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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Number Game: Counting Kangaroos, David Brooks
The Number Game: Counting Kangaroos, David Brooks
Animal Studies Journal
Well over one million kangaroos are shot each year in New South Wales, around half of them for the kangaroo ‘industry’, a harvest underpinned by the annual supply of population estimates sustaining the widespread impression that kangaroos are a ‘pest’, ‘in plague proportions’. Each year these figures, added to historical tables (typically from 1990 onward), are published as part of the state’s Quota Report, upon which the following year’s shooting quota is based. Drawn from aerial surveys, these estimates are nevertheless characterised by the persistent incidence of extraordinary annual population growth rates, well in excess of biological possibility. This …
The Grieving Kangaroo Photograph Revisited, David Brooks
The Grieving Kangaroo Photograph Revisited, David Brooks
Animal Studies Journal
Early in 2016 a photograph circulated widely of a male kangaroo holding up a dying female in the presence of a joey. Although initially taken as a moving and powerful photograph of grief, ‘experts’ quickly determined that this male may have killed the female in the process of coition. The male was in effect accused and convicted of rape and murder. Was this judgement correct? Was the male innocent or guilty? What are the nature, strength and politics of the assumptions involved in this judgement? Might he be exonerated, and why should this matter? The photograph is read and contextualised. …
Space On Par: A Short Performance For One Performer, Peta Tait
Space On Par: A Short Performance For One Performer, Peta Tait
Animal Studies Journal
Space on Par is a short performance text that uses gentle humour to communicate an alternative perspective on how open space is used by humans and nonhuman animals, in this instance a golf course. If playing golf for enjoyment is puzzling behaviour for a nonhuman observer, it can emphasise human refusal to recognise the physical and spatial rights of other species and their needs for survival. The effort to educate about the treatment of animals can include theatrical characters who blur the species identities to make a point, and Space on Par inverts the invisibility of the gaze of the …