The ngāhere (forests) of Aotearoa are busy with life, and most of it is eating something. A national eradication effort now aims to eliminate three varieties of introduced pests, whose status as problem is secured in terms of their gustatory excesses. Indeed, the question of who eats whom and with what consequence is at the heart of conservation here; more than simply ‘matter out of place’, the pest as eater emerges as a key protagonist in Aotearoa’s multispecies politics.
These gustatory logics now inform pest control research and practice, which relies largely on toxins that target species need to eat, or traps that they need to interact with, usually attracted by an edible lure. Accordingly, ‘pest tech’ harnesses animal appetites through timing (e.g. to coincide with food scarcity) and attention to animal preferences (e.g. for differently scented lures). Attending to one particular poison, 1080, this talk explores how practices of food, feeding and eating widen and complicate the attachments between pests, people, and the places they share.
Courtney Addison is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington. Her research focuses on science, technology, and environmental politics in Aotearoa New Zealand. She is also an editor of Science, Technology, & Human Values.