The wild workforce: Enlisting non-human labor in invasive species management

Abstract

An all-hands-on-deck rationality appears to characterize invasive alien species (IAS) eradication. Not only are citizens enrolled in their monitoring and management to extend authorities’ capabilities, but a recent trend in so-called nature-based solutions also outsources labor to non-human species. Within the realm of biocontrol initiatives, these non-human actors are strategically enlisted to counter invasive species through various methods such as predation, detection, sensing, niche occupation, and infiltration for internal destruction. This paper critically examines this conscription of non-humans, including sentient animals, to do the dirty work for us, by synthesizing ongoing cases from each of these categories or careers of non-human labor. These range from metabolic and ecological labor, performed with relatively little human intervention, to contrived schemes of capturing, sterilizing, tagging, and releasing Judas animals to locate conspecifics for culling. In the IAS management context, most of this is a kind of necro-labor, where non-human workers, wittingly or unwittingly, end up as assassins, snitches, moles, thieves and destroyers of their targets, the undesired invasives. We argue that wild animal labor has been invisibilized insofar as these non-human laborers either are said to perform their “natural” behaviors or relegated to nature/property themselves, that is, the product of labor. Our paper further helps de-exceptionalize human labor over nature and make visible the kinds of contracts that we are entering into with non-human laborers and hence also our duties and responsibilities. Our focus on labor specifically in invasive species eradication helps highlight the harms involved in the necro-labor that targets undesirable species.

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