Killer Cities by Nigel Thrift

Author:Nigel Thrift [Thrift, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Human Geography, Sociology, Urban
ISBN: 9781529752991
Google: XLP5DwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 55843456
Publisher: SAGE
Published: 2021-02-10T02:52:45+00:00

But It's Not Quite That Simple

But the toll of surplus death generated by cities comes with its own quandaries. There isn't an easy ‘just stop killing things’ fix. As Haraway (2008) points out, issues that involve this kind of responsibility are never a matter of simple calculation. Two examples will suffice. One is that the rise of the companion animal has spawned a burgeoning pet food industry which largely relies on animal products. In 2017, the global pet food industry was worth $94 billion and it is expected to grow much further (Fleming, 2018)24. For example, in China, where pet ownership has historically been rare, the market grew by 100 per cent in 2017 and in 2019 pet food overtook baby formula as the highest-selling imported product on China's biggest shopping day of the year, Singles Day (Tang, 2019). If China follows the same trends as other countries there will soon be millions more pets – and a correspondingly larger demand for pet food. On one estimate, as much as a quarter of the impact of world meat production can now be attributed to the pet food industry (Fleming, 2018). If that estimate is even close to correct, the industry is having a very large environmental impact, paid for in animal deaths and environmental damage (such as carbon dioxide production and faeces (Okin, 2017), showing that not all the consequences of symbiotic relationships are necessarily good ones.

The other is that, in many parts of the world, on the list of anthropogenic causes of death, the biggest urban killer of birds (and, indeed, many other animals) is probably the humble domestic cat gone feral (Marra and Santella, 2016). By one estimate, cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually in the United States (Loss et al., 2013a; 2015). Unowned cats25, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality, which suggests that, sometimes at least, cities or at least parts of cities –may be safer places for birds and certain other animals. In Australia, the situation is even worse proportionately. There some 2–6 million feral cats roam freely. In addition to mammals, many of which are near to extinction, these cats kill an estimated 377 million birds and 649 million reptiles every year (Woinarski et al., 2015; 2019; Aguirre, 2019). In New Zealand similarly, one estimate (Van Heezik et al., 2010) is that the country's 1.4 million cats alone kill at least 18.76 million animals a year, including 1.12 million native birds.

In other words, in a topsy-turvy anthropogenic world, it is not possible to avoid uncomfortable judgements which may well, for example, involve reparative killing of some ‘awkward’ animals – not just cats but also feral pigs, goats, rats and squirrels, as well as ocean dwellers like the crown of thorns starfish, which is busily hoovering up Great Barrier Reef coral – in order to save others. However uncomfortable it may be, killing sometimes has to be placed alongside care. Equally, the justifications for making animals killable

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