Killing animals is a ubiquitous human activity consistent with our predatory and competitive ecological roles within the global food web. However, this reality does not automatically justify the moral permissibility of the various ways and reasons why humans kill animals – additional ethical arguments are required. Multiple ethical theories or frameworks provide guidance on this subject, and here we explore the permissibility of intentional animal killing within (1) consequentialism, (2) natural law or deontology, (3) religious ethics or divine command theory, (4) virtue ethics, (5) care ethics, (6) contractarianism or social contract theory, (7) ethical particularism, and (8) environmental ethics. These frameworks are most often used to argue that intentional animal killing is morally impermissible, bad, incorrect, or wrong, yet here we show that these same ethical frameworks can be used to argue that many forms of intentional animal killing are morally permissible, good, correct, or right. Each of these ethical frameworks support constrained positions where intentional animal killing is morally permissible in a variety of common contexts, and we further address and dispel typical ethical objections to this view. Given the demonstrably widespread and consistent ways that intentional animal killing can be ethically supported across multiple frameworks, we show that it is incorrect to label such killing as categorically unethical. We encourage deeper consideration of the many ethical arguments that support intentional animal killing and the contexts in which they apply.

This paper proposes an empirical research agenda for investigating the practices of biosecuritization of wild animal threats in modern society. Previously mostly studied on the lofty biopolitical level of directives on combatting invasive species or culling pests, we outline the conceptual and methodological points of entry for bringing the on-the-ground work of culling out-of-place, unwanted, individual animals and populations. This means a focus on necropolitics as constituted by the norms, everyday professional practices, vernaculars of killing, and identity work by pest controllers in the city and hunters on the countryside. Borrowing from research in the domestic animal killing context, we nevertheless show how wild animal killing is imbued with more spontaneity, remorse, aesthetics, public stigma, and multispecies entanglements, requiring adapted research protocols.

Media multitasking has become an integrated part of much media consumption. While some celebrate the practice for activating the viewer and connecting them to virtual others, perhaps discussing the show in real-time, critics point to cognitive costs and reduced productivity. A perhaps more scathing critique has been added to those multitasking while watching nature documentaries: you are already consuming nature through a screen, but now your focus is further fragmented across multiple apps. The implication is that this is not an authentic way of experiencing nature, at a time—the Digital Anthropocene—when direct nature experiences dwindle. In this study, we examine viewers’ engagement with different sorts of media and ‘real-life’, physical multitasking during a slow-TV nature documentary, The Great Moose Migration in Sweden. We ask what these tasks mean not only for one's enjoyment and relaxation, but more broadly for nature engagement in the Digital Anthropocene, and connection to others over nature as something shared. Through surveys and digital ethnography of the Great Moose Migration, our research shows how multitasking around nature contributes to a potentially transformative experience. It is a viewer experience that is at once personal through increased customization options and layering of different activities. Second, it is communal in terms of connecting diverse audiences on platforms. Our contribution is in showing that taskscapes are now becoming multi-taskscapes, which comprise both physical and digital tasks over nature. These multi-taskscapes are actively shaped by users who engage with them. This changes both the media landscape and the way we engage with nature.

The recent decision to downlist the wolf from a “strictly protected” to “protected” status in the Bern Convention and Habitats Directive marks a turning point for European conservation. While reflecting wolves' recovery, the shift has illuminated a conundrum within existing conservation frameworks: No species has ever been downlisted before, despite a remarkable wildlife comeback over recent decades. Moreover, the downlisting has been fiercely resisted and framed as a reversal of conservation progress. Yet evidence suggests that wolves can thrive under more flexible management regimes, and that pragmatism from all sides is needed to foster ecologically sound and socially sustainable coexistence. We argue that the rigidity of current frameworks is undermining social legitimacy and the development of adaptive management strategies suitable for recovering wildlife in anthropogenic landscapes. European conservation policy and debates needs to evolve beyond the emergency modality toward addressing the distributive and procedural challenges of coexistence, including effective cost redistribution, transboundary management approaches, and inclusive articulation of visions for coexistence in different places. The policy shift for wolves should not be treated as a crisis, but as a call to reconfigure European conservation to accommodate success and recovery, and its sociopolitical complexities.

Managing migrating species is a geobiopolitical undertaking: with this is meant that administrating life (and death) across borders has political implications between neighboring countries. When a species immigrates, or is moved anthropogenically, its sudden presence can trigger defensive-nativist responses from its new destination. Sometimes its mere risk is enough to generate anxiety. This is true both of invasive alien species and of unpopular or conflictful species. But what actually happens culturally and politically in the process of such an immigration? What determines which foreign representations and practices are adopted, vs. rejected? In this paper, we examine means of transmission of actual and representational wild boar from Sweden into Norway in the recent decade. With the relative infrequency of encountering physical boars in Norway today, representations of wild boar are necessarily imported from elsewhere in Europe. This is done through media coverage, personal experiences, international institutional cooperation and more. Our paper thus shows how traces of a ‘ghost’ boar precede and partly shape responses to a ‘corporeal’ boar in Norway. Through interviews with stakeholders, we show how the boar is welcomed, unwelcomed, made foreign and partly assimilated into Norwegian hunting culture by hunters, veterinarians, farmers and decision-makers. We show that the public—typically individual hunters—appears to have been more important actors in the diffusion process of learning how to live with (and hunt) wild boar than the transmission in institutional pathways has been. Complicating the situation is the contested nature of wild boar belonging in Norway, as an invasive alien species and threat from the east on the one hand, and as a new game resource on the other hand.

An all-hands-on-deck rationality appears to characterize invasive alien species (IAS) eradication. Not only are citizens enrolled in their monitoring and management to extend authorities’ capabilities, but a recent trend in so-called nature-based solutions also outsources labor to non-human species. Within the realm of biocontrol initiatives, these non-human actors are strategically enlisted to counter invasive species through various methods such as predation, detection, sensing, niche occupation, and infiltration for internal destruction. This paper critically examines this conscription of non-humans, including sentient animals, to do the dirty work for us, by synthesizing ongoing cases from each of these categories or careers of non-human labor. These range from metabolic and ecological labor, performed with relatively little human intervention, to contrived schemes of capturing, sterilizing, tagging, and releasing Judas animals to locate conspecifics for culling. In the IAS management context, most of this is a kind of necro-labor, where non-human workers, wittingly or unwittingly, end up as assassins, snitches, moles, thieves and destroyers of their targets, the undesired invasives. We argue that wild animal labor has been invisibilized insofar as these non-human laborers either are said to perform their “natural” behaviors or relegated to nature/property themselves, that is, the product of labor. Our paper further helps de-exceptionalize human labor over nature and make visible the kinds of contracts that we are entering into with non-human laborers and hence also our duties and responsibilities. Our focus on labor specifically in invasive species eradication helps highlight the harms involved in the necro-labor that targets undesirable species.

Invasive species cause global challenges with massive long-term impacts, and reduction of impacts relies on both international and local interventions. At national level, mismatches between how AIS are classified and managed, and how different governmental bodies deal with these species, produce a messy reality of changeable standards for the species and the people who are expected to manage them. We explore such mismatches through the case of wild boar in Norway. While native in Sweden, wild boar is an AIS in Norway and to be eradicated. By comparing management of wild boar in Norway with management of other invasive mammals, we found clear mismatches between risk assessment, species-specific action plans, management aim and management interventions. We also found that selective prioritization and inter-governmental conflicts shape the current eradication policy for wild boar in Norway. The consequences are many, including changing priorities, declining political legitimacy, and lack of public participation.

We appeal to the concept of a broad spectrum of solidarities, including those typically dismissed as merely rhetorical and parasitical. The concept of a solidarity spectrum captures both the phenomena of nonhuman solidarities among wild so-called co-predators, working together, and human solidarity with co-predators. We first consider the present normative literature on solidarity to establish the case for understanding solidarity as a spectrum of relations, practices, and actions, with different and morally ambiguous consequences for in- and out-group members. We then apply this concept of a spectrum of solidarities to the zoological and ethological research concerning co-predation alliances among members of different species reducing their own vulnerabilities in the wild, but only at the expense of other species. We also consider interspecies solidarity through practices like alloparenting. Finally, we argue human solidarity with wild co-predatory killers represents yet another gradation along the broad spectrum of solidarities. Our analysis contributes an approach to understanding diverse forms of solidarity across different species lines otherwise lacking in the recent solidarity literature concerning nonhuman and human animals.

The battle against invasive alien species (IAS) rages on, and is being driven by recently articulated global biodiversity agendas. While the current United Nations Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) seeks to ensure pristine, protected areas comprise 30 percent of the world’s total surface area by 2030, there remains much to be done for the remaining 70 percent, areas dominated by human habitat and industrial activities. Many non-native species have partly or wholly naturalized in these mixed ecosystems, becoming entangled in people’s livelihoods. We therefore argue that initiatives to not only aggressively eradicate such IAS but also to enroll the help of citizens in doing so will likely meet with resistance. Biodiversity dilemmas may arise where the cure may be worse than the disease; animal welfare standards may have to be sacrificed; and socioeconomic utility may have to be set aside. We therefore advocate the need for an alternative perspective on biodiversity justice and the proper place of IAS.

Tracking, viewing and livestreaming wildlife in situ but online has enabled new relations of proximity and immediacy to proliferate among people who experience few real-life encounters with wild animals. Innovating affordances of programs, broadcasts, and citizen science apps to foster virtual encounters, both with the wild animals in front of the camera, and between other human users following them, now generate an arena of vicarious consumption of wildlife from one's armchair, and at the click of a button. We show how The Great Moose Migration, a slow-TV sensation airing in Sweden every spring, blends multiple genres of nature documentary to create a unique space for the constitution of new attitudes to wildlife in general and moose in particular. This program's dynamic hybridity ‘migrates’ across event-based TV, slow-TV, participatory media, multimodal media, travel-based TV, reality TV, and cross-platform media. We demonstrate how the particular features of each format represents and thus mediates the wildlife. Using a digital ecologies approach, we show how the moose also ‘migrates’ across various media and formats, becoming subject to the whims and preferences of viewers who feedback into the production- This newfound virtual accessibility to moose breaks with tradition in Sweden. We argue that an emancipation of moose from hunters is partly occurring, but that its representation – even in so-called authentic, reality TV – is subject to new registers of power, narratives and aesthetics. Our study speaks to the various implications of the re-entanglement of nature into the everyday lives and leisure and work spaces of people in modern society.