Anthropomorphising the Anthropocene: The pragmatics, politics and poetics of animal agency

Abstract: When the king of beasts was shot in his Zimbabwean home by a dentist from Minnesota, the world (although not Zimbabwe) was outraged. Cecil the lion was, it  transpired, a well-known character in the Hwange National Park and a subject in a long-term study of animal behaviour run by Oxford University. Tourists and scientists alike took to both traditional and social media to condemn sport hunting in general and the hapless dentist in specific. Nothing changed however: eventually the outrage died down, and the animals of Africa continued to be targeted by foreign guns. So what does this episode tell us about the nature of animal agency in the Anthropocene? How have certain animals become characters? Why do their activities matter? What makes their lives (and deaths) front-page news in an era when human actions at the local and global level are resulting in the extinction of entire species? This paper will explore these questions in relation to the history of the field study of wild animals, a history that is thoroughly imbrangled with contested ownership of space and place at home and abroad, with contending definitions of ‘the wild’ and ‘nature’ in understanding animal behaviour and with the contentious question of the appropriate relationship between scientific and economic interests in the (public) pursuit of research projects.