispecies stories, taking care and 'taking care of'. Who is response-able, and how, in the story of feral cats? I will seek to understand the lives that intersect with feral cats to produce a multispecies ethnography and provide crucial insight into feral at management in response to the urgency of the Devon wildcat project, and more wider conservation agendas.