Cat-alysing attunement

Abstract

The natural resource management of wildlife in Australia encounters tensions between concerns for the environment and for the welfare of non-human animals. I explore the conservation biology practice of culling feral cats to preserve Australian native species and demonstrate how ‘feral cat’ has become a trope, affording persuasive power to the storyline of native species conservation. Massumi’s reading of ontopower develops Foucauldian biopower, enabling analysis of how modes of power are powered by an operative logic or rationale, a conceptual persuasion to a certain truth. I examine the event assemblages of the Australian government’s Threatened Species Strategy and the Threat Abatement Plan for Predation by Feral Cats as the pragmatic working out of the conceptual formula of cats kill → feral cats kill → feral cats kill and render extinct threatened native species → feral cats must be exterminated. The formula channels conditions of possibility towards a particular actualisation through mobilising apparatuses of knowledge, objectivation and power in order to catalyse an affective social attunement of cats as ‘killing-machines’ and legitimate the decreed extermination of 2,000,000 feral cats in Australia. I suggest possibilities for alternative formulations based on Foucault’s idea of environmentality and the environment as milieu.

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