Susan Pyke

This article examines the welfare standards that govern the lives of chickens raised for meat in Australia and the United Kingdom. While ‘meat chickens’ are subject to a wide range of welfare interventions, we focus on the development and implications of the ‘private’ standards which are the most significant determinants of meat chicken welfare in these jurisdictions: the RSPCA Approved Farming Scheme in Australia and the Red Tractor Chicken Assurance Scheme in the United Kingdom. While the jurisdictions appear to have a similar regime that favours private regulation, differences in the origins and governance of these systems can be identified, offering insights into the use of hybrid regulation in areas associated with the welfare of non-human animals. The similarities and differences in these countries point to the importance of individual relationships, as well as supply chain power in the adoption of private standards as a response to comparatively unstructured community concerns about welfare (Australia) and welfare and food safety (United Kingdom). While hybridity as a form of new public governance can be seen to facilitate innovative and varied responses to state devolution, the article concludes the overarching anthropocentrism of policymakers and the policy sciences explains a closed, incremental, and conservative form of practice in this area. Observations of the wider ‘animal turn’ in the social sciences are recommended to consider future systems of hybrid regulation that are not centred on anthropocentrism and more fully expand hybridity's participatory promise.

Spring, well over a decade ago. I head up the rise before the fruit trees as a tiger snake moves across the path made by my regular round of the tree paddock, a cherished place transformed more than ten years before this sighting, from a barren stretch of grass and rocks. I jump back when I see the snake, two metres in one movement, an impossible feat when I’m not full of fear. It takes a jump like that for my body to know a particular place as snake habitat. Spring is when snakes move their slowest, when they are seen more than they are heard. I still tread that part of the paddock carefully when the sun starts to sting.

This paper imagines Snake Church as a post-secular worship practice that reaches with and beyond the vilified serpent held within the limits of Judeo-Christianity. Snake Church offers a devotional practice enlivening enough to shift the languish of a post-secular world where the reasonableness of Enlightenment has crumbled into numbers like 440ppms and 1.5C. The Western empire has been revealed as stark naked, vulnerable, an old skin that cannot hold my world. Snake Church offers me a sacred opiating hope. As I approach a nascent liturgy, here, in the settler-ravaged Stony Rises, home to the Eastern Maar tiger snake and Eastern brown for millennia, I wonder, what might a prayer do for these ancient locals? Snake Church is not a holy rolling out of the self, to assume the mantle of a snake who wants nothing at all to do with me and the harms of my species. Instead, perhaps, it is a shedding of my old He-God skin, freeing me to grow towards something new in this play of sacrilegious devotion. Like a drop of poison, Snake Church might change my body completely.

Gesturing to the limits in Judeo-Christian ideas of ownership and stewardship, traditionally expressed in the reviling and control of snakes and women, this ecofeminist work critiques unthinking modes of human dominance by parodying the proliferation of websites offering "top tips" for pet "care." These counterpoised "top tips" suggest how human relations with snakes might be expressed differently. The work is part of an ongoing project taking place on settleroccupied Tyakoort Woorroong country. The feminist work done here to destabilise masculinist anthropocentrism therefore holds all the harms entailed in writing from a position of settler privilege. In response, but with no kind of answer, the work brings forward fictional texts of influence that depict practices of human/snake mutuality long performed in the territories now known as Australia.

This essay offers an evisceration of my troubled links to ‘cattle country’, seeking a truthtelling that responds to my mother’s romancing. I trace my family’s part in the cattle industry imposed upon Jiman Country and Wulli Wulli Country, drawing on stories populated with the hooves of cattle, the flight of emus, and the stare of a goanna. I find myself in uncomfortable territory, complicit in the actions of my settler relatives in this region of Central Queensland, but to not examine this informal archive of possession feels like a lie. The stories that shape me begin with the tales of Mum’s foster-mother, my great-aunt, about the dreadful murderous harms done during the early
settler occupation of Jiman Country. My family’s later deployment of this stolen land is a related
act of war. I see a related mode of violence in tales of terrified cattle in nearby Wulli Wulli Country,
Mum’s girl-self perched on the back of a weary horse, whip in her hand. In all this, there is me, telling tales, like settler writers before me, caught in the writing act, exposed as a fence, dealing in stolen goods, part of the ongoing posts of making up and wires of making do. Nonetheless, I take up my extractive blade, sharpened by a field trip to this region, and carve into my family history,
with its legacy of generational violence to humans, cows, waterways, and earth, exposing three extractions: the near-genocidal murders of the Jiman and Wulli Wulli people; the ongoing slaughter of cattle; and finally, there, on the kill floor, entrails exposed, the stories of my mother, laid bare for this critical reading.

Farming must fundamentally change over the next ten years, if humans are to flourish for future generations. Our species, like most other species in this world, thrive with nourishing food, fresh air and unpolluted water. For many decades, intensive farming has been reducing food’s nutritional value, significantly contributing to greenhouse gases and toxifying waterways. In the continent now known as Australia, a shift to regenerative agriculture, led by Indigenous knowledges, and accompanied by consumer migrations to plant-focused
food consumption, offers an alternative to health-threatening agricultural modes that are
contributing to the precarious escalation of climate damage.

This work is a case of a worlding with every wording, where material textuality creates a poetic space for thick description that helps me see the world as textual material. A thing, the blue case, with a bare handle on itself, offers relations that write me as and to and with my family, creating 'the blue case' as another thing for us to handle. The actual and virtual matter forms and reforms in these relations.

This paper considers the transformative use of the sublime aesthetic in two contemporary Gothic novels, Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains (1969) and Charlotte Wood's The Natural Way of Things (2015). My exploration begins with the Romantic sublime, defined here as a mode of perception created through art that is concerned with the awe-inspiring, the frightening and the ineffable. Sublime metamorphosis extends the Romantic sublime alongside the more fragmentary postmodern sublime through posthumanism. Sublime metamorphoses occur in these two speculative novels when their protagonists pause in the moment of sublime arrest in response to nonhuman others. Such moments create new embodied potentialities that may reshape human/nonhuman relations. When Carter's central protagonist Marianne considers her position in moments of terror, she improves her marginalised status. She pushes through the boundaries of her species and the limitations of an injured world of mutation and brutality, evolving, in the end, to Tiger Lady. In Wood's novel, the entrapped Yolanda shifts from prey to predator to a new kind of self-determination that frees her from her human confinement. Yolanda's friend Verla follows with her own radical transmutation. In these novels sublime metamorphosis resists ideas of human exceptionality and troubles typologies that separate humans from other creatures. This approach may be of interest to creative writers concerned with more generative relations with the world's nonhuman creatures. My own creative efforts are learning from such work.

This paper considers the use of drones in animal advocacy and aims to provide a moral and political justification for their use. We focus on animal protection groups who fly drones over farms to take pictures and videos of the way animals are used in agriculture and who then share these images publicly with a view to changing either consumer behaviour, the laws which regulate animal agriculture, or both. We identify unique moral issues associated with drone use and provide an argument to support their use in animal protection, in the ways spearheaded by Will Potter and other animal advocates worldwide. We then analyse privacy issues associated with drone use and consider whether the potential harms outweigh the benefits. We conclude that while privacy concerns are legitimate, they do not outweigh the public good generated by drones. Moreover, animal advocates can easily manage those concerns. Finally, we illustrate our argument in practice with a recent case study from Australia.

Interim evaluations of government programs can sometimes reveal lower than expected outcomes, leading to the question of how adjustments can be made while the program is still underway. Although adaptive management frameworks can provide a practical roadmap to address this question, a lack of successful learnings and poor implementation have hampered the progress and wider application of adaptive management. Using a case study involving an energy efficiency government program targeting low-income households, this article provides supporting evidence on how adaptive management can be facilitated and applied. Factors such as proactive and responsive leadership, establishing a research-practice interface, and recognizing the skills, expertise, and contributions of multiple stakeholders guided adjustments to the program, and later paved the way for longer-term organizational learning that impacted how other programs are delivered. Implications for knowledge and practice, and a discussion of the challenges faced in the program, advance current thinking in adaptive management.

There is a posthuman strand of Romantic ecological consciousness that has some antecedent in Emily Brontë’s Victorian poetry and this oddly connects me to the swooping turns in Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book (2013). The discomforting strangeness of birds in Brontë’s poems directs readers to the power of the beak, the piercing eye that glares askance and the fearsome talon. Such work amplifies the stranger swans depicted in Wright’s text. While Brontë writes to the Book of Nature and Wright’s work draws upon her Waanyi nation’s Dreaming, there is resonance between these two works in their openness to other creatures. Brontë’s speakers see birds as responsive co-inhabitants of the earth, as much at the mercy of the seasons of life as humans. Wright extends this co-affectivity to a creative kinship between a displaced flock of black swans and the dreamy harshly treated Oblivia. Brontë’s ‘mute bird’ on a ‘still grey stone’ portends the heartbreak and the wonder of the winged flight that beats across Wright’s apocalyptic sky. Wright’s critique of the damage humans have inflicted upon the world harkens back to Brontë’s poems, with their Romantic attunement to the impact of seasons on those with hearts and nests. Centuries and cultures apart, these texts come together to encourage readers to remember it is not just human animals that deserve the focus of mitigation and adaptation strategies in a time of rapid climate change. The works of these two authors refuse to place humans in the centre of the world, thus offering an alternative to the melancholic destructive greed currently riding roughshod over the livability of this shared world. In the alterity of these two literary responses to the world, there is a power shift in human/avian relations that suggests a winged-divine might be what is needed to mentor humans to seek a different role in the dynamic of a world in crisis.

Alison Croggon's young adult novel Black spring (2012) activates the feminist considerations present in the triangular love relationship explored in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, with echoes of the emplacement present in Brontë's novel. Dead country, a work I may be finished with for want of a market, also adapts Brontë's nineteenth-century text, paying attention to relations with place, and also offering a number of ghostly encounters. While different in their approach, these novelistic revisions, like the poetic revisions of Anne Carson and Kathy Acker, play the game of resistance and submission found in feminist textual reinvention. Such revisions can gesture towards the dream writing described by Hélène Cixous, where unexpected pasts might emerge to create new material ways of being, through text. Croggon's revision, like my own, also echoes Brontë's use of idiomatic voice to invite readers to make their way in and out of the materially textual haunted house of dreams. Readers will enter as they are materially equipped, revealing not only the compromise of perspective but also the potentiality of response that is offered by writing in voice. Readers may or may not find a way in, dependent, as they must be, on the ghosts that speak in their own heads. Biographical note: Susan Pyke teaches at the University of Melbourne with the School of Culture and Communications and the Office for Environmental Programs. Her most recent critical essays can be found in Southerly and The human place in the natural world: essays on creation and creatureliness (Fordham University Press). Her monograph The haunted moor is under development (punctum press). She is a regular book reviewer for Plumwood mountain.

A heartfelt part of my effort to live better in the world is to seek new ways to understand how I can sensibly go beyond my own skin. Here I build on this audacious desire, thinking through perceptions and significations specific to my own experience, to make sense with them, critically and creatively. It is an inconclusive sense-making, oriented to suggestion, not argument, forming part of a project much bigger than my words, experiences or aspirations. I begin with a story of listening, of attending, of being with the unfolding world, honouring a spectacle, a moment where texts and the physical world  worked together in a way I do not fully understand. It silenced me, and now it makes me sing

The texts and landscapes of my life work together in uncanny ways that are leading me to a divine beyond the closures of my skin and mind. My religious reading of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights particularly meshes with connected moments of experience in place that complicate and extend the possibilities of my divine. Here I leave Victoria, escorted by the grace of the East, to encounter Victorianist thinking that explores textual afterlives and ancestral haunting. This prepares me well to lose my singularity to the moors of Brontë's text. In a playful gothic gathering that follows, I begin to understand that textual emplacement and physical displacement create productive refractions between lingual, spacial and temporal prisms, creating boundless connections that perforate my containment with an echoing divine of faithful peace.

Presents a theoretical framework that considers posthuman dream writing as a conduit to politically charged affective reading, through the vantage of literary animal studies. Argues that posthuman dream writing can resist exclusionary assumptions of human stewardship over nonhuman animals through an analysis that firstly intersects with radical feminist insights that consider the depiction of dreams and visions as an avenue to imagine different social orderings. Concludes that the progressions offered by posthuman dream writing allow empathetic readers the opportunity to imagine less masterful human relations with nonhuman animals and their habitats.

This essay is part of an ongoing effort to strengthen my material affinity with snakes. By working through my all-too-human physical engagement with these creatures, turning to literature to re-imagine the ways that I see the snakes in my life, I aim to fall from theory into love in a way that does no harm, enacting my theoretical refusal to place humans, including myself, at the top of a hierarchy of dominance and control. Human and nonhuman co-citizenship, for me, begins in this difficult place.