Wild, but Not Too-Wild Animals: Challenging Goldilocks Standards in Rewilding

By contrast with traditional conservation emphasizing managerial stewardship, rewilding is positioned as “post”-conservation through its emphasis on unleashing the autonomy of natural processes. In this paper, however, we argue that the autonomy of nature in rewilding is more rhetoric than reality. But instead of critiquing the “managed wilderness” approach of rewilding, we examine the injustices this entails for the ecosystem engineering species involved in these projects. Reintroduction case studies demonstrate arbitrary standards for wildness are imposed on these animals as they do their assigned duty to rehabilitate ecosystems. These “Goldilocks” standards are predicated on aesthetic values that sanction interventions inconsistent with the premise of animal sovereignty. These include meeting actual autonomy of animals, championed in rewilding rhetoric, with culling, relocations and sterilizations. Drawing from Donaldson and Kymlicka’s framework for political animal categories, we argue rewilding needs to re-position itself in one of two ways. Either it should align itself more closely to mainstream conservation and embrace full animal sovereignty without Goldilocks conditions, or it should commit to taking full responsibility for reintroduced animals, including supplementary feeding and care. Erica von EssEn Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences MichaEl allEn East Tennessee State University Erica von EssEn and MichaEl allEn 81 © Between the Species, 2016 http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/bts/ Vol. 19, Issue