Cougar — Human Entanglements and the Biopolitical Un/Making of Safe Space

Abstract

This paper explores how cougars and humans live together on Vancouver Island, Canada, a region home to what scientists estimate is the densest cougar population in North America and to one quarter of the continent's lethal and nonlethal cougar attacks in the last century. Drawing on biopolitical and spatial theory, I trace how safe space is made, maintained, and unmade and ask what the role of cougars has been in production of spaces and their imagined security. Discussion is informed foremost by stories of cougar - human encounters on Vancouver Island and then retold based on newspaper and archival research and semistructured interviews with island residents. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how nonhumans matter to the material - semiotic construction of safety and space. In particular, I examine attempts to discipline cougars in the name of biosecurity, how cougars discipline humans, and how cougars' bodies and behaviors have resisted and shaped spatial configurations. I argue that these contestations and enforcements are biopolitical. My empirical research supports recent theoretical arguments by geographers and actor-network theorists regarding space—namely, that space is produced within network formations of which cougars, in this case, are key actors. My analyses suggest that the biothreat cougars and humans pose to each other precludes the formation of ethics through encounter and that conservation strategies must account for cougars' spatial requirements.