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（West Devon），目前它们正在那里繁殖，一旦它们的数量增加到几百只，它们将被放生到达特穆尔，重新引入一个它们已经150年没有居住过的地区。人们希望，它们的重新引入将推动景观的“重新野生化”，从而形成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数量发挥着至关重要的生态作用。它们被列为濒危物种，目前在苏格兰只存活了数百只，最近的研究表明，在那里，与家猫（Felis catus）——大多数情况下是家野猫——杂交是很常见的，对它们作为一个物种的生存构成了严重威胁。目前对家猫的研究主要集中在它们作为伴侣物种的作用以及它们对野生动物的感知和实际捕食。人们对澳大利亚和美国的野猫给予了一些关注，但在估计有150万只野猫生活的英国，很少有来自社会科学的文献。野猫不像流浪猫那样温顺，也不会容忍人类的陪伴，这给自然资源保护主义者提出了问题，因为它们的捕食技能对当地野生动物构成了想象或现实的威胁。它们的数量可以迅速增长，但作为家养物种，它们受到《动物福利法》（2006年）的保护，不能按照对话科学中对“问题”物种的常见做法进行捕杀。相反，在英国，人口控制需要其他方法，通常是“诱捕-中性释放”。在西南部，慈善机构“猫咪保护”牵头开展了这项活动，在那里，绝育的猫要么被放归原址，要么在得到德文郡和康沃尔郡土地所有者同意的情况下，被放归私人所有的土地。可以理解的是，德文郡野猫项目关注的是放养区内的野猫，并确保它们之间最少的接触是理想的结果。这些强加于野猫和野猫身上的构造有其生物政治含义，但在保护的混乱中也有一些尚未被理解的护理实践。此外，保护科学对种群而非个体的关注是有问题的。例如，托姆·范·多林（Thom van Doreen）敦促我们与濒临灭绝的人呆在一起，目睹他们的痛苦、暴力和死亡，因为这种诚实的观察要求证人承担责任。他认为，真正关心一个物种，必须从关心组成这个物种的个体开始。谨慎的保护需要关注所有参与保护故事的成员的内在价值，这需要关注他们的途径和他们的多物种相互作用。通过这样做，van Doreen和其他人提供了丰富的多物种人种志，人类和非人类在关怀和暴力，学习，知识和成长的错综复杂的网络中莫名其妙地联系在一起。例如，在保护环境中，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对保护议程的“麻烦”上，并询问有关护理的做法。尽管野猫很明显是有局限性的——不是被驯服的，也不是野生的——但它们在生物的网络中是非常有形的，而且是纠缠在一起的。我打算研究这个网络——这个“猫摇篮”，它遵循着从驯化历史到杂交礼物的亲缘关系，多物种故事中的“与”，照顾和“照顾”。在野猫的故事中，谁应该负责，如何负责？我将试图了解与野猫相交的生活，以产生多物种人种志，并为野猫管理提供关键的见解，以响应德文野猫项目的紧迫性，以及更广泛的保护议程。

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.