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Kangaroos: The Non-Issue
Lorraine Thorne1
UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL, UNITED KINGDOM
The international trade in kangaroo skin and meat has been contested on
ecological and ethical grounds for several decades. Yet, it continues
unabated. This article reviews the constitutive practices of the kangaroo
network, drawing on Actor Network Theory to provide insights into why
and how this trade continues. Questions of agency, network, and space are
explored in this account, which looks at the real and imagined geographies
of the kangaroo trade.
The bodies of nonhuman animals have long been drawn into trade as living flesh,
raw material, iconic body part, and genetic assemblage. In the newly industrializing
world, domesticated animals fuelled the development of international trade -
Europe readily ate Argentinean beef or tender New Zealand lamb and clothed itself
with antipodean wool. But even animals designated as "wild" have stretched the
boundaries of many empires (Whatmore & Thorne,1998). Today, wild animals are
implicated in many kinds of trading networks, encompassing not-for-profit organi-
zations and commercial enterprises alike.
Social science interest in animals is relatively embryonic (Arluke & Sanders.
1996; Wolch & Emel, 1995), and analyses sensitive to the animals caught up in
trading networks are thin. In the past, this topic has been studied in ways that frame
animals as passive resources, cultural symbols, or taxonomic groupings.-' An
invigorated study of wild animals in trading networks requires diversion from
standard practice. Taking as its focus the largest trade of wild mammals in the world
- the international
kangaroo trade - this article offers some moves in that direction.
It challenges the fiber of the kangaroo trading network, its historical legacy, and the
spatial imaginaries that it espouses. Actor Network Theory (ANT) is employed
here as a lens through which frequently ignored aspects of the kangaroo trade can
be seen.
ANT derives from studies of the social construction of science and technology
elaborated during the 1980s by Callon (1986), Latour (1988), and Law (1986).
ANT holds that society and nature are not neatly divisible into easily identifiable
compartments. Rather, the theory gives analytical significance to different kinds of
material forms (material heterogeneity), such as humans, machines, devices,

2. 168
buildings, and other living organisms - thereby introducing symmetry as a key
concept (Law, 1994). Thus an actor network comprises materially heterogeneous
linkages where agency is multiply performed among various materials, although
those who speak (humans) may make claims to "power" over those who or that do
not (Callon and Law, 1995). Recently infusing into European human geography
(Bingham, 1996; Murdoch, forthcoming; Thrift, 1996 and Whatmore and Thorne,
1997), ANT has offered a rich suit of "spatial metaphors," refusing "to impose a
single conception of undifferentiated space upon variable landscapes of relations
and connection" (Murdoch, forthcoming). These metaphors, moreover, bring into
view all manner of material spaces, irreducibly "real" and "present."
My purpose here is to facilitate analytic recovery of the (dis)connections
running through the human-nature "hybrid" of the kangaroo network, using ANT.
Documenting this kangaroo network reveals the discrete connections between
spaces of calculation and spaces of killing often overlooked and dismissed as
unconnected with our lives. Since the European settlement of the "great south land"
200 years ago, kangaroos have been hunted and killed as an ongoing legacy of the
kangaroo drive. The contemporary international trade in kangaroo products is an
historically specific, complex set of (attenuated) relationships between hidden
spaces, sites, and actors. Spatial metaphors help legitimate the kangaroo industry ;
in particular, deployment of spatial imaginaries has tangible, material impact upon
the animals' lives. The taxonomy of abundance fuels public acceptance of
kangaroo slaughter, underpinned by widespread popular images of "virtual"
kangaroo hordes bounding across a flat, virtual landscape. Ultimately, by casting
kangaroos as large, abundant "pests" now repackaged to serve the lucrative caused
celèbre of biodiversity, the kangaroo trading network profoundly delimits the
options for agency of the commercially targeted species. Kangaroo slaughter is thuss
rendered justifiable - a non-issue.
The Legacy of the Kangaroo Drive
The gradual exploration and mapping of the Australian continent by white
European explorers is reflected in place-names and statistics. Yet, the opening up
of the country was a more dispersed affair: "True European exploration ... was not
done by a handful of men called 'explorers,' but by women, sealers, travellers, and
drovers" (Ryan, 1996).
A siege mentality accompanied the exploratory push. This mindset kept the
new country always at bay, protecting the white settlers from experiencing the land
and water, the animals and the aboriginal peoples on their own terms - projecting.

3. 169
rather, a civilizing face onto all they encountered (Muecke, 1996).
Ignorant of the fragile soils, European settlers began practising agriculture as
at home, and by the 1830s, a major expansion of pastoralism had begun in earnest.
So great was the livestock deployment that, by 1900, pastoral lands eclipsed only
the harshest desert environments (Russell & Isbell, 1986). Many plant species
perished, intolerant of browsing and grazing by the introduced herbivores (Caughley.
Shepherd, & Short, 1987). Also, from early in the European colonization, indig-
enous fauna became the direct targets of hunters: "Out of the squalor of Melbourne
the diggers marched...and, casually and indifferently, shot all the wildlife they met"
(Lines, 1991, p. 91).
The largest wild animals, kangaroos and wallabies, were hunted for sport.
Kangaroo drives ensued where horsemen with whips mustered the animals into
corrals and slaughtered them en masse. The cruelty of these practices was, in some
ways, an outworking of frustration with the difference of the place, and perhaps a
soothing of imperialist angst. Throughout the 20th century, a transition has
occurred from the colonial killing regimes to kangaroo programs institutionalized
through state and federal departments:
[L]arger kangaroos were seen as a serious threat to the livelihoods of the
rural community from as early as the 1850s. [The] laws at the time required
farmers to kill kangaroos and many millions were destroyed. Fifty years
ago, the large kangaroos were not protected. Governments did not think
this was necessary. Kangaroos were valued for their skins. Governments
began to realize that while rural production still had to be protected so too
did the kangaroo. Commercial operations...had to be controlled [for] the
survival of kangaroos...During the 1950s and 1960s [they] passed laws to
control harvesting. Since then, a person must have a permit to kill
kangaroos (Environment Australia, Biodiversity Group, 1996).
However, while all kangaroo species were eventually assigned legislative protec-
tion, only Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia, and Western Australia
went the route of espousing a commercial industry. In Victoria, where the natural
range of kangaroos intersects with agricultural areas, no industry operates. Neither,
in the Northern Territory (NT), where kangaroos bound among the state's grazing
cattle, are the trucks and containers of traders to be found. Although kangaroos in
Victoria and the NT are not commercially slaughtered, in another state (or part of
it) the same density of animals renders them "fair game" (Caughley, Shepherd, &
Short, 1987, pp. 9, 10, 13).

4. 170
The viability of the historically embedded kangaroo trading network depends
upon continued access to bodies in quantities reminiscent of the kangaroo drives.
It also requires that a civilizing face be put upon the commercial kill of Australia's s
national symbol, which is the responsibility of Australian High Commission staff
worldwide. Further, there must be expert witnesses prepared to argue for slaughter,
overlooking the anomalies of geographical comparison. These witnesses, their
documents and devices, create spaces of calculation.
Spaces of Calculation
The kangaroo trade is a network that includes at least 32 government departments
Australia-wide with oversight responsibilities for the five commercially-sought
kangaroo species (Australian Wildlife Protection Council, personal communica-
tion, January 8 1997). To elaborate the killing of kangaroos, one must begin with
the less obvious spaces animated in the trading network - those of specialist
calculations and discourse (wildlife service departments state-wide, the B iodiversity
Group of Environment Australia, science faculties of universities, and the offices
of consultants) - where science and management are materially practised among
people, documents, and devices. A further-flung set of actors infuse these spaces,
from those flying aerial transect surveys to participants of wildlife symposia world-
wide.
Kangaroo Management Programs
Ultimately, the specialist spaces of calculation deliver Kangaroo Management
Programs (KMP's), which each state must prepare on an annual basis. To examine
the details of each KMP would take a long exposition. Briefly though, each KMP
is informed by a standardized division of labor for matters wild, namely with regard
to the prescience of scientific and management authority respectively. For exam-
ple, at a federal level, Environment Australia's Biodiversity Group is segmented
into the Wildlife Population Assessment Section (the Australian CITES Scientific
Authority) and the Wildlife Protection Section (the Australian CITES Management
Authority).
The scientific authority alleges that designated killing quotas are based on good
scientific grounds and the management authority testifies that procedures are in
place to ensure program compliance. Their task is to follow the two aims of
kangaroo management set out by the Council of Nature Conservation Ministers
(CONCOM) in the mid-1980s.

5. 171
The first of those aims is "to maintain populations of kangaroos over their
natural ranges" (CONCOM, 1985). Within a country so radically altered since
European occupation (Lines, 1991; State of the Environment Advisory Council.
1996), the natural ranges of various populations are already impaired. Forexample,
studies of the distribution and abundance of western grey kangaroos and euros in
the western Australian wheatbelt have shown that kangaroo density has declined
during the past 50 to 70 years with the fragmentation of the habitat and increased
distances between remnants of native vegetation (Arnold & Weeldenburg, 1995).
The kangaroos have not responded well to habitat degradation and the ensuing
intensive agriculture. Yet, the 1997 kill quota for these species was 82,000
individuals.
The second aim of kangaroo management is "to contain the deleterious effects
of kangaroos on other land management practices" (CONCOM, 1985). This second
aim is rather incongruent with the first. The first aim is to maintain the kangaroos
in their natural ranges, while the second aim is to mitigate damage to land-use
practices by killing the kangaroos. Since these aims are open to each state's
discretion, the scientists are relied upon to determine how many animals may be
removed from a steady-state environment via the calculation of harvest models.
However, into the spaces of calculation, there come telephone calls from interested
parties, face-to-face visits from farmers, and academic documents with details
about the "pests." During the 1970s and 1980s, these calculations favored kill
figures that paid little serious attention to kangaroos as living beings. They served
to arbitrate the practices of an industry whose conduct is woven into pastoral
occupation, whose markets are well-established, and whose advocates are of a
diverse constituency.
While some nongovernmental organizations argued otherwise, the historical
orthodoxy that depicted the large kangaroos as pests appeared both plausible and
true well into the 1980s: Those who lived on the land were believed to hold an
unbiased, authentic account of kangaroo behavior, and the farming community's
position was bolstered through its traditional status as the backbone of the national
economy; the pest status of kangaroos thus explained the existence of the kangaroo
industry. By the mid 1980s, however, an analysis of literature shows a refocusing
within the spaces of calculation. Queensland, which annually receives the largest
chunk of the national commercial kangaroo kill quota, was already signalling its
dispatch of the damage mitigation basis to its program:
It is important to recognize that while the kangaroo industry was originally
a response to the past problem caused by these animals, it has come to exist

6. 172
in its own right as the user of a valuable renewable natural resource and thus
it serves not only the needs of the farmers but also its own interests.
(Queensland National Parks and Wildlife Service, 1984)
Dissenting voices in influential places began to appear as the decade wore on,
notably from a Senate Select Committee struck to consider animal welfare:
[T]he major driving force behind kangaroo killing at present is the
kangaroo meat and hide industry ... the Committee has not received any
data on crop damage [to] justify a kill of more than 26 million kangaroos
and wallabies over the last 7 years. The industry is the obvious beneficiary
of such high quotas. (Senate Select Committee on Animal Welfare, 1988)
This same awareness began to permeate the scientific community as it turned to
observe the daily practices of the industry: "Wholesalers will buy kangaroos from
shooters only if they can make a profit from selling the productions. The number
killed therefore depends on availability of markets for meat and skins" (Caughley,
Shepherd, & Short, 1987, p. 207).
Recent Developments
More recently, the spaces of calculation have been augmented by data derived from
field research into the alleged competition between kangaroos and domestic
livestock. The findings of these studies undermine previous calculations showing
that kangaroos negatively impact sheep and cattle. Edwards, Croft, and Dawson
( 1996) concluded, on the basis of a large-scale study, that red kangaroos in the arid
rangeland compete with sheep for food resources only under semi-drought condi-
tions. And, despite the intermittent competition, wool production has not been
significantly impaired. In South-Australia, the hill-dwelling euro kangaroos were
found to principally eat grasses, which constituted 80% of their diet in severe
droughts; sheep ate grass during the wetter seasons, but shrub in dry conditions.
According to Dawson and Ellis (1996), the reduced feed availability resulted in
diversification of food preferences, and only modest dietary overlap.
However, the strength of certain logics in the specialist spaces of calculation
dies hard; Environment Australia's Biodiversity Group begins its justification for
"harvesting" kangaroos with the following:
Certain species of kangaroo are so common in some areas that they cause
major damage to farming and grazing properties. In large number, they can

7. 173
ruin crops and damage fences. They also compete with livestock for food
and water. Landholders can lose income as a result, which effects the
whole rural community. Commercial harvesting lessens this risk at no cost
to the landholder." (Environment Australia, Biodiversity Group, 1996)
The generic farming wisdom that kangaroos, unrepentant nibblers, swarm to blight
the prospects of rural enterprise, is translated here into risk. Yet, the possibility of
that risk being in some way quantifiable has been known for years. Risk, per se, was
tied up in a category referred to as the non-commercial kill, permits for which
required property inspection, the numbers of which were always a fraction of the
commercial quota. The impact of this recognition on individual kangaroo lives -
that damage may be authenticated, as opposed to being a risk - is not to be passed
over lightly. New South Wales overshot its annual quota for red kangaroos in 1996,
by 24,370 animals (Environment Australia, Biodiversity Group, 1996b). It would
have required approximately one-twelfth of its approved quota in 1997 ( 134,000
animals, not l,128,800 animals) were the intent of kangaroo management, indeed,
to alleviate anticipated damage, upon verification. In other words, the federal and
state governments had a working mechanism for addressing perceived damage, one
that entirely precluded the need for a commercial kangaroo industry. This illus-
trates how the kangaroo trading network has operated in a less-than-honorable way
-
protecting commercial killing spaces from full scrutiny and debate.
However, with the demise of the damage claim, new justifications are opera-
tive in the spaces of calculation that feed into, and are supported by, various
networks articulating biodiversity. A review of how scientific and management
experts in South Australia and New South Wales have recrafted the non-commer-
cial quota illustrates this. First, they admit that the quota reflects the anticipated
extent of damage to be caused by kangaroos. Second, they reassign this former,
noncommercial component to the kangaroo industry. With this repositioning
comes a change of name. South Australia now recognizes the category as "land
management" wherein "[t]he latter will be released only when there is an identified
threat to land management goals," as opposed to a "sustainable-use" component.
(Environment Australia, Biodiversity Group, 1997). New South Wales now
acknowledges the quota as "damage mitigation":
This part of the quota will be released only when the regional commercial
quota has been used and then only based on consideration of property
inspections, kangaroo population trends, and climatic trends. (Environ-
ment Australia, Biodiversity Group, 1997)

8. 174
For some, the fact that the damage component is now available for commercial
use may provide an incentive for pitching the figures high. South Australia's land
management quota in 1997 is more than four times greater than its commercial
quota in 1985 (505,000:135,000 animals). To this rough half million lives must be
added a further 433,000 animals for sustainable use, leaving South Australia
nearing the million-body league in 1997. Considerable faith resides in the spaces
of calculation when the body count for the commercial industry is sanctioned to
increase by nearly 600% in a 12-year period. An ANT approach holds this kind of
faith up for analysis, insisting that spaces of calculation are the kangaroo trading
network in practice.
Kangaroo Killing Spaces
Just as the spaces of calculation extend through networks to distant arenas of
scientific foci and political foray, kangaroo killing spaces are by no means
constrained to the outback. Through body parts, purchase-orders, or containers,
killing spaces are opened in Milanese tanneries just as well. The dance of order-
placement and order-readiness make it difficult to assign, with exactitude, the point
at which a killing space is activated. Indeed, from an ANT perspective, the
paperwork passing the desk of customs and excise, the stamp that authorizes the
shipment, the individual who lifts the stamp - this assemblage, as much as the raw
hides stored dockside, is the kangaroo trade network.
Further, the soccer player choosing a kangaroo leather boot for its ability to feell
the ball, also helps to create a killing space. Purchases such as these are achieved
through persuasive sales techniques, contributing to the industry's profitability
($200 million annually). Table 1 shows the total species kill figures for 1996. Thiss
table reveals that (a) ideal killing spaces are accessible and (b) ideal hunted animals s
are large. Note too the geographical diversity of the kangaroos' preferred habitats.
The nightly practice of killing kangaroos follows a well-worn, routine formula
- the
only fanfare is the occasional truckload of illegal hunters. Four-wheel drive
vehicles penetrate the darkness using light to freeze groups or individuals. A
gunshot claps, echoing fear. Adult bodies fall to the dusty ground, often dead on
impact. Young-at-foot, hurtling into the blackness, die alone. Pouched young
stunned, but not killed outright, expire with time. The shooter, most likely a part-
timer, hangs each carcass - legs tied vertically, head swinging - on the truck. The
shooter proceeds to the next target.

9. 175
What is happening in the moment of each death? Each is a performance
whereby the agency of the kangaroo, in its right to be there, is being forcibly denied
by the shooter. Refuting the legitimacy of kangaroos to dwell as individuals, within
their bodies, in their places of residence creates a killing space, which profoundly
violates a living space. Ironically, in its death throes, a kangaroo acquires partner-
ship with the international kangaroo trading network. This, however, is nonagency
- the animal, at this
point, is a corpse. But even this proscribed agency is barely
visible in most discussions of kangaroo slaughter. Further, in the intimate moment
when a shooter aims for the designated zone of the gendered animal, a zone
stipulated by the Code of Practice, the bullet that issues from his gun makes the
whole network durable - every actor in the network becomes wholly accountable
for personal action - the actor network becomes a seamless web.
A Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) report in
1985, estimated that shooters kill approximately 15% of kangaroos inhumanely. In
other words, the bullet in each of these cases brought pain and suffering to its victim.
It is a moot point that domesticated animals ought to be killed humanely in a
hygienic killing space. Indigenous fauna, seeping blood, smeared in dust, and
breeding bacteria, are allowed, however, to suffer prolonged deaths. At a recent
conference with multi-constituency attendance, which was organized to discuss
whether the Code of Practice is an appropriate mechanism for preventing cruelty.

10. 176
one participant organization noted: "It seems even at a conference convened to
discuss cruelty to kangaroos, any discussion of cruelty was confined to those within
the animal welfare movement" (Australian Wildlife Protection Council, 1996).
Thus, it appears that human actors of calculation and killing have little
empathetic experience with the living, multi-sensual beings whose body spaces
they invade in the technological form of bullets.
"Oh Give Me a Home, Where the Kangaroos Roam ..."
One aspect of Actor Network Theory is its focus upon agency. With respect to
wildlife caught up in international trading networks, there is a particular complica-
tion that must be recognized from the outset. It is only with the application of a
certain fraught status to a species - endangered or threatened with extinction - that
the trade of an animal's body parts becomes the subject of serious attention. At that
point, a species may be technically removed from circulation via national and
international regulations implemented through the Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).
By contrast, while the status and distribution of species declared "abundant" is «
often routinely monitored in wildlife inventories, these animals are effectively non-
issues in the sense that trading systems created around them are assumed basically
defensible. The taxonomic designation of abundance acts as a cloaking device for
spaces of calculation and killing whereby animals are (allowed to be) translated
from the wild into the commodity system. Sustained interest in the ways in which
they are networked is thus misplaced, pending default of their classificatory life-
chances.
Practically, this a serious problem with which some campaigning organiza-
tions grapple, since they are often cornered into arguing over the transitional
boundary between whether a species is abundant or vulnerable. The battle is to
prove that the species in question is vulnerable to population crash, and that
management procedures are inadequate. However, the agency-through-death
linkage is ultimately unsatisfactory because the legitimate candidates for shared
concern become rare species - and the spaces of other trading networks involving
abundant animals are made trivial by contrast.
If abundance is not only a taxonomic description of fecundity, but a normative
adjective hiding the practices of a complex network, it is also a license to kill with
wide public support. For this reason, consideration must be given to the spatial
imaginary of abundance as it works in the popular imagination with respect to
kangaroos.

11. 177
Virtual Abundance
The vision of kangaroos extending over a vast compass collides with a landscape
shadowed by the civilizing face, which specialists in spaces of calculation agree
should be removed of itinerants. This potentially implosive moment is s stabil ized by
holding kangaroos' bodies separate from a particular spatialization of the world as
a flat, deterministic, almost barren surface. In other words, kangaroos are virtually
abundant, and the land is to be virtually devoid of them.
A close look at the demise of western grey kangaroos, commonly called mal lee
kangaroos in the western Australian wheatbelt, illustrates this. For the popular
spatial imaginary to hold to abundance - the land must be a flat, unchanging plane.
Thus, western Australia has been granted, without widespread public resistance, a
kill quota for western grays in 1997, which is almost twice as high as that permitted
6 years earlier, despite the habitat reduction. Ignored in this process are certain
openly discussed facts:
Whether we look at wetlands or saltmarshes, mangroves or bushland,
inland creeks or estuaries, the same story emerges. In many cases, the
destruction of habitat, the major cause of biodiversity loss, is continuing
at an alarming rate. (State of the Environment Advisory Council, 1996, p.
5)
Perhaps these changes are not deemed significant for the animals involved because
the flat plane of the imaginary is a static entity. As Table 1 illustrates, that flat plane
has mountains, forests, deserts, and scrub. Ecological niche is both specific and
discrete, and kangaroos have home ranges from which they seldom venture.
However, few are willing to highlight this difference for more or less obvious
reasons.
The conviction that kangaroo bodies are impervious and always virtually
abundant, leads to extraordinary oversights. In Queensland, for example, during the
1982-1983 drought, when 70% of the kangaroo population perished on the east
coast within several months, the annual quota was not reduced, even though
macropod reproduction ceases during drought. In the same state, an overshoot of
the commercial kangaroo quota has occurred in 4 years since 1984, totalling
199,525 animals. Recent material on the 1997 commercial kill in Queensland,
however, suggests that kangaroos may be less abundant than the idealized spatial
imaginary presents:

12. 178
I note from the minutes of the Queensland Macropod Management
Advisory Committee of last 16 July that they are not killing very much of
their quota. Indeed, by the end of June, from a quota of grey kangaroos of
925,000 they had shot only 130,400 ... 14% of the quota; of the red
kangaroo quota of 875,000 for the year, by the end of June they had only
shot 188,970 ... 21.6% of the quota; and of the wallaroo quota of 200,000,
only 52,630 had been shot ... some 26.3%. In those same management
committee minutes, it also recommends that the minimum size of the skins
be reduced from 5 square feet to 4 square feet. Evidently something is
going wrong in Queensland, whereas, in New South Wales, quotas are
already taken up fully in several areas. (Jones, 1997, pp. 810-816)
Abundant kangaroo and barren landscape are therefore purified imaginings (Latour,
1993), far removed from the lived reality of individual animals sharing emotional
fellowship in their three-dimensional places of residence. The sightings of popu-
lation monitoring or the statistics of harvesting ratio calculations confirm kanga-
roos as viscerally separated from their dwelling places. This would fit well with the
discourse of disembodied beings contained in the United Nations so-called Biodi-
versity Convention: "Biological resources include genetic resources, organisms or
parts thereof, populations, or any other biotic component of ecosystems with actual
or potential use or value for humanity" (United Nations, 1992).
Spatial Imaginings' Impact on the Commercial Harvest
As virtual animals, kangaroos are readily acceptable, commercially viable bodies.
Increasingly, with shedding of the pest rationale, the kangaroo industry takes
center-stage as sole proprietor of these bodies, requiring no excuse on its behalf:
In recent years there have been changes in the way that kangaroos are
viewed by the rural community. Increasingly, kangaroos are being seen as
a valuable natural resource for their meat and skins - rather than a possible
rural problem. (Environment Australia, Biodiversity Group, 1996)
Irrevocably, public determination to marry two essentially conflicting spatial
imaginaries, abundant bodies and barren land, is co-implicated in the success of the
international kangaroo trading network. Ironically, by this count, kangaroos will
achieve agency only if, as a species aggregate, they undergo population crash
through events such as slaughter, reproductive failure or environmental impacts

13. 179
such as droughts, floods, and diseases. At that point, they will be accorded the
divine rule of Death and Disappearance (Muecke, 1996) and claim some attention.
That is, the remaining few bodies will be deemed worthy of the right to be there.
However, as their populations have not crashed across what is called the
commercial harvesting zone, the kangaroos have failed that particular trial of
agency. As long as they fail to perform in this sense, kangaroos will remain a non-
issue in the international arena. The spatial imaginary of abundance must be
reconciled with animals' rights to dwell in space so that an animal's abundance is
not a death warrant. Such reconciliation might bring about the closure of the
commercial kangaroo industry.
Conclusion
Kangaroo slaughter has been contested on ecological and ethical grounds for
decades, although by the early 1990s the concentrated, internationally-geared
opposition faltered when Greenpeace abandoned its kangaroo campaign, appar-
ently thwarted by the spatial imaginary of abundance. The Australian government,
some scientists, and most farmers achieved a discursive coup at that stage - the
kangaroo issue was assuredly a non-issue to the international community. Perhaps
it is more than coincidence that, in 1992, the highest-ever annual quota was
approved, at more than 5 million adult animals. Nonetheless, several national
Australian organizations, some with international affiliation, continue to assert
how the curious, the ironic, and the simply sad are woven into the target kangaroos,
who are, simultaneously, protected indigenous wildlife, emblem of the nation,
"pest" species, export product, and gourmet food.
The kangaroo network is historically embedded within a colonial siege
mentality, materially practiced as the kangaroo drive. The agency of kangaroos as
living beings is co-opted in the intimate moment of each death, rendering them
materials of non-agency within the kangaroo trading network. An examination of
the actors, spaces, and relationships making that network through the ANT lens
illuminates the hidden spaces involved - in particular, the role of spaces of
calculation, which otherwise appear disconnected from those of killing. Further, it t
is possible to see how the taxonomy of abundance and distinctive spatial imaginaries,
provide the popular illusion of ethical detachment from the practices of this
network. Through this kind of analysis of wild animals in international trade, it is
possible to acknowledge how, why, and by which means their agency is revoked
and reinstated.

14. 180
Notes
1. Correspondence should be sent to Lorraine Thorne, School of Geographical Sciences.
University of Bristol, University Road, Bristol, BS8 I SS, UK. I would like to thank Chris
Philo, Jennifer Wolch, Sarah Whatmore, Nicola Brimblecombe, and Ken Shapiro for their
constructive and insightful suggestions.
2. The discipline of economics is the prime explorer of trade-related issues, dealing with
ethical considerations as the option of "welfare," with organic nonhumans designated as
stocks or resources. While anthropology has examined trading systems and the role of
nonhumans within them, the latter are principally tokens of cultural specificity. In the
biological sciences, animals are primarily characterized by their bodily form and function,
and their quantitative presence or absence at a given site.
3. The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) mounted a campaign which was
reportedly successful in September of 1977 to persuade the U.K. grocery multiple, Tesco.
to remove kangaroo meat from its shelves.
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CALL FOR PAPERS FOR A SPECIAL ISSUE of
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