Zooveillance: Controlling to Conserve
Legal Theory Workshop.
Speaker: Irus Braverman, Associate Professor at University of Buffalo Law School, SUNY.
Abstract
The last three or four decades have witnessed a dramatic shift in the management of zoo animal populations in the United States and around the world.
During this short period, captive animal management has transformed from a materially, geographically, and technologically limited enterprise - focused on the control of individual zoo animals within specific zoos - into a global system that relies on computerized database management. Finally, zoo animal management has become an ambitious ecological project that emphasizes conservation and requires sophisticated administrative mechanisms to coordinate between zoos.
In terms of surveillance, this revolutionary shift can be categorized as a transition from a low-level project of naming and recording individual animals, into a more expansive and centralized dataveillance project for the global control of animal populations, and, finally, into the domain of reproductive management. What were previously technologies of naming, identifying, recording, and tracking - and thereby scientifically knowing - captive animal populations, have thus evolved into a heightened control over the very physicality of these animals.
Humans, in other words, have transcended their biblically allotted role as namers to now become creators. Whereas animal husbandry has been around for centuries, this essay contends that the reproductive control of zoo animals is unique in several ways, and, perhaps most importantly, in its framing as an ecological enterprise. The term "zooveillance" is coined here to express this uniqueness.
Based on a series of fifteen semi-structured, in-depth interviews conducted between May 2009 and November 2010 with prominent zoo professionals in North America, Irus Braverman explores the relevancy and importance of applying the framework of surveillance in the nonhuman context of zoo animals and explore some of the underlying interconnections between human, domestic, and captive animal surveillance projects.
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