Abstract
Domesticated pigs (Sus scrofa) were introduced as livestock in Australia by European settlers, and now a large population is living wild. Rather than interrogate the settler pig as co-colonizer and destroyer of Australian ecologies, this article employs Deborah Bird Rose’s concept of “unmaking”—a process that fractures relationality in service of control—to articulate the relational violence done to the free-living pig by naming it a feral animal. An examination of the nonhuman’s historical entanglement with Anglo-Australian settlers in New South Wales will trace the free-living pigs’ shifting agency and identity. Introduced pigs were modern English breeds, domesticates in nascent capitalist stages of unmaking. Yet, these animals were made anew in Australia, living largely unmediated and demonstrating remarkable adaptability to novel environments. This article analyzes how porcine bodies and identities took shape in connection to a hunting culture and wild pork economy, a practice that encouraged Sus scrofa’s transformative ability to move between wild and domestic domains. Then, in the 1950s, how farmers, veterinarians, and government actors with converging motivations sought to reductively read the free-living pig as toxic and illegitimate, and to rebrand the “wild” pig as “feral.” To be feral in Australia is to be part of a systematic process that institutes strict limitations on an animal’s relational possibilities. By problematizing all life-sustaining connections the nonhuman being has with their environment, this process endeavors to radically unmake the socio-ecologies that constitute their being. Unmaking the feral targets the relational knots that make existence possible.
Domesticated pigs (Sus scrofa) were introduced to Australia by European settlement, and over time a significant population began living independent of human husbandry. An estimated 2.4 to 4 million free-living pigs now inhabit large parts of the country. Categorized as feral animals, they are the target of farming and government bodies who see the free-living pig as a prolific pest and an invasive species highly destructive to economies and environments. Culling initiatives are supported by veterinary and ecological scientific literature that predominantly focuses on the negative impacts of this porcine population. It is widely accepted that feral beings inhabit a problematic position in the country, and consequently free-living pigs are starved of allies in Australia. Introduced animals have also been the subject of critique in the humanities. Livestock accompanying European colonial settlers have been cast as “creatures of empire,” effective co-colonizing allies in damaging native environments and the co-sustaining relationships between Indigenous human and more-than-human communities.1 Deborah Bird Rose conceptualizes the destruction wrought on these communities as part of a larger colonial project of unmaking—a dismantlement of the complex webs of life and death that have coevolved over millennia.2
Rather than interrogating the introduced species as an agent of unmaking, this paper will propose the inverse question and ask how pigs themselves are subject to being unmade. The concept of unmaking used in this paper is the one developed by Deborah Bird Rose3 and recently extended by Marcus Baynes-Rock.4 Unmaking acts in contradiction to the relationality necessary for life to emerge and describes a process that disregards how being exists through interaction with others. Rose writes about unmaking as a logic of control prevalent in late modernity that involves the “separation, fragmentation, the breaking down of connectivities into bits and pieces.”5 Building on this notion, Baynes-Rock argues that modern forms of domestication are problematic forms of unmaking. These practices materially and semiotically apprehend animals separately from the environment in which they have evolved and then mediate, modify, and simplify their ecological niche to shape these nonhuman beings for human-centric purposes. Unmaking highlights processes that fracture relationships in service of control. I extend these concepts toward analyzing campaigns of invasive animal extermination and suppression. A feral is unmade, I argue, by enacting the entirety of their socioecological relations as problematic, toxic, and illegitimate in a bid to ultimately annihilate their existence.
I am in awe of the transformative capacity of pigs: their relational promiscuity and ability to thrive by embroiling themselves in diverse socioecologies, including forests, plantations, cities, and more broadly the conditions of the Anthropocene. They are cosmopolitan beings: organisms who can “eat-anything-live-anywhere.”6 Pigs, or Sus scrofa, are generally classified in two kinds—wild and domesticated. Yet the distinctions drawn between these two kinds—especially regarding their habitat, behavior, appearance, and proximity to people—dissolves upon closer examination. The “intractable agency” of biologically domesticated pigs makes them adept at disentangling themselves from ecologies and practices of domesticity.7 Free-living domesticated pigs express phenotypical traits that bear strong resemblance to those of wild Eurasian pigs: long, black hair; pronounced tusks; muscular bodies; and extended snouts.8 An analysis of the pig’s proliferation in Australia will demonstrate this domestic-wild potential,9 including the capacity for free-living pigs to quickly adapt back into domesticity. The settler pig’s history both destabilizes the domestic/wild binary and is an account of how these distinctions were strictly reenforced.
The tension between wild and domestic, between processes of vital relationality and unmaking, will be employed to narrativize and analyze the trajectory of porcine being in Australia, specifically focusing on human-pig relations in New South Wales (NSW). Northwest NSW serves as an interesting site for this study, with a confluence of significant aspects that compose the free-living pig’s story: the entrenchment of a free-living population; early legislation marking these pigs for eradication; a thriving pig-hunting industry and culture; and the genesis of a disease narrative about feral pigs. This paper will begin, however, in the eighteenth-century British Isles, exploring how the pig was unmade through modern domestication and capitalist production. Contrasting this process of unmaking with the transplantation of pigs into Australia will illustrate how domesticated pigs were made anew in alien environments. That is, pigs were able to express greater agency in experimenting and constituting themselves through new socioecological worlds. The pig’s domestic-wild capacity was encouraged and exploited by both early settler farmers and later pig hunters. Then, in the 1950s, farmers, veterinarians, and government agencies sought to construct the free-living pig solely as problematic and ontologically distinct from the domestic pig. The latter half of the paper covers a period when strict limitations on the relational possibilities of a pig were instituted, and the place, identity, and lives of free-living pigs were at stake.
This article, which draws on newspaper archives and colonial settler texts, with interpretations informed by ethnographic research, situates itself as part of a growing body of research exploring changing attitudes toward so-called invasive and feral animals, of which Australia has a strong representation. These relations reveal that “just who counts as a friend . . . is a complex and shifting business.”10 The free-living, domesticated pigs in this paper were initially related to as “wild,” until they were problematized and rebranded “feral”—an identity commonly taken for granted in Australia, and a seemingly natural category legitimized by science.11 I aim to contextualize the politics behind this shift, critique how animals like free-living pigs are managed through unmaking, and open the question of other modes of relating to this animal. These revaluations are part of an ongoing critique of invasive ecologies in the environmental humanities, and the need to rethink our ways of living together with other beings in the Anthropocene.12
Capitalist Porcine Ecologies
The pigs such as the Berkshire, Tamworth, and Yorkshire breeds transported to Australia throughout the nineteenth century were representative of the English breeds emerging at the time.13 Previously, the dominant domesticated pig on the British Isles was the “common boar,” a lean, dark, and coarse-haired pig raised through the practice of pannage, a method whereby a swine herder accompanies their free-ranging herd through mast forests. In England, the wild boar had been hunted out of existence since approximately the fifteenth century, yet the common pig still expressed certain phenotypic traits representative of wild kinds, traits that had not been bred out and remained persistent expressions under less intensive forms of husbandry.14 Leading into the eighteenth century, new living arrangements and diets for the common pig began to emerge, changes driven by deforestation, the gradual enclosure of common woodlands, the emergence of new crops and commercial husbandry, and the migration of rural peasantry to urban centers.15 Fatter and more prolific domestic breeds from China were soon introduced to England, and British farmers began to mate the English type with these more productive kinds. Most of the world’s domesticated pigs are descendants of these mixes, prototypes of what Sam White calls the “capitalist pig.”16 Capitalist pigs are a result of domestication practices and ecologies that instituted new forms of control over pig relations.
The porcine ecologies and breed production that emerged in Britain were the basis for controlled exploitation of pigs across Europe and North America over the next two hundred years. Alex Blanchette’s ethnographic research in a United States factory farm documents an extreme manifestation of this process in the form of the “industrial pig.”17 Within these systems, pig bodies are standardized, mechanized, and shaped toward maximizing efficient breeding and growth. Animals inhabit closely monitored environments, with intensively managed diets and sex, while losing significant agency to navigate complex ecologies and social relations. The boundaries that delineate the intensified piggery and the surrounding environment are tightly patrolled, where biosecurity regimes limit the passage of fatal diseases and maintain a self-enclosed system.
The rise of capitalist pigs and industrial porcine ecologies are examples of domestication that Baynes-Rock would consider representative of the process of unmaking.18 The industrial pig is an extreme case of systematically fragmenting and mediating the environmental relations that constituted that animal over time, to predictably shape and incorporate them as part of anthropocentric projects. Domestication as unmaking highlights the evolutionary and developmental distinction between a simplified, industrial porcine world and wilder, broader, more complex ecological systems. Indeed, the emergence of the capitalist pig was connected not only to the disentanglement of people, pigs, and forest but also the development of the idea of wilderness as a place distinct from the human world.19 Baynes-Rock seeks to refocus our attention onto the powerful anthropocentric interventions that choreograph these new ecological, technological, and intra- and interspecies social connections and disconnections. Domestication ecologies can be understood through what is lost, argues Baynes-Rock, where the range of relational possibilities for individuals and species has been narrowed or withheld. These compartmentalized worlds are impoverished and dependent on human intervention, with some species unable to survive beyond this mediated domain. However, this breeding of fragility does not necessarily apply to pigs.
Wild Colonial Stock
If generations of pigs raised in nineteenth-century England were progenitors of emerging capitalist ecologies and economies, then some of the pigs transported to Australia during this period undertook a different trajectory. The first livestock imports were kept free-range and not enclosed within properties. Nancy Cushing’s article on early domesticated pigs explores how they were allowed to forage unaccompanied, consuming town and farm waste. Further they roamed in adjacent bushland and wetlands where they adapted to rooting the earth and feeding on native flora and fauna, colonizing the food webs of an already marginalized Indigenous population.20 These free-ranging, domesticated pigs were tied to domestic worlds and dinner tables through occasional treats from their owners.21 While keeping pigs in this manner was considered the most economically viable option, many early settlers also stopped pig keeping due to the costs of building fences to protect crops from these unconstrained animals.
Across history and geography, domesticated pigs have been valued not only for their meat and rapid reproduction rates but also for their capacity to adapt to novel environments and survive independently. These abilities facilitated their spread alongside the movement of humans across the Pacific Islands, Americas, and Antipodes.22 An important part of the European colonizing process, pigs were not only free-ranging livestock but were released to be hunted and harvested later. Domesticated pigs in these situations were not expected to be domestic, that is, a farm-raised animal, living in proximity to people, and intensively managed. Some English breeds, such as the Tamworth, which was introduced to Australia in the 1890s, were admired for their robustness and resilience. The colonial pig was expected to adapt its feeding strategies across multiple environments, to free-range and form new ecological relations, even to the point that they challenged those boundaries designed to confine or exclude them.23 Indeed, in Australia, free-ranging pigs soon became free-living as they permanently wandered off or were abandoned by their owners, cutting their human ties.
Despite the downward trend of domesticated pig keeping across NSW in the 1880s,24 there were simultaneously increased reports of wild pig presence in agricultural gazettes and newspaper columns that reported on crop damage or promoted pig hunting. Free-living pigs prior to this period were largely limited to small, isolated colonies and rarely reported.25 The Macquarie Marshes—a wetland in northwest NSW fed by multiple riverine systems—was a site where one major pig population became established in the late 1800s. The Macquarie Marshes is a diverse ecosystem supporting the growth of grasslands, reed meadows, and bushland.26 Home to the Wailwan people for thousands of years, the marshlands also attracted settlers whose livestock and irrigation modifications served to disrupt Indigenous ecosystems.27 Settler pigs flourished in the wetlands, feeding on common reeds and other native vegetation; a variety of frogs, earthworms, fish, and snakes; and also lambs and livestock carcasses.28 In addition, free-living pigs have few nonhuman predators in Australian ecosystems.29 By the early twentieth century, whether due to the animals’ prolific breeding, extended periods of wet weather, or facilitated by the spread of farming settlements, free-living pigs had colonized much of the landscape directly connected to the rivers that fed into the Macquarie Marshes. The interconnecting Barwon and Gwydir Rivers and the watercourse country of Moree have remained home to a resilient porcine population for the last 140 years.
If unmaking describes how capitalist pigs have their ecologies, subjectivities, and biological selves shaped by anthropocentric interventions, then settler Australian pigs, to a degree, made themselves anew, performing their “own adapting, transforming, and reinventing.”30 Pigs skillfully adapted by weaving together and participating in a complex web of relations composed of unfamiliar beings. The Americas and Pacific Islands all have introduced, nonnative pigs, yet the pigs that develop and evolve in these places must be differentiated, in that they are constituted by a unique set of human and nonhuman beings, practices, and ecosystems. As Laura Ogden provocatively suggests, we can reconceptualize such animals as part of a diaspora of Sus scrofa. They are generations of nonhuman migrants defined through their adaptation to the context they inhabit. Ogden’s reframing of invasive species is helpful to remind us how “identity and subjectivity is always political and relational” and that animals become “differently positioned subjects” depending on where they live.31 In Australia, British-bred domesticated pigs became “wild pigs,” as well as competitors and prey for dingoes, predators to snakes, pests for sheep farmers, and an inexpensive resource around which a small, pig-hunting economy formed in some parts.
Hunting cultures were a part of wild pig emergence in Australia. Pigs were quickly incorporated into Wailwan diets.32 Despite hunting being a popular settler activity, it was only toward the end of the nineteenth century that pig hunting became common in NSW,33 likely developing out of hunting kangaroos with dogs.34 In the floodplain environment of northwest NSW, pig hunting rose in prominence alongside the animal’s growing reputation as a pest among pastoralists and agriculturalists. As the problem increased in the early to mid-twentieth century, landowners publicly invited recreational hunters to the region, sometimes offering privately subsidized bounties on pig snouts, making “pig-sticking” a “profitable sport” in the area.35 In Moree, a local industry developed around catching wild pigs alive, where hunters, with the assistance of dogs, caught free-living pigs to be sold at livestock markets and slaughtered for domestic consumption.36 While hunters curtailed the apparent number of pests on a property, the free-living pig’s incorporation into this small, wild pork economy also played a significant role in their spread across NSW. Live pigs being transported sometimes escaped to potentially colonize new places.37 Some hunters intentionally translocated pigs to establish new populations near home for convenient harvesting.38 In such cases, the wild colonial pig population grew alongside a settler hunting culture in a mutually enabling arrangement.
Pig hunter-harvesters exploited the porcine shape-shifting potentiality to move between wild and domestic domains. Between catching and selling, previously free-living pigs were kept in a pigsty, fed, fattened over the course of a month, and then sold. Feeding captured pigs on a controlled diet in the weeks before a slaughter was a method adopted by hunters from Australian pannage farmers. Chickpeas, maize, lucerne, and dairy by-product not only fattened the pig but also changed the flavor of the pork to be less “gamey” and taste more like domestic kinds. Public controversy about the sale of wild pork by butchers alongside domestic meats erupted, and opponents argued that the wild pork was generally lower quality, lacked in fat, or had a “rank” flavor.39 These attempts to distinguish the two kinds of pigs were sometimes disputed. Abattoir workers who handled pig consignments argued that without a thorough inspection, it was difficult to make a distinction based on the skinned body. In some cases, a wild pig, “if properly fed for a short time on grain . . . ceased to be a wild pig.”40 Indeed, wild pork was likely sold unknowingly as domestic pork. Free-living pigs were not only quickly tamed to be kept in enclosures, but their bodies could substantially transform and become acceptably domestic in flavor for an Anglo-Australian settler palate.
The attempt to construct a wild pork industry was likely influenced by the highly successful “rabbiting” industry that flourished in Southeastern Australia, including northwest NSW, prior to the 1950s.41 Rabbit trapping yielded high earnings not only from bounties but also meat and skin sales,42 and it supported thousands of people who were part of an itinerant and unskilled workforce moving between farms. Pig hunters were from the same demographic.43 Hunters did not own the land on which pigs were caught and many would have offered their services to landowners to remove wild pigs from their property.44 With an animal that thrived so well independently, harvesting free-living pigs and then housing and feeding them for a limited period required little capital or resources on the part of these hunters. The inclusion of wild pork into people’s diets and the spread of free-living pigs across NSW emerged as part of a small local industry and economy driven by a less privileged socioeconomic class.45 Indeed, hunters not only sold pork to abattoirs and markets, but wild pork was also part of a trade of cheap available meat in towns.46
Branding the Free-Living Pig
The free-living pig’s growing population and emerging identity as a resource eventually put it at odds with other stakeholders invested in Australian pigs, farms, and environments. In 1934, in the districts of Warialda and Walgett in northwest NSW, wild pigs had become such a problem for agricultural and sheep farmers that they were officially declared “noxious” by the Pastures and Protection Board (PPB; now Local Land Services).47 The PPB were legislatively empowered bodies in different districts set up to oversee the management of rural land, livestock, and disease and the destruction of pests.48 Once an animal is declared noxious, it becomes the responsibility of landowners to destroy all such animals on their property. As explored in the last section, hunters in the region capitalized on and found value in the porcine problem. However, the animal’s threat to farming eventually dominated the free-living pig’s identity in Australia. Beginning in the 1950s, there was a significant drive toward redefining the wild pig to brand it as the kind of being it is typically referred to as today—a feral animal, out of control, diseased, and destructive.
Sparganosis, a zoonotic parasitic infection caused by ingesting tapeworm larvae in undercooked meat, was identified in the carcasses of pigs in a Newcastle abattoir in 1950.49 The source was traced back to the wild pork economy in northwest NSW and pigs caught in Macquarie Marshes and the watercourse area of Moree.50 Introduced predators, such as foxes, cats, and pigs, had ingested tapeworm when preying on aquatic and intermediate native hosts, such as snakes, frogs, or fish.51 Recorded sparganosis infections in humans from consuming pigs are very rare, with only four locally acquired in Australia over the past two hundred years; yet between 1952 and 1954 there was a concerted campaign in the public media by various actors in response to the identification of sparganosis in the abattoir, arguing against the sale, transport, processing, and consumption of all free-living pigs. The momentum of this campaign was carried by the Australian Pig Society, a collective of domestic pig breeders and farmers who had representatives across different districts in NSW. The Pig Society began petitioning local branches of the PPB to declare wild pigs as noxious animals, not only in Walgett and Warialda but across the entire state.52
Pig farming until the 1970s was largely tied to dairy farming, and domestic pigs were fed with the by-products of the dairy industry.53 The domestic pork industry was relatively small during the period when sparganosis was identified, dropping from 1.4 million domestic pigs in Australia in 1946 to 1.1 million in 1953.54 For the next two decades, the industry endeavored to increase public demand for pork, eventually doubling the number of pigs slaughtered and shifting toward factory pig farming by the late sixties. Yet in the early fifties, the sale of wild pork was argued to be undercutting the precarious position of pig farmers: game meat was relatively cheaper. The Pig Society also claimed that the comparatively lower-quality wild pork, when sold alongside the pork of a “properly grown animal,” devalued the domestic product.55 Breeders argued that wild pigs were unmanaged so likely to be diseased and unpalatable as meat. This characterization of wild pork in Australia persists into the twenty-first century: feral game meat is largely considered both undesirable and dangerous.56 Biosecurity concerns raised about the threat of sparganosis spreading to other parts of the state led to a ban on transporting wild pigs in some districts and cast doubt on the practices of the hunting industry.57 By April 1955, free-living pigs had effectively been proclaimed noxious across NSW.
Emerging alongside this campaign in the fifties were two important studies on free-living pigs by the prominent Melbourne University veterinarian E. M. Pullar. Both papers furthered the notion of the animal as diseased and out of control. Pullar was connected to state veterinary laboratories and known largely for his work on domestic swine disease. In the 1930s and leading into the postwar period, Pullar played a significant role in monitoring the impact of disease in domestic herds and investigating the total eradication of disease from piggeries.58 Pullar’s first paper on free-living pigs addressed them as a potential vector for the infection of domestic stock. Data was gathered by survey; local participants were attracted through advertisements in newspapers with provocative titles such as “Wild Pigs Reservoir for Infectious Disease.”59 Despite the study’s initial proclamations, in the published article Pullar reported little evidence of free-living populations harboring or spreading disease.60 Still, this finding did not discount the article’s argument that this population possibly could become infected and then become an uncontrollable and disastrous vector for any novel disease that might destroy domestic livestock. Indeed, this new porcine reservoir theory was reinforced by the finding of sparganosis and over the years prompted industry and veterinary fears of wild pigs.61 Analysis of disease reservoirs often hinges on the speculative, and across modern history select species populations—whether pigs, rats, mosquitoes, or otherwise—are feared and framed as “epidemic villains,” justifying widespread culling.62 Domesticated pigs are known to be vulnerable to and to amplify many exotic diseases. With free-living pigs, the anxiety of an unruly vector is particularly acute when coupled with the idea that they are a particularly rapid breeder, found widespread and in high numbers across Australia.
Pullar’s second and much-publicized 1953 paper urged for a closer look at pigs for their economic value as a resource, their role as agricultural vermin, and their “enormous destruction” of native wildlife.63 Importantly, this was the first paper to examine in historical detail the introduction of pigs by European settlers and to be used to publicly argue that these animals—who until this point had been referred to as “wild”—should be recategorized as “feral.” The rebranding of wild pig to feral pig did not catch on immediately but was eventually established, after several decades, in scientific papers, government reports, and the media. This shift developed alongside an emerging eco-nationalism in Australia, where settler belonging began to be expressed through a strong identification with wild native flora and fauna. The growing national identity in turn produced new exclusionary and arguably racialized forms of biopolitics, targeting introduced animals thriving outside of sanctioned domains.64
While the term feral is not a legal category, feral was a terminological shift central to rethinking free-living pigs as a problematic animal in Australia and represents their now dominant characterization. The tone of the pig’s character gathered under this new branding was set by a certain group of actors—farmers, veterinarians, industry figures, government bodies—with converging economic, political, and ideological motivations. In particular, the pig’s feral status as diseased, destructive, out of place, and out of control continues to be posed as threatening to the livestock industry, and so “constructed in contradistinction to domesticity and domestication.”65 Free-living pigs cut across and disrupted the boundaries that distinguished the domestic from the wild, and so needed to be policed. And pig farmers were invested in undermining the relatively small, local wild pork economy built on the domestic-wild pig, arguing in favor of generations of pigs raised—or unmade—in intensively human-mediated contexts. The valorization of a porcine being and ecology that requires sufficient infrastructure, food, and other resources—a possibility inaccessible to the less privileged hunter-harvesters—reveals the role of power in defining, institutionalizing, and benefiting from the exclusionary practice of domestication and unmaking.
The concept “feral” has been adopted by academics in transgressive ways over the past decade. Notably, a special issue of Feral Feminisms, titled “Feral Theory,” explores how feral can be used for “untaming, queering, and radicalizing feminist thought and practice” with a set of papers that celebrate the liminality of the concept and its liberative potential.66 More recently the word has been appropriated by multispecies scholars, as represented by the Feral Atlas project, to describe those organisms that have been made through their entanglement in anthropocentric projects as well as by escaping human control and having unexpected consequences.67 In many ways, the “feral effect” does capture Sus scrofa’s remarkable proliferation through colonialism in Australia.
But I prefer not to apply the word feral to identify the free-living pig populations. While the term has been positively appropriated by a counterculture movement,68 naming a thing feral is predominantly associated with negative interpretations in the Australian context. Feral embodies a “frustration about a lack of control” and can be applied disparagingly when used about people and animals.69 When interpreted by stakeholders such as invasive species biologists and farmers, feral is a term that only inspires narrow questions about the pig’s destructive impact. This naming closes off the “wonder” required to explore how these animals “become through their relations with other beings,”70 how they were made and made themselves anew in Australia. And it is within this Australian context that I write about free-living pigs and partially expect to be read. Rather than enacting feral as an abstract concept representing a global set of human-nonhuman processes characteristic of the Anthropocene, I understand the term as having a meaning that is always situated and can have political and fatal consequences. These consequences are not limited to Australia but may manifest in other Anglo or Anglo-settler countries where free-living pigs are introduced, and where it is also a term used to justify methods of control and violent intervention.71
Unmaking the Feral
In 1983, two farmers disputed in district court the lawful destruction of twenty-four pigs by the PPB from Canonba, western NSW. Initially, the persons successfully argued that the pigs were not feral but domestic, since they were kept in pigsties, grain fed for several weeks, and had offspring raised by the property owners. Canonba PPB contested this, and the courts in 1986 eventually found that the pigs were rightfully identified and killed as feral. The judges ruled that the meaning of “feral pig” should be based on physical characteristics—such as dark hair and long snouts—and not only on the condition of wild living. Essentially, a feral-looking pig living in domesticity is still feral, and so legally must be destroyed.72 The outcome determined that free-living pigs can no longer be caught alive and kept as property, whether for transport, sale, personal consumption, or breeding. For hunters, the only legally acceptable mode of relating to free-living pigs became killing, either for culling or for personal consumption.
From that point on, all domesticated pigs who had lived a free-living existence were exiled from domestic practices, spaces, and identity. The acting director-general of the NSW Department of Agriculture concluded that the court ruling finally clarified that “a feral pig can never become a domestic pig.”73 This demarcation of two kinds of porcine being was a new limitation on the relational possibilities of pigs and denied their capacity to adapt and live between wild and domestic worlds—a capacity central to their proliferation in the country. This ontological ruling was one of the final nails in the coffin of the NSW wild pork economy, and presumably was considered important for discouraging the translocation, spread, and economic value of free-living pigs.74 Each state in Australia has their own laws pertaining to feral animals, and there are similar rulings across most other jurisdictions regarding limitations on moving and keeping live feral pigs. Although these restrictions do not necessarily extend to all animals. Feral goats and camels can be caught, transported, and later processed as meat, and free-living cattle can be caught, tamed, and sold on a domestic market in Northern Territory. The exceptionally strict limitations on pigs are likely due to the anxiety around their status as an unruly, prolific vector of disease, and the threat they might present to the health and productivity of cattle farming and factory pig farming.
Demarcating feral and domestic kinds is a means of unmaking free-living pig socioecologies. This strategy is consistent with campaigns of nonhuman eradication and suppression in Australia, campaigns that aim to fracture the connections that enable the feral animal’s ongoing existence. With free-living pigs, this unmaking is done in three ways: by enacting the animal as untouchable, delegitimizing their relationships, and undermining their cultural attachments to people.
As vectors of disease, their proximity to livestock is regarded as a biosecurity hazard. Contact is severed by installing fences or culling the local pig population. The consistent characterization of wild pork as unsuitable for consumption can instantiate experiences of disgust. Even among recreational hunters I interviewed, many express a hesitancy or aversion to eating feral pig meat because of its reputation as diseased or unpalatable, although the perceived toxicity and refusal to identify these pigs as a form of food was not always shared by hunters. In his 1980 poem, “Poor Man’s Pork,” about pig hunting in northwest NSW, Keith Garvey mocks the idea that free-living pigs are diseased, dedicating his verse to “our enlightened bureaucracy [which] claims that to eat the flesh of wild pigs is a dangerous health hazard.”75 Actors like the Australian Pig Society and veterinarians successfully cast the bodies of domestic-raised and free-living pigs as substantially different, where those not “properly grown” are considered irregular, degenerate, polluted, and risky, and so untouchable. Disgust provokes dissociation, and these aversive affects can extend to other feral kinds in Australia: for example, not only the flesh but the physiology and behavior of introduced carp can inspire aversion.76
Catie Gressier argues that Australian’s disgust with feral meat, while it is shifting among certain sections of the population, can be understood by the introduced animal’s perceived “unhomely” presence in the nation. Feral animals have the ambiguous and unsettling status of animals once familiar but now out of place—aberrant beings who are a danger to the proper order of things77 and inherently disruptive because they inhabit an ecology in which they were not evolved to fit. The persistent examination of feral animal existence as having a negative effect on an already fragile environment serves to delegitimize all their ecological relations: ground rooting is a carbon effect producing climate change;78 feeding on native species is undermining Australian ecosystems. Similarly, other feral animals, such as cats, are frequently depicted in relation to their role in driving extinction.79 Even if pigs feed solely on agricultural and pastoral products, this is considered harmful to Australian economies and farming families. For free-living pigs in Australia, there are no environmental relations or facets of their existence that are seen as nonthreatening or acceptable.
Recreational hunters’ perceived cultural and personal investment in pigs is a source of mistrust, as it is assumed that they want to maintain a healthy future population for hunting rather than suppress it.80 Interactions that might create value from the pigs’ existence are discouraged, undermined, or banned—as with live transport and sale for a local economy. Other cases of undermined cultural attachments with ferals include settler Australia’s identification with brumbies, a free-living horse. Recent campaigns have sought to disrupt an entrenched national affinity with these animals by foregrounding their destructive relationship to native wilderness and questioning the romantic imagination for the “mighty brumby” who in reality “looks a lot more like an inbred pony.”81 Any connection that might lead to sympathy for or give value to, and so sustain, a feral animal’s existence in Australia must be devalued. Although the acceptance of this invasive species discourse varies between animals. Brumbies, for example, occupy an ambivalent place in Australia, compared to the largely maligned free-living pig.
Danielle Celermajer and Arian Wallach argue that feral animals in Australia are stripped of any “use” value, “aesthetic” value, or “identity-based” value, and are characterized as worthless beings who interfere with those animals for whom colonial Australia finds a category, a place, or a use.82 As beings placed “outside available frames of meaning” feral animals are excluded from the same cultural protection and sympathy extended to domestic and wild kinds, and to be denied of all value and status is to be made illegible. Free-living pigs, for example, are indiscriminately killable and only subject to the most basic animal welfare laws. However, rather than claiming feral animals are made illegible, it is more correct to state that their legibility is reduced to a narrow, dogmatic reading, one that demands we interpret them solely through their destructive effects on others. Free-living pigs, who have few allies in Australia, are more likely to be singularly characterized in this manner. Further, while the deaths of individual feral pigs might go publicly unnoticed (as they do in recreational hunting), the feral pig’s death en masse is registered often as an achievement in the war against pests.83 Again, this register is dependent on the species.84 In general, a toxic reading of animals branded as feral is central to maintaining regimes of extermination and suppression. Any alternative imagining of these animals as having positive value or place in the country—such as those made by compassionate conservationists—have been the target of attacks by invasive species ecologists, who claim that exploring such relational possibilities obfuscates and denies the destructive impact of invasive species.85
Reducing a free-living animal’s status and their relations to solely negative effects is part of the process of their unmaking. To undergo domestication and to be named feral are both material and semiotic processes by which a species’ bodies and ecological relations are managed by humans. Yet while domestication, according to Baynes-Rock, mediates and modifies socioecologies to remake animals to anthropocentric ends, feral is a form of unmaking that seeks to annihilate the animal’s existence via a relational vacuum. By contesting and problematizing all the feral pig’s environmental relations, a project of eradication serves to deny and starve these nonhumans of all life-sustaining connections and to challenge the alliances that bind their continued existence in the world. Unmaking the feral closes off any relational claims to the animal (e.g., by pig hunters) and by the animal (on native or farming ecologies) and, in doing so, aims to bring about the targeted animal’s total disappearance from the landscape and from people’s lives. Free-living pigs are deeply entrenched in Australian environments, and it is unlikely that they will ever be eradicated. Yet ideally, invasive species campaigns do imagine and attempt to recover a precolonial environment empty of these aberrant variants,86 a landscape absent of all possible negative or positive relational effects through which these pigs can be articulated and made legible.
Conclusion
By writing a short history of free-living pigs in Australia, exploring their capacity to thrive in multiple social and ecological worlds, and unpacking the construction of their toxic identity, I hope to better articulate the relational violence committed against pigs and demonstrate how these solely destructive associations obscure what is remarkable about these animals. For better or for worse, the domestic-wild pig’s success is an example of how life emerges through unexpected connections. I take this plasticity and creativity to be an admirable quality of Sus scrofa and one that contrasts dramatically with the indifference that eradication and suppression campaigns have for these more-than-human beings. These campaigns deny all possibility for valuable relations and, as Deborah Bird Rose argues, opportunities for any kind of ethical regard.87 Given that Rose’s writing is so sensitive to how being emerges through long-term, mutual connectivities, it is no coincidence that her research is useful for attuning to the horrors of unmaking and how it targets the vital relationality that makes life possible. Settler Australia offers particularly virulent examples of unmaking the existence of feral, invasive, and other unwanted animals, although similar processes can also apply to campaigns regarding nonferal animals and contexts, as with the badger in Britain.88
This paper offers a narrative of the transformation of the pig in Australia, from domestic to wild, wild to domestic, and wild to feral. A being unmade, made anew, and unmade again. Despite representing the pig’s trajectory in a linear fashion, I do not deny that currently in Australia there are other ways to speak about the place and identity of pigs apart from “feral.” Indeed, despite the efforts of invasive species campaigns, there are multiple, if marginal, ways of talking about and engaging free-living pigs. First Nation Australians express a variety of cultural interpretations of pigs, and some groups do not identify them within the wild-domestic categories of settler Australians.89 Feral animals, like pigs, can be incorporated into community and family life in ways that defy the eco-nationalist perspectives.90 Pigs have been seen as destructive but also as an important source of meat in Northern Queensland, supplementing a lack of “traditional food” and viewed as a seed disperser for some native trees.91 Daniel Natusch and colleagues’ ecological study on feral pig rooting has shown that these animals can disrupt the habits of native birds but also create niches for native species to thrive in new ways.92 And my ongoing research on recreational pig hunters in Australia suggests that despite these pig-killers’ often reducing feral pigs to objects, this community can also offer more interesting, respectful, and surprising ways of engaging and conceptualizing pigs that are beyond a reductive set of negative traits.93 By critiquing invasive species discourse as a process of unmaking, I am not claiming that pigs are not an environmental and economic problem, that they do not transmit disease, or that we should not be killing pigs and managing their population in some circumstances. Yet the critique of unmaking will hopefully help open the question of whether there might be better ways of relating to and killing pigs not steeped in the radical relational violence of eradication, and where pigs can be respected and read in a more nuanced and generous way.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Ned Makim and Les Cleal, two hunters who inspired the question of shifting pig relations. Thank you to colleagues Laura Kuen and Virginie Vaté for their time and comments on an earlier draft, and the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful suggestions. This research has been cofunded by the European Union (call no. 02_20_079 International Mobility of Researchers—MSCA-IF IV, OP VVV, Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport).
Notes
Rose, Reports from a Wild Country. However, how introduced animals like pigs changed Indigenous foodways is more complex than a single narrative. I will reflect briefly on this in the conclusion.
For example, Rose, Reports from a Wild Country; “What If”; “Slowly.”
Frawley and McCalman, Rethinking Invasion Ecologies; Franklin, Animal Nation; Ogden, “Beaver Diaspora”; Riley, “Changing Legal Status of Cats”; Celermajer and Wallach, “Fate of the Illegible Animal.”
Coghlan, Wealth and Progress of NSW.
Dingoes, wedge-tailed eagles, and crocodiles.
See Ceremonial Re-enactment of Spearing a Wild Pig by an Aboriginal Australian Warrior, Macquarie Marshes, New South Wales, ca. 1895, photograph, PIC Album 394: Photographs of Religious Ceremonies of the Australian Aborigines, National Library of Australia, https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-138663795/view.
An earlier account is Finch-Hatton, Advance Australia!
Land, “Kangaroos, Wild Pigs,” 3. It should also be noted that in other parts of Australia in the mid-twentieth century, such as Victoria and Queensland, bounties on feral pigs were subsidized by the government.
The earliest example of this industry is Maitland Weekly Mercury, “Capturing Wild Pigs,” 17. Between 1900 and 1950 there was a growing selection of articles in NSW newspapers on hunting and rearing wild pigs for sale, particularly around Moree, e.g., Daily Telegraph, “Thrills with Profit,” 8; World’s News, “Hunting Wild Pigs,” 6. Note that northwest NSW was not the only site where major populations of free-living pigs and a pig-hunting industry emerged in Australia.
Newcastle Sun, “Close Check Made Here,” 6; hunters I interviewed made similar statements.
Before myxomatosis was released and killed large portion of the rabbit population.
Scone Advocate (NSW), “Wild pigs Eating Young Lambs,” 3; this was supported by ethnographic interviews I conducted in 2019 that touched on the history of hunting in North NSW.
Based on interviews in northwest NSW, conducted in 2019, about hunting practices in the mid-twentieth century.
Based on interviews in northwest NSW, conducted in 2019.
Pests are defined as those organisms that threaten rural economies, consuming produce and damaging fences that exclude or contain animals.
Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate, “Rare Disease,” 3.
Tran, Tran, Mehanna, “Sparganosis”; Gordon, Forsyth, and Robinson, “Sparganosis in Feral Pigs.”
For example, “Now that we have decided to form a branch of the Society here we could ask for wild pigs to be declared noxious animals” (Inverell Times, “Organising the Pig Industry,” 4).
Grain farmers also raised some pigs on by-product.
Pender, “Quarterly Developments in the Pig Industry.”
Gressier, “Going Feral.” This characterization is at odds with those of wild pork in other parts of the world where free-living pigs are endemic.
Lynteris, ”Introduction.”
The ban on the local pork economy created possibilities for an international market. A small percentage of pigs hunted in Australia are still commercially sourced and sold alongside wild boar meat in Europe and Japan. However, European competitors sought to deny the classification of Australian free-living pigs as “wild” since these animals are not endemic and are in fact “feral domestic.” This commercial branding would drastically undermine sales, since the European market values game meat. However, Australian authorities launched a complaint arguing not only that there were phenotypic similarities between European wild boar and Australian free-living pigs but that unlike European wild pigs, who are closely managed and sometimes farmed, the pigs in Australia truly live wild. Feral pig meat from Australia can now only be labeled as “Australian wild pig meat” and is marketed for its aromatic flavor akin to that of endemic wild pigs.
Garvey, Dinkum Little Aussies. Also, while I spoke with hunters who refused to eat pig, there were others who extolled the quality of meat from free-living pigs who have been feeding on chickpea crops, for example.
Takahashi and Tisdell, “Trade in Wild Pig Meat.” This is also supported by my ethnographic research, Northwest NSW, conducted in 2019.
Menzies, “Heritage Icon or Environmental Pest?”; Canberra Times, “Mighty Brumby.”
For example, Sydney Morning Herald, “Aerial Culling of 8000 Feral Pigs.”
The culling of brumbies can invite public protest.
Cassidy, “Vermins, Victims, and Disease.”
Koichi et al., “Aboriginal Ranger’s Perspectives”; Trigger, “Indigeneity, Ferality, and What ‘Belongs.’”
