Eating Dingoes Fiona Probyn-Rapsey School of Humanities and Inquiry, University of Wollongong DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7882/AZ.2016.026 Imagine if every plate of lamb or sheep meat came with a peripheries subject to this anthropocentric want. In this side dish of dingo. Admittedly, it’s a rather grim image for way meat eaters consume animal bodies directly, but also a non-meat eater to contemplate. But, as I explain here, indirectly; and alongside this consumption of animal bodies the eating of sheep also brings with it the incorporation (indirect and direct) are the consumption of cultural ideas of dingoes, not necessarily ‘good to eat’ but sacrificed in about what and who is good to eat and who or what is not. the name of those deemed ‘good to eat’ who are. This Around this dominant norm of sheep edibility, Australian raises the question of what we mean when we say that settler colonialism has built not only material ecologies something or someone is ‘good to eat?’ (landscapes indelibly shaped by hoof, by plough2 and by fences in the annexation of indigenous country), but also According to Jacques Derrida, ‘eating well’ is not just cultural myths that shape identities (the shearer, the drover, about consumption or ingestion through the mouth and the pastoralist/shepherd, the bushman, the settler/farmer3) stomach, but it’s also about ethics and moral tastes that all born out of the control of animal life and death, and the we incorporate by living with and in specific cultures, and task of determining who gets to eat who, and how. Thus that we can decide upon by questioning the conventions the question of ‘good eating’ raises questions about how we live in/with and through. He suggests that ‘eating well’ ‘we’ determine that one way of eating is somehow better also describes what happens when we imbibe cultural than another, and how these determinations may in fact ideas; we incorporate, assimilate and feed off culture, obscure the violence that underlies our relationships with and because we have to ‘eat’, that is, we have to both sheep and dingoes (but not only those two). incorporate cultural ideas, we have to work out how to eat ‘well’ (Derrida 1991). Following Derrida, eating well also Before I go on to discuss the National Wild Dog Action implicitly involves not being taken in by, or taking in, the Plan4 (which I see as a recipe book for the eating/ ‘bad’ portions of what culture feeds us. eradication of dingoes, based on the premise that sheep are ‘good’ to eat/assimilate), I will explain why I am But eating well also raises the question of who is edible interested in the relationship between sheep and dingoes. and who is not – again, these questions come down to My broader project concerns dingoes and in particular the cultural ideas that predict the form of the meal even before cultural politics of eradication; that is, what ideas have to it is served. For example, in Australia it is forbidden to eat be in place in order for a group of animals to be rendered dingoes, but the eating of sheep is encouraged to the point eradicable. In the case of the dingo, I have been looking of being seen as a patriotic, indeed manly, duty1. If it is at how the designation ‘wild dog’ does much of this work un-Australian to not eat sheep then it is ‘un-Australian’ to of eradicating the dingo in advance. By constructing a eat any sort of dog. These are taboos and rituals specific to mythical ‘pure’ specimen, the landscape is suddenly littered settler colonial culture; economies, exports and identities. with mongrels, hybrids, menaces, wild dogs, who have lost Their practice is not necessarily any more ethical (‘good to their claim on protection and conservation of the ‘pure’ eat’) than rituals in other countries that might, for instance, by muddying, staining their ancestral inheritance. I have hold the reverse to be true: that dogs are for eating, but made the point that the mobilisation of hybridity as akin sheep are not. Australia does not have a dominant tradition to extinction is taxonomically related to miscegenation of dog eating, but if we think about eating as something discourses that permeated and still circulate in settler more than ingestion of other animal bodies and, as Derrida colonial Australia (Probyn-Rapsey 2015). suggests, as something more like the swallowing up of cultural ideas, then we could argue, as I want to here, that The investment that the sheep industry has in this view of we do indeed eat dogs as a matter of routine, and indeed as an integral part of the ‘animal industrial complex’ (Noske 2 Vicki Grieves points out that the ‘plough became a weapon in the war 1997) in which we live. This brings me to dingoes as a side against nature and Indigenous custodians’. dish; an invisible accompaniment to that ever-so-aussie 3 Deb Verhoeven argues that ‘Sheep recur en masse in Australian films, plate of dead sheep. Here in Australia we have two different and usually their appearance signals a narrative enquiry into the but interrelated ways of eating animals. One is to farm production of identity’ (Verhoeven, 2006, 9). them directly for their flesh (those designated ‘livestock’), 4 National Wild Dog Action Plan: Promoting and supporting and the other is to make all the other animals on the community-driven action for landscape-scale wild dog management, WoolProducers Australia 2014. For a full list of authors and contributors see Acknowledgment section in the opening pages of 1 As seen in Meat Livestock Australia (MLA) advertising, Stan Kekovich’s the Plan. http://www.pestsmart.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/ ‘Lambassador’ series, as well as the more recent “Operation Boomerang” NWDAP_FINAL_MAY14.pdf Australian 2017 Zoologist volume 39 (1) 39 Theme Edition: Zoology on the Table Probyn-Rapsey dingoes as a polluted population is evident in the National die alongside the demand that sheep be ‘eaten well’ by Wild Dog Action Plan (WoolProducers Australia 2014), humans (and not by any others). a document that announces another round of wild dog eradication in a time of decline for the sheep industry. Once dingoes are caught in the same trap as sheep as Although the plan includes dingoes in its definition of wild industrial animals, they too are edible, appropriated, dog, it reflects the paradox of an apparently suicidal species, subject to a logic of instrumentalisation. And yet, we where it holds that dingo populations are threatening seem accustomed to seeing dingoes, to valuing dingoes, themselves, endangering themselves, through their own only in as much as they are able to stay somehow outside sexual selection with wild dogs. Such an argument implies of this category of livestock, in the ‘wild’, a space that is that killing wild dogs is actually doing dingoes a favour, impossible given the reach of industry, and which industry even if dingoes are also included in that very definition of marks for us as its romantic ‘elsewhere’, reflecting a mixed wild dogs to begin with. They have swallowed up dingoes up repertoire of feelings regarding animals. The NWDAP definitionally, and then claim to be able to spit them back is an example of a vested interest in separating the issues out as pure specimens. As well as this investment in the of wild and industrialized animals, because animal edibility science of dingo purity, I have also been struck by the depends on our ‘mixed feelings’ for animals according to enormous policy power that the sheep industry has in type; the named and individualised ‘pets’ we don’t eat, relation to dingo life, such that it is not possible to even the livestock we number, the wild ones we estimate. think of the dingo, without also thinking about sheep at Our mixed feelings for these animals means dividing our the same time. The meanings and the cultural life of these attention and our care between species. I think it’s safe two groups of animals are so thoroughly interwoven in to say that, in general, there is a greater institutional our contemporary cultural landscape that it’s impossible and cultural concern for species extinctions than for to separate them. Indeed, I think mixing them up is what species ‘massification’5; those like chickens, sheep and is actually needed in order to think about dingoes more cattle who are being forcibly reproduced in industrialized clearly. In saying ‘let’s mix the dingoes with the sheep in farming situations. And yet, the mix of these two animal order to understand them’, it might make it sound like I spheres, founded partly on their shared geographies, am advocating conflict, but actually, I want to bring them needs to be better understood. Engagements with the rare together because they are brought together already by their and endangered should bring us to the question of the situation in relation to the industrialisation of animals as massified and factory farmed, so that, in the case of the commodities in general, or within what Barbara Noske dingoes, it is not a case of being ‘for dingoes’ and ‘against calls the ‘animal industrial complex’ (1997), a concept that sheep’ in Australia, but rather of understanding how the describes the mixture or enmeshment of animal life with exploitation of both is managed by a highly charged, capital, culture and forms of governance, tying animals to anthropocentric relationship to animal bodies that is categories such as ‘livestock’ in which they ‘live’ (and die) premised on their incorporation in one form or another. merely as commodities. This partly explains the attention given to the dingo/ The National Wild Dog Action Plan (NWDAP) is a wild dog by the sheep industry. The document expresses good example of what Noske has in mind here. The concern about the impact of wild dog attacks primarily in Plan shows that pastoralists are policy players on a scale relation to its impact on humans. When wild dog meets both small and large, with links though Meat Livestock sheep, it seems that it is the pastoralist/shepherd whose Australia, WoolProducers, government agencies, and suffering counts most of all. I’m not saying that the sheep federal political parties including the Liberal and National farmer does not suffer when ‘wild dogs’ attack their flock, Party. Pastoralists and their representative bodies are their distress is palpable and manifest.6 But this suffering is across global economies, national economies, research one of many, including those of the sheep and the dingoes infrastructure and funding, Landcare, animal science and that prey upon them. As Christine Townend argued back welfare, the promotion of meat eating and wool wearing, in 1985, Australian sheep husbandry methods are far from and they are also actively engaged with the ‘conservation’ ideal. The sheer size of sheep properties in Australia and of the dingo, as well as their eradication. The NWDAP the number of sheep being farmed means that for much of is produced by WoolProducers Australia, and backed the year, sheep are left unmonitored by human managers. by government funds, and is not only about the sheep Townend argues that “given the economic constraints of industry protecting sheep from dingo attack, it is also, contemporary capitalist society, a humane wool industry is as the metaphor of ‘bite back’ (NWDAP, 23) jokingly suggests, a recipe book for eating dingoes, for incorporating 5 I use the term ‘massification’ to describe the deliberate mass breeding their lives into the animal industrial complex that situates of animals designated livestock animals instrumentally, as mere objects for human use 6 Helen Cathles writes: “I cannot stress enough that farmers and graziers and exploitation. It designates human control of animal are very conscious of their duty of care to their animals. As much as life and death as non-negotiable and precedes from the the economic rationalists might tell us otherwise, that our sheep, our cattle and our goats, are only commodities, our duty of care seems to basis that animal life is valued as a commodity for human override this.” (75) The duty of care does not override the commodity use. This is not a strong foundation for animal ethics, status of the animals raised for slaughter, rather it forms an integral part for ‘eating well’. It decides, in advance, that dingoes will of animal welfare-based killing. Australian 40 Zoologist volume 39 (1) 2017 Theme Edition: Zoology on the Table Eating dingoes virtually impossible in this country” (Townend 1985, p18). contradictory logic of protection, as Wendy Brown has She shows that patterns of cruelty and neglect such as tail argued: “to be ‘protected’ by the very same power whose docking, castration, mulesing (all without anaesthetic), violation one fears perpetuates the very modality of unsupervised lambing, lack of shelter, untreated disease, dependence and powerlessness” (1995, 170). That is exposure to drought and freezing conditions, lengthy the case for sheep, and it is also the case for dingoes, in transportation to slaughter (including live export) are whose name the logic of ‘protection’ is also mobilised. acceptable norms in the industry. She argues that these conditions are not so much the fault of “every individual Because of this logic of protection, because of ‘sheep wool grower” as much as “lack of economic viability on country’, the lives of sheep and dingoes are mixed up with the farm and labour costs” (p23). A more recent report each other, and yet they are often placed on opposing from the Sheep Co-operative Research Centre suggests ends of political interests, as if their lives and interests are that little has changed. Sheep - Simple Guide: making separable, fenced off from each other. Consider Barnaby more money with less work (Hall 2013) describes sheep Joyce, who as Minister for Agriculture launched the as “generally a non-depreciating asset” (p2) that can be National Wild Dog Action Plan, and in doing so took up managed with as few “labour units” as possible: “10,000 a familiar position of shepherd. Joyce’s ‘flock’ is both the to 15,000 DSE [dry sheep equivalent] per labour unit is sheep farmers he is addressing and the Australian electorate possible and efficient” (p14). How such a ratio can meet that he must ‘look after’ as his governmental/pastoral duty animal welfare standards is not explained. (Foucault 1982/1997). Moreover, Australians routinely refer to the land as ‘sheep country’, which tacitly ordains Mulesing was meant to be phased out by 2014,7 in a nation of shepherds, the romance seemingly immune recognition of the impact of the boycott of Australian to the realities of economic decline or environmental wool organised by a PETA campaign. Australian wool destruction. But the phrase ‘sheep country’ designates growers have withdrawn from this agreement, and it not only an industry, but an image of benign settlement seems that our attention has been turned to wild dogs by animal proxy. The war that colonialism represents has instead. The timing of this shift in focus is significant always involved sheep, as both mechanisms of ecological and it sends an interesting and possibly unintended dispossession but also as an image of self-replicating message that we should not be looking at the violence of multitudes of white bodies occupying the land, “central animal farming, but instead we should direct our concern vectors of Australia’s colonization” as Sarah Franklin towards the violence that wild dogs inflict upon the (2007, 122) has pointed out. The dingo threatens this sheep and their farmers. It is as if the Plan indicates: it is pastoral occupation by predation, and yet, in a strange not our eating of sheep that is the problem, but their eating of twist, the dingo actually helps make the occupation sheep that is the problem. What follows is a purifying logic appear as a legitimate form of protection. Without the that makes farming a ‘good’ way of eating and predation dingo, we cannot have the shepherd – the protector and a ‘bad’ way. We are being reminded by the animal carer of sheep. The dingo becomes scapegoat, not only for industrial complex that feeds and leads Australia that the violence of occupation, and the violence of animal farming is not predation, but protection. The shepherd is farming, but also for the belief that there is a legitimate way not the killer of sheep; after all, that occurs off the farm, to eat sheep, and an illegitimate way to eat them. If sheep out of sight in the slaughterhouse. But the shepherd’s are implicated in or mixed up in settler colonial narratives, protection of his/her flock is always already tied up with they are also, relatedly mixed up in the persecution of the logic of protection and the biopolitical management the dingo who functions not only as a scapegoat for of ‘life’ and in the case of livestock (not what Foucault industrial decline, but also as a means of re-presenting had in mind when he wrote about pastoral power, the sheep industry and the sheep farmer as a ‘protector’ 1997/1982), the realities of making live now in order of animals, rather than an exploiter. Furthermore, what to sacrifice later are manifested very differently; the happens when the shepherd is in charge of protecting the shepherd’s care over the flock ends with the abattoir. ‘wolf’ would seem predictable. The dingo is made edible, The pastoral logic of the sheep farm (where care is swallowed up by an industrial relation to animal bodies also one of power’s forms) is embedded in the deeply that fails to satisfactorily distinguish good eating (farming) from bad (predation) because of the violence that is intrinsic to both. We ‘eat’ dingoes in Australia because we 7 See Sneddon and Rollin on what risks the industry faces by not phasing out mulesing. do not ‘eat well’ when it comes to animal life in general. Australian 2017 Zoologist volume 39 (1) 41 Theme Edition: Zoology on the Table Probyn-Rapsey References Brown, W. 1995. States of Injury. Princeton: Princeton Noske, B. 1997. Beyond Boundaries: Human and Animals, University Press. Black Rose, Montreal Cathles H. 2001. A Landholder Perspective. Pp 75-83 in Sneddon, J. and Rollin, B. 2010. Mulesing and Animal Ethics. Dickman, C., and Lunney, D.(eds) Symposium on the Dingo. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics. 23: 371-386. Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales. Townend, C. 1985. Pulling the Wool. Hale and Iremonger, Derrida, J. 1991. Eating Well: or the Calculation of the Subject. Sydney. Pp 96-119 in E Cadava, P Connor and J-L Nancy (eds). Who Comes after the Subject? New York and London, Routledge. Probyn-Rapsey, F. 2015. Dingoes and dog-whistling: a cultural politics of race and species in Australia. Animal Studies Journal. Franklin, S. 2007. Dolly Mixtures: the Remaking of Geneaology, 4(2): 55-77. Duke Uuniveristy Press. Rose, D. B. 2011. Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction. Foucault, M. 1982. The Subject and Power, Critical Inquiry, University of Virginia Press, Virginia. 8:4: 777-795. Verhoeven, D. 2006. Sheep and the Australian Cinema. Foucault, M. 1997. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Collège de France, 1975-1976. New York: St. Martin’s Press. WoolProducers Australia. 2014. National Wild Dog Action Plan. Grieves, V. forthcoming 2016. The plough as settler colonial WoolProducers Australia. Camberra. cultural icon: voices from the other side of the blade. In Nick Holm and Sy Tassel (eds) Ecological Entanglements in the Anthropocene: Working with Nature. Lexington Books. Hall, B., Ferguson, M., Curnow, M. and Thompson, A. 2013. Sheep - Simple Guide: making more money with less work Cooperative Research Centre for Sheep Industry Innovation. Western Australia. Dept. of Agriculture and Food. http://www. sheepcrc.org.au/files/pages/information/publications/sheep-the- simple-guide-to-making-more-money-with-less-work.pdf Australian 42 Zoologist volume 39 (1) 2017 Theme Edition: Zoology on the Table