Animals, Governance and Ecology

During the nineteenth century, the British Raj launched a campaign to reduce the number of people killed annually by venomous snakes on the Indian subcontinent. Unlike its successful effort to cull large mammals, the colonial government was forced to abolish its bounty scheme in 1890 and instead seek to use sanitation to reduce interactions between humans and snakes. This article will assess this transition in policy as a means to understand how attitudes towards the governance of animals were shaped by cultural and ecological factors. It will be shown that during its inception, discourses of scientific governance statistically augmented perceptions of the threat posed by snakes, presenting them as a direct yet manageable danger within an anthropocentric cultural model. However, financial and practical limitations forced the government to recognise that the behaviour, seasonal patterns and territorial movements of snakes influenced the rate of mortality, and thus adjust its policy to acknowledge the experience of cohabitation in India’s diverse ecological contexts

Biology · Colonialism · Corporate governance · Development economics · Economics · Geography · Government (linguistics · Management · Political economy · Political science · Sanitation · Sociology · Animal and Plant Science Education · Engineering · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Wildlife Ecology and Conservation · Ecology

• Industrialization of Nature in the Time of Complexity Unawareness

  Open Access•Arash Akhshik, Hamed Rezapouraghdam et al.•Journal of Hospitality & Tourism…•2022

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• More-Than-Human Emotional Communities

  Thomas Webb, Thomas A Webb et al.•Cultural and Social History•2020

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