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Received: 10 March 2023    Accepted: 15 June 2023

DOI: 10.1002/pan3.10518

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Social licence to cull: Examining scepticism toward lethal

wildlife removal in cities

Erica von Essen1  | David Redmalm2

1
Department of Social Anthropology,
Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Abstract
2
Division of Sociology, School of Health, 1. The public may sometimes resist orders to cull wildlife, even when these pose a
Care and Social Welfare, Mälardalen
University, Västerås, Sweden
biosecurity threat. Managers and researchers desire to know why this is so.
2. Research overwhelmingly focuses on the role of the species in conditioning re-
Correspondence
Erica von Essen
sistance but our approach also shows the circumstances, settings, people respon-
Email: erica.von.essen@socant.su.se sible and methods used that undermine the legitimacy of the cull.

Funding information
3. We bring these together and use a social licence to operate (SLO) framework to
Svenska Forskningsrådet Formas, Grant/ demonstrate how support for wildlife culling in the context of biosecurity may be
Award Number: 2019-­01168
revoked. In the absence of SLO, resistance to wildlife culling can range from per-
Handling Editor: Laura Verbrugge sonal unease at seeing a cherished species or a neighbourhood fox being culled,
to openly confronting the municipal hunter.
4. By interviewing (n = 32) and following (n = 4) municipal hunter in Swedish cities
who cull wildlife individuals or populations deemed to pose a threat to public
health, safety or other societal interests, we uncover parameters by which culling
wildlife are deemed to be problematic: who performs the culling, when the cull-
ing is done, how it is done and where it is done. This leads us to the concept of
necroaesthetics: taboo ways of taking animal lives. In a unique perspective, we
apprehend two forms of resistance: one that hunters attribute to the public and
that of hunters' own unease at performing certain culling interventions. While the
public and municipal hunters disagree, they also have similar criteria for opposing
culls.
5. We conclude by considering the future of the SLO of culling wildlife for biosecu-
rity, including the subjective nature of its Revocation. This goes toward identi-
fying parameters that make culls likely to produce controversy, hence granting
some predictive value for managers in their planning.

KEYWORDS
animal ethics, biosecurity, culling, hunting, public support

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly cited.
© 2023 The Authors. People and Nature published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society.

People and Nature. 2023;5:1353–1363.  |

wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pan3     1353
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1  |  I NTRO D U C TI O N
To “shoot first and ask questions later” has been an operative ap-
proach to the culling of “problem” wildlife in many societies (von Essen
& Redmalm, 2023). Recent agendas on biosecurity and One Health,
emphasizing the interdependence of human and non-­human animal
health, provides added impetus to “clean” and “control” interfaces
where the public and wild animals intersect (Braun, 2007; Hinchliffe
& Lavau, 2013; Shortall et al., 2016). An increasingly dominant logic to
policing the human-­wildlife interface has been to cull animals accord-
ing to a precautionary principle by which animals are eliminated at the
risk level (Broz et al., 2021). Hence, in many contemporary societies, if
wildlife are seen to pose a threat by endangering public safety, public
health, ecosystem functioning, industries and agriculture, they are as
a rule culled. Indeed, to hesitate or refrain from lethally intervening
can open up hunters and managers to liabilities (Alagona, 2022).
The following paper is based on a study of wildlife management
where culling is broadly done on a biosecurity rationale and as a pub-
lic service: to eliminate synanthropic wildlife (species who thrive in
proximity to humans) to protect public health, industries, sanitation,
human safety and more. Through interviews with 32 Swedish wildlife
managers, municipal hunters and municipal ecologists and through
participant observations during four urban culling interventions, we
explore the legitimation of and controversies around the culling of
diseased or problem wild animals from a biosecurity risk assessment.
We show how municipal hunters in Sweden, a country in
which public acceptance of hunting is otherwise high at 89%
(Henricson, 2022) deal with public resistance to their cull orders. As
we indicate, this sometimes leads these hunters to having to defend,
excuse or hide their practices from the public. In a novel perspec-
tive, we also show hunters' own unease over certain culls they may
be pressured to do in the name of biosecurity when these violate
certain criteria. Our point of departure is to ask what, according to
municipal hunters and wildlife managers, is it about these particular
culling projects and individual cases that make them controversial?
By what criteria do culls become morally objectionable?
An explanation proffered by research has been to suggest that
it is a matter of speciesism: the criterion is basically species identity
(Horta, 2010; Lorimer, 2007). On this explanation, according to so-
cial norms some animals are simply considered to be more valuable
and charismatic than others. Hence, their deaths at the hands of hu-
mans compel stronger reactions. However, given that animal deaths
of the same species have been met with utterly disparate reactions
(Marvin, 2007), we posit that the calculation behind an animal's rel-
ative cullability is more complicated than its species identity. In so
doing, we respond to Beirne's (2014) call for research to explore
“how and why some theoricides [animal killing] are constructed as
socially acceptable and others as unacceptable” (p. 61).
Some culls appear to be at odds with growing public senti-
ment on animal rights and animal welfare (Hampton et al.,  2021;
Kowalewska, 2019). Critical voices also attribute the cull-­as-­operative-­
strategy to a newfound influence over wildlife management by, among
other things, veterinary medicine and One Health (Broz et al., 2021). In
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von ESSEN and REDMALM
this calculus, biosecurity is a trump on all other interests, which intu-
itively licences culling as a solution, drawing from the tradition within
farming to use euthanasia as a tool to manage zoonoses in livestock
(Enticott & Wilkinson, 2013; Ferroglio et al., 2011). But cull orders and
their executors sometimes lose public support, and sometimes even
generates resistance. These moments of resistance may be under-
stood as “ruptures” in a necropolitical regime where the blanket bios-
ecurity approach that relies on culling is contested (Srinivasan, 2017).
In terms of culling for biosecurity, urban wildlife manage-
ment is carried out under circumstances quite different from rural
hunting, as cities present a particularly complex human-­wildlife
interface (Bateman & Fleming, 2012). Cities are generally character-
ized by a relatively strict control of the nature and culture divide
(Jerolmack, 2008), as well as a careful shielding and separating ani-
mal death from the public eye (Burt, 2001). At the same time urban
areas host comparatively more compassionate attitudes to wildlife
than rural areas as humans here encounter wildlife under controlled
forms, and wild animals are arguably rarely a quotidian threat to
their sustenance, as for farmers and foresters (Alagona,  2022).
Nevertheless, resistance from the urban public erupts in ways that
puzzle researchers (Whittaker et al., 2006). Lethal interventions are
also increasingly filmed on citizens' mobile phones and shared online
with criticism of the practice (see e.g. Munro, 2005).
Beyond the “what” and “which” animals that are targeted for
culls, there remain unasked questions about the different situational
and contextual circumstances of culling interventions and how these
dimensions interact in specific circumstances to either legitimate or
undermine a social licence to operate (SLO) on the part of the hunt-
ers before the public. Our approach is to demonstrate how SLO,
an approximation of public support for the practice, is forfeited in
urban wildlife culling. As the analysis shows, municipal hunters view
SLO as being challenged from two directions: the public and mu-
nicipal hunters themselves. Emanating from the analysis, we break
down the constituents of wild animal culling into a “who”, “where”,
“how” and “when” in order to demonstrate what today separates a
legitimate cull from an illegitimate “kill” by way of loss of SLO. Our
contributions include an increased understanding of when wildlife
deaths that are likely to compel resistance and which are likely to
proceed without protest (Whittaker et al., 2001).
2  |  CO N C E P T UA L FR A M E WO R K—­S LO
In order to bring out loss of support for wildlife biosecurity culls,
we leverage the concept of SLO. The term originates from business
studies, describing the erosion of public legitimacy attached to an or-
ganization (Demuijnck & Fasterling, 2016). SLO is an “intangible, un-
written and non-­legally binding social contract” (McManus, 2022),
also understood as “the existence of informal community accept-
ance of a social institution's activities” (Gunningham et al.,  2004).
SLO can be rooted in moral acceptance, where the public explicitly
embraces the activity in question, or in passive acceptance, where
the public has some notion of the activity but the activity is widely

von ESSEN and REDMALM
perceived as marginal and relatively insignificant. While having
more use so far in the context of extractive industries, SLO can now
refer to any organizational activity that might generate controversy
before the public (Morrison, 2014).
SLO has recently, and with some promise for future applica-
tions, been extended to the non-­human animal context. Here it
refers to the loss of societal support for extractive or harmful activ-
ities that involve wildlife and animals (Hampton, Jones, et al., 2020).
McManus (2022) deploys SLO to understand controversies around
animal racing industries, concluding by “encouraging interaction
between animal geographies and the concept of SLO” to under-
stand how “death in the wrong place” for an animal can compel loss
of SLO (p. 325). Darimont et al. (2021) use a social licence to hunt
(SLH) to describe how increased scrutiny and higher thresholds on
the part of the public regarding animal welfare now pose higher
requirements on the SLO of the executor–­s tate sharpshooters. Not
leveraging SLO beyond a placeholder theory, however, Darimont
et al. (2021) leave the task of further research to “identify the so-
cial dimensions that predict whether and how SLH will be lost or
maintained”. Unlike in these studies where activities around ani-
mals may compel intuitive resistance because they involve harm
to animals for recreational purposes (such as sport hunting, bull-­
fighting and more), our case context presents culling as a societal
service promoting biosecurity. For this reason, the “why” of these
culls is partly given, though may also be contested.
To apprehend or otherwise measure SLO, scholars have suggested
looking at how public acceptance is acquired and maintained (Gehman
et al., 2017). Luke (2017, p. 267) suggests that SLO should increasingly
be examined with respect to “social license withdrawal”, rather than
acts of maintenance, as it is when the SLO is challenged in one way or
another that its conditions are highlighted. Moreover, research now
allows for SLO to be evaluated not only by surveying the public in for
example legitimacy evaluations, but apprehended through the per-
spectives of stakeholders, industries and organizations themselves
(Agle et al., 1999; Elsbach & Sutton, 1992). Bice (2014) for example
interviewed employees for reflections on changes in their perceived
social licence over time. We apply this measure of SLO by interview-
ing hunters themselves about perceived social licence and resistance
to culls. In this way, our case apprehends two forms of resistance si-
multaneously: the one they attribute to the public (indirect), as experi-
enced in their interactions with civilians when they are out culling, and
second, their own ambivalences and reluctance to carry out an order
(direct). The public and hunters do not always agree on the legitimacy
of a cull but, as we show, there is overlap on some criteria.
3  |   M E TH O D
We now turn to our case of urban wildlife management in Sweden.
Our case includes both coordinated cull events, such as targeted re-
movals of select populations, but also a range of ad-­hoc individual
culls where biosecurity is perceived to be under threat, requiring the
hunter himself to make the ultimate decision of each cull. Interviews
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      1355
People and Nature
were conducted with municipally contracted hunters across Sweden
(n = 21), municipal officials responsible for wildlife management
(n = 7), as well as people in different ways engaged in wildlife rescue
and rehabilitation (n = 4). These are numbered as R1–­R32 for transpar-
ency. Additional interviews were conducted with a representative of
a large hunting organization, an environmental analyst specializing in
human-­wildlife interactions, and a policeman responsible for wildlife-­
related incidents in a large city. Interviews were semi-­structured and
lasted on average 1 h 30 min, with some going over 2 h. In addition,
participant observations were conducted with municipal hunters dur-
ing four hunting trips in three different cities in Sweden. These trips
were of a “follow along” nature, previously used by researchers in the
hunting context (Crowley et al., 2018). They involved taking photos
of environments, animals, vehicles and weapons and utilizing notes.
One trip was recorded and transcribed in its entirety.
Interviews were transcribed, anonymized and coded for
themes by the two authors using Nvivo, approximating the proce-
dure of thematic analysis, through which codes generated overar-
ching themes—­t he hunters' and the public's different approaches
and the “who”, “where”, “how” and “when” of culling. The data
collection and data processing took place from 2021 to 2023.
All audio files, transcripts and coding documents were stored on
password-­p rotected hard drives, unconnected to the internet at
the authors' universities. When approaching respondents, they
were provided with a written letter (in Swedish) in advance stipu-
lating the aims of the study, the procedures for anonymization and
the possibility of withdrawing consent at any time until publication
of results. Consent was subsequently given orally to the research-
ers. Because respondents were interviewed in their professional
roles, the interview questions did not request sensitive personal
information, and following adherence to the principles of data
minimization and purpose limitation during collection, no such
information was gathered. The project licence to cull, originally
commenced at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
(2020), therefore, did also not necessitate an ethics review.
The hunters held hunting licences and in addition often sup-
plementary training for firing shots in densely populated areas or
euthanizing wounded wildlife following for example car collisions.
The hunters also had affordances to dispatch animals that may oth-
erwise be exempt from hunting, out of season, and in areas where
hunting was not ordinarily allowed. None of the hunters said that
culling quotas were stated in their contracts with the municipality.
Consequently, it was usually up to the hunters to plan the inter-
ventions and make the ultimate culling decisions. Widemo (2021)
found that Swedish municipal hunters often also lacked clear man-
agement plans, allowing them considerable discretion in culling.
This however also meant they could come under criticism.
4  |  R E S U LT S
We now present two categories of resistance to culling: first, the
public reacting negatively to the work of the hunters, as told though
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the perspective of hunters; and second, the hunters themselves ex-
pressing unease to carry out certain assignments.
4.1  |  Loss of public support
While most of the hunters had experiences of being confronted
when out on a mission, resistance was mostly spontaneous rather
than organized. Although hunters were only confronted occasionally,
the possibility of a dispute adds to the weight of the already chal-
lenging situation of having to open fire in a densely populated area.
Emergency calls can come at any time of the day, which meant that it
was sometimes impossible to avoid confrontations. Therefore, most
hunters carry out interventions during the night or at the break of
dawn. One hunter noted that he received “a lot less yelling at me and
fewer questions when you're out at night and early mornings” (R12).
The when was not as important as the where, however. Any areas,
city-­adjacent or otherwise, that were classified as nature reserves or
otherwise protected, made for an uneasy location to bring a firearm:
“The public think we're poaching. They feel a bit threatened.” (R21).
A hunter (R23) recalled receiving angry stares when called to cull
a deer on a train platform in rush hour, making an already difficult
and dangerous intervention even more stressful “there were a ton of
people there and I had the deer slung over my shoulders and people
were really pissed off”. Hence, both green idylls and bustling transit
places were unideal.
A few urban sites were particularly ill-­suited as locations for
culling. “When we cull at cemeteries, you gotta make sure you do
it in early mornings before any people. We also can't exactly nick
a gravestone” (R27). A hunter in a large city who had live-­captured
rabbits, taken them to a secondary location—­an alley outside a
hospital—­found himself yelled at, and informed to the police, by an
angry nurse who saw him clubbing rabbits from her window. Another
hunter lamented culling diseased rabbits outside a children's daycare
center “I have to ask the kids to go inside, because often I can't catch
it because it hops around, and I have to get my dog on it […] and the
rabbit will scream and if the kids see that, well that's not great (R23).
And the daycare teachers think I should take it to the ‘animal hospi-
tal’ and treat it”. A hunter from a city in middle Sweden was often
culled to take care of birds in sensitive places, like supermarkets “and
I would try to be there, by the fruit display, just before they opened.
But a guy saw me and caused a hell of a scene. He didn't like the look
of that.” (R21).
Most of the hunters identified a widespread paradoxical attitude
to culling: people do not want animals killed, yet do not want to face
the consequences of having them around. A hunter said: “Shooting
geese at a beach […] sure isn't fun to do. I've had a lot of conflict
with people who think it's a terrible thing.” At the same time, there
is public pressure on the hunters to rid the beaches of birds. “The
same person writing to the local press that it sucks that you cannot
put your blanket on the beach for all the geese poo, that's the same
persons who also throw rocks at our car when we shoot the geese”
(R14). A wildlife manager (R12) described a polarization: people
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von ESSEN and REDMALM
either want to save all animals, or have everything that moves shot
down. He contended that municipal hunters are left in the middle to
sort out this conflict.
One incident of a hunter (R4) facing a confrontation stood out
in our material and took place during the tracking of a moose hit by
a car. The hunter assigned for the task found the moose lying near
death in a thicket—­with a teenage girl beside it, refusing to move
away from the moose. When the moose started to go away, the girl
followed, whereby the moose was stressed and ran over the girl.
The hunter had to call in the police to be able to go through with
the cull and end the moose's suffering, which according to him was
increased by the stress that the girl's interference must have caused.
The hunter told of this incident sounding concerned: throughout the
intervention, he was worried about the deer's suffering as well as
the girl's safety—­although she was not badly injured, worse things
could have happened. The account illustrates the stress a confron-
tation like this can cause for hunters, and how hunters perceive that
confrontations ultimately risk increasing the suffering for the ani-
mals that are targeted by the intervention. According to the hunt-
ers, the people confronting them when out on an intervention are
exclusively people unknown to them, who seem to interfere spon-
taneously. None of the hunters have heard of animal rights organiza-
tions or other organizations doing planned interventions.
Therefore, several of the hunters suggested that being known
in the area—­“a guy you can trust,” as one interviewee (R24) put it—­
minimized confrontations and increased the general acceptance of
culling. Some hunters had become familiar faces by regularly appear-
ing in local news media, commenting on issues related to wildlife
management, with the hope of being able to explain the rationale
behind the interventions and thus minimizing confrontations. In
addition, being a local was also crucial to understanding the local
fauna, and consequently knowing when an intervention was needed.
In an interview with a wildlife manager in one of Sweden's biggest
cities, he explained that he did not base culling decisions on meth-
odological surveys of animal populations, but on a “hunch” he got
when he drove around the city, relying on rough estimates on when
to intervene in the urban fauna.
Hunters recognized that the relative charisma of the species
mattered, and that some animals “get away with more” when threat-
ening societal interests. A municipal hunter argued: “You know
people have a whole different outlook on rats than they do rabbits”
(R16). A wildlife manager responsible for municipal hunting in one of
Sweden's biggest cities pointed out that there really is not that much
of a difference between rabbits and rats in terms of their disease
and damage (R7). But, he said, while a colony of rabbits can be an
idyllic feature in an urban green area, people would not feel the same
about a pack of rats. Equally, another hunter had identified “a pretty
strong Bambi syndrome,” (R24) referring to a widespread appreci-
ation of deer in his municipality and public reluctance to see them
culled. Yet, both rabbits and deer had an ambivalent status: people
were also regularly contacting municipal hunters to have their gar-
dens rid of these animals. Thus, the question of “what” does not do
enough to capture the dynamics that make animals cullable.

von ESSEN and REDMALM
Feral cats, however, turned out to be an especially uneasy jurisdic-
tion for hunters, with a strong opposition against culls among the pub-
lic. As one hunter reluctantly pointed out, it is impossible to cull cats
because of public perception, although feral cats spread diseases, they
predate on birds, and they also often suffer from parasites and mal-
nutrition. Cats have not been culled in his municipality during the last
20 years—­not since an incident where a tame cat was culled by mistake.
The legitimacy of a cull can be at stake if the methods and tools
involved are perceived as brutal or cruel, even if technically humane:
“Clubbing a bunny to death is very effective and it dies right away,
but it sure does look bad” (R14). Here, there is a trade-­off between
public reactions and animal welfare. He further explained: “You
could also cut its throat, but that's a lot messier” (R14). A hunter on
a similar assignment in another city argued stomping smaller an-
imals seriously injured by traffic to death with your boot, like ro-
dents, was the right thing to do but looked unpalatable: “It may be
a half-­squished squirrel and you just have to stomp it to death” (R6).
Welfare trumped appearance also in the case of rabbits, but this was
not altogether popular to the public, who did not understand. Culling
rabbits in safe and controlled environments, rabbits who would oth-
erwise die “excruciating deaths” (R23) by myxomatosis and may lay
down to die at a children's daycare centre, was widely held as the
right thing to do, despite the public frequently criticizing hunters
when netting, clubbing or shooting them from their cars. This was
especially so when they were culled in large numbers. A hunter in a
big city shot 600 rabbits in less than 2 months.
In another case, a municipal hunter (R23) told of a colleague who
had to wring the neck of a lethally injured seagull, “It went ‘click’ and
then he put it in a plastic bag”, someone filmed the incident and put it
on social media, which in turn led to someone filing a complaint with
the municipality. The case was dropped, and the hunter defended his
colleague, arguing that sometimes you have to do things that look
bad but is the most humane for the animal. Similarly, a hunter sug-
gested (observation R3) that the quickest and therefore least painful
way of euthanizing deer on the run after a traffic accident would be
to let a hunting dog track them down and bite them to death. Yet, the
negative exposure would be too great.
Another hunter added that culling in a city meant “you have to
be a lot more observant these days” (R23) about what is exposed to
the public. This was so, because the public were not only there to
judge at the time of the cull but could get the wrong picture after-
ward from the afterlife of the cull in various media, social or news:
“it really depends hugely on how the journalist frames [the cull]”, he
explained, discussing a swan. While the public generally accepts the
culling of foxes, particularly mangy urban ones, a hunter critiqued
the framing of these culls by the hunting establishment a few years
ago, noting that they made it sound like a sport “Why did they have
to call it the Fox Cup? It caused such a ruckus among animal rights
activists” (R16). This suggests that it is not only how mainstream
media frame a cull event but the language and attitudes that hunters
themselves bring to it, that can raise eyebrows.
All in all, it was reflected that culling offended multiple senses
in the city, before the urban palate: “Animal death is something the
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People and Nature
public just doesn't want to see. It smells bad too.” (R20). He added
that disposal of already diseased animals, a frequent job of hunters,
was equally repelling to people “if it's been lying there for 4 h with its
guts hanging out”. A hunter who routinely culled birds at industries
for sanitary reasons admitted that he had to carefully approach the
culling of, and subsequent subtle packaging of, “some 400 pigeons
[…] rolled up neatly in newspaper” to not offend sensibilities (R21).
4.2  |  Loss of hunters' own support
The second form of resistance concerns hunters' resistance toward
their cull assignments. Hunters were reluctant to cull animals in green
areas, especially in suburbs at the outskirts of cities, “because at the
end of the day that's where you want the animals to be” (R24). Most
hunters testified that they often questioned people's motives for
contacting wildlife management altogether, or refused to carry out
a cull altogether, arguing that wild animals are a natural part of the
urban environment, or that cities should not be “sterile” (R15, R21).
Hunters were critical of the public's selective tolerance toward some
animals: “The cuter the animals, the bigger the villains we are, and
vice versa” (R15). This hunter added that in his municipality, “when
we cull the pigs, we're the heroes” (R15), referring to wild boar hunt-
ing. He and his team had been served with cake by local residents
after clearing the area of wild boar but had to undergo strict an-
onymization procedures or have police escort when they were called
out to cull charismatic animals, like swans, or large carnivores hit by
traffic. A policeman (R20) coordinating hunters admitted that the
boar has a “bad rap.” While a few hunters we interviewed endorsed
zero tolerance policies for boar in their cities, others defended the
boars from what they saw as “hysterics”, “ignorance” and “war-­like”
persecution by the public and media: “I know they're ugly and scary,
but come on.” (R22).
Badgers building nests underneath houses were a frequent
complaint in most municipalities, to which hunters usually re-
sponded that the house owners should try to let the badgers be.
Hunters also confessed to having their own selective tolerances
that made them hesitant toward some assignments. One hunter,
for example, said he drew the line at culling a nightingale whose
singing allegedly kept people up at night (R21) and also hesitated
culling squirrels in his city. Several hunters expressed unease as-
sociated with culling a healthy animal. One hunter did not like to
shoot geese to keep beaches clear, as it included shooting healthy
animals, including nestlings: “It really doesn't look nice when you
shoot a family of geese you know, no, that is really unpleasant”
(R13). A three-­legged deer was the topic of repeated calls to a
wildlife management office but, as the same manager pointed
out, “some deer do really well on three legs even if it looks pretty
ghastly to the public” (R13).
The interviewed hunters also criticized other hunters' culling
decisions. Overall, there was a sharp criticism of quick recruitment
processes of hunters that lacked wildlife management expertise and
understanding of the proper safety protocols and practice. Hunters
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People and Nature
distanced themselves from colleagues who were hot on the trigger,
focusing on shooting as many animals as possible, rather than seeing
their wider role as wildlife managers. Several hunters also said that
leisure hunters were attracted to the role of municipal ­hunter—­as the
idea is that they can shoot any animal, anywhere, all year round—­
without understanding the responsibilities and often hard, boring
and often unpaid work connected to the role. One hunter expressed
this widespread view by pointing out that “it's a real Wild West in
some places and all these municipal hunters are called wildlife man-
agers, although they are just hunting sporadically without taking re-
sponsibility (R14). To him, braggarts and poseurs—­defined as those
with full camouflage gear and facepaint—­were least credible to per-
form a cull. This was echoed by R15, who also culled large carni-
vores: “last thing you want is some macho hunter come in and ‘finish’
the job, with no people skills”.
Yet, it was generally accepted to take some pleasure in urban
culling, within strict boundaries—­a sort of professional play. Thus,
a head of a park management department (R29) had fired a hunter
who posted photos in social media of their assignments, turning the
hunting into a spectacle. However, the same head of department
assigned rabbit culling tasks to two of his colleagues who he knew
enjoyed it. During a participant observation of an early morning hunt
at a sewage plant, the hunters competed to see who shot the most
birds—­the winner expressing clear satisfaction and jokingly mocking
the person who shot the smallest number of birds. But while some
hunters said that they enjoyed the actual hunt—­the shooting and
killing—­the absolute majority of the hunters appreciated the wider
challenge of urban wildlife management: of being able to plan and
carry out difficult culling tasks in crowded areas which demanded
advanced skills and being able to picture elaborate scenarios.
5  |  D I S C U S S I O N
The above moments of resistance toward culling—­whether ac-
tive or passive—­or by hunters or the public—­may be understood as
“ruptures” in a necropolitical regime where the blanket biosecurity
approach that relies on culling is contested (Srinivasan,  2017). We
now present three themes from our above findings that show how
SLO can be forfeited for such culls: (1) what—­the ideal victim, (2)
necroaesthetics—­how, when and where and (3) who—­the commis-
sioned killers. In a concluding section, we discuss how SLO for bios-
ecurity culling may be further challenged in the future, given animal
welfare and ecology ideas.
5.1  |  What—­The ideal victim
As partly predicted given the centrality of this factor to cull accept-
ance in previous literature, specieism in determining the relative ac-
ceptability in the cull surfaced in our cases. Scholars have suggested
speciesism, anthropomorphism and affective ties to animals influ-
ence both decisions to cull in the first place, and public reactions to
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von ESSEN and REDMALM
culls second (Horta, 2010; Rogers & Kaplan, 2004). Unlike the previ-
ous literature which has approached this by mainly looking at animal
aesthetics and value to society, our results indicate how situatedness
of particular animal individuals and populations also matter. Hence,
sometimes, rather than a matter of “what” animal is culled in terms of
species, the question may be better posed also as “which” individual
animal to cull, as specific individuals may stand out as uncullable. We
saw this in the example of rabbits and deer, who may pass the un/
cullable boundary depending on place and the persons evaluating
the situation. An example of the move from “what” to “which” in
previous research is the shooting of Samson the elk in Colorado in
1995. Samson was a locally known elk, emblematic of Colorado na-
ture, known for his large stature and a “friend” to many residents. His
kill precipitated an outrage. While elk are common hunting targets
in Colorado, the killing of Samson by an “outside” hunter constituted
an “assault on a cherished friend and charismatic celebrity” (Colomy
& Granfield, 2010, p. 375), suggesting that individual, and not merely
species-­level characteristics, matter in cullability.
One theme that emerged in relation to what or which animal,
was that of culpability. Are the particular animals targeted for le-
thal removal seen as innocent of their alleged biosecurity threats
or as having it coming? In criminology, Christie (1986) “ideal victim”
concept has been put forward to explain sympathy toward victims
on the basis of their characteristics. This has recently been adapted
to wildlife or green criminology, to account for moral outrage in re-
sponse to trafficked or poached wildlife victims, which follows pre-
dictable charismatic species (Sollund, 2017). The wildlife managers
and municipal hunters we interviewed were explicit in stating how
none of these predicaments were the fault of the animals, no matter
their appearances and behaviours. Nevertheless, there were selec-
tive tolerances to damage incurred by “ideal victims” or valued wild
animals: rats and rabbits both causing comparable harm, but rabbits
more likely to be exempted from blame and spared from culls. To
hunters, blame and fault were complex concepts insofar as human
agency was involved, and this sometimes made them feel guilty
about culling animals whose predicament was clearly the result of
human interference.
The selectivity across species in relation to their relative blame
is also reflected in the literature, where for example elk—­the main
reservoir for brucellosis—­are allowed to roam freely outside of
national parks, but bison—­a less infectious reservoir for the same
disease—­are routinely slaughtered when they venture outside these
areas (Bienen & Tabor, 2006). Oppositely, Milton (2000) shows how
“selective tolerance” of such species effectively raises the threshold
for culling decisions. Today, if charismatic species can claim indige-
neity in the region as their status on top of this, they have an added
protective shield: managers tend to try harder to find non-­lethal and
go-­around solutions to avoid culling. Hence, when protected UK
peregrines preyed on terns, the response was not to cull the pere-
grines but to provide shelters for the terns.
In this way, the “key emerging question” (Gibbs, 2021, p. 375)
of how animals are made killable, and oppositely uncullable in the
eyes of the public, one needs to interrogate levels below species,

von ESSEN and REDMALM
including populations and individuals and their relative out-­of-­
placeness or value in a particular area. As we now know how there
are a great many cullable animals “whose bodies have been disposed
of invisibly, silently and without inspection or accord” (Beirne, 2018,
p. 37) in the name of biosecurity, the exceptions become especially
instructive to tease out, insofar as they can tell us much about what
we project onto different wild animals.
5.2  |  Necroaesthetics—­Where, when and how
One theme that emerged is that SLO is often impaired when cull ef-
forts are highly visible to the public. Indeed, our hunters intimated
that culls in public areas should ideally be conducted with a logic
that can best be described as out-­of-­sight and out-­of-­mind in terms
of visibility. However, there were limits to the clandestine modality
of operations; if perceived as if prior notice had not been given to
the residents, the public appeared more sceptical about the cull, and
even “yelling” were likely. Hunters sought both active acceptance
for their SLO, for example by appearing in the media to clearly warn
about a cull, and passive acceptance, by planning their interventions
with care to minimize visibility on the day in question. The threshold
to culling an animal varied with its position in the city landscape. This
is in line with previous findings: when a wild animal presents a risk
in a “zero tolerance zone” or other sensitive area with respect to the
animal's impact on biosecurity its cull is arguably less controversial,
because its death is deemed a one health necessity. For example,
birds are not supposed to be in and around food-­producing factors.
Oppositely, eliminating the same animal in a green area, where
there were unspoken ideas about sanctuary, evoked scepticism—­
both among hunters and the public. Indeed, as research demon-
strates, the public appears more accepting of ideas that the forest
is an “oasis” and refuge for wildlife like deer (Connors & Short
Gianotti, 2021). Where people recreate and face high exposure of
animal excrement, such as beaches, the public appears to implicitly
endorse hunters keeping this area clean—­even if they do not like
to see the “cleaning” being done. In this way, we argue that “zero
tolerance zones” also extend to the way the people feel about the
culls themselves. Culling a deer on a train platform was an obvious
such case, signalling an unlikely deathscape. While the city may be
seen as a place in which ideally no animal culling should be visible
to onlookers, further research may penetrate deeper to also break
down “micro-­zones of killing” (Wadiwel,  2015, p. 94) within the
city, where culling in alleyways, public beaches and daycare cen-
tres for example would all present different reactions. In the liter-
ature, an “animal death in the wrong place” is one that may be said
to transgress emotional geographies (Mazhary, 2021). Research on
“deathscapes” point to the spatial nature of death, consolidated
in cemeteries or hospices (Maddrell & Sidaway,  2010). However
acceptable death may have been at these places, though, culling
was not.
These zones are manifestly also temporal, demonstrating the im-
portance of “when”. Urban hunters tried to be out before dawn and
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      1359
People and Nature
after dusk to avoid crowds: they became, in some ways, crepuscular
as the animals they hunted. However, while these are often stra-
tegic times to hunt many wild animals due to their day rhythms, it
may not line up temporally with the occasions where these animals
become a problem to people needing to be solved–­such as during
lunch hour, rush hour, or an afternoon. We gleaned the importance
to SLO of maintaining a balancing act between minimizing visibility—­
something that the hunters managed in the current study by keep-
ing out of people's way geographically and temporally as best they
can, while also pressing upon the need to clearly signal what they
are doing by using reflex vests and identifying marks on their car
and equipment. We anticipate that beyond the relative timing of the
cull—­for example—­if it appears to be premature before non-­lethal
interventions have been tried, the duration of the cull itself may also
harm SLO.
This connected straightforwardly to manner of death—­the
aesthetic considerations weighing into hunters' culling interven-
tions, and into the public's approach to culls. We suggest the term
necroaesthetics (Gieser, 2022) to refer to the questions raised in re-
lation to what a death's visible aspects—­to what extent it appears to
be for example painless, efficient and clean, or cruel, violent, and re-
pugnant. Our hunters noted there were trade-­offs between forms of
killing that looked unpalatable–­even shocking–­and deaths that were
delivered with the intent of minimizing suffering. Clubbing or stomp-
ing small animals to death—­like rodents—­were aesthetically prob-
lematic, and not something that hunters wanted to do before the
public. However, they were the quickest and most efficient means
in many cases, according to hunters. In some countries, technologies
and paraphernalia that seem too associated with the army, such as
camouflage, helicopters, and automatic rifles may alienate the public
when being used in hunts, particularly when there is a troubled mil-
itary legacy (Geis, 2005).
But oppositely, weapons that do away with efficiency and re-
lies on hunters' sportsmanship, such as an old saloon rifle or a
compound bow, may tip the scales too far in the other direction,
indicating perhaps that the cull was done unprofessionally with lei-
sure intent and not with the principal aim of protecting biosecurity
(von Essen, 2020). In the case or retitling predator control (of foxes)
the “Fox-­Cup” (“Räv-­SM” in Swedish), a boundary had been crossed
that immorally gamified culling. Finally, traps and poisons enjoy
less support today, despite being cost-­effective, because of their
necroaesthetics—­animals in cages and animals self-­dying in crowded
areas—­tend to repel people (Smith et al., 2022).
Lastly, the sheer number, and subsequent presentation, of culled
animals at any one time, could also upset onlookers. Not only was
this seen as a sloppy, no-­holds-­barred approach to culling as op-
posed to more precisely targeting the individual animals at risk, but
they massified death. This is reflected also in the literature; if culls
are experienced as non-­selective, for example targeting whole pop-
ulations when only a few individuals are deemed a risk, they often
lose support. The large-­scale culling of animals may look cruel and
unnecessary, but in addition, mass death also tend to look and smell
repugnant, thus challenging necroaesthetic ideals.
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1360     
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5.3  |  Who—­The commissioned killers
We suggest that the characters, affiliations and dispositions of hunt-
ers were instrumental to their SLO. The SLO of a cull was more likely
to be seen to be violated when teammates appeared to be too “excit-
able” by their work to cull, did not display signs of empathy with the
animals, or were lacking in knowledge in wildlife management. While
hunters' competence in scientific principles of wildlife management
were important, local knowledge of the conditions and fauna of the
area were seen as even more so. This may potentially betray an inter-
related normative preference on hunter identity: that they be local
residents, trusted and tried in their culling and socialities. Hunters
reflected at length and critically about the faults of outsiders, press-
ing on the importance of being locally embedded, befriending stra-
tegic local residents to use as liaisons, and to be aware of social
tensions. To them, retaining a “folk” element to culling was critical
to its social legitimacy.
5.4  |  SLO revoked
The above three themes collating the circumstances and charac-
teristics surrounding wildlife culls clarify some basic logics behind
resistance to culling. Such resistance may be seen as the litmus test
for SLO, revealing its forfeiture. We now return to this concept and
discuss it critically as (1) a reliable indicator of public sentiments and
(2) how it may extend to broader critiques toward culling wildlife for
biosecurity today and in the future.
Our approach, to interview hunter and municipal officers, rather
than to poll broad publics, provided an “insider” view on how hunters
themselves reflected on the loss of SLO. SLO is often fragile and has
the capacity to suddenly “change or be lost” (Hall & Jeanneret, 2015,
p. 219). McManus (2022) asks “who has the authority to break the
contract?” (p. 319) and Rooney et al. (2014) ask about the “grantee”
of the social licence as a contract in the first place. Some instances of
revocation were clearer than others, involving yelling, resistance, or
interference. But SLO revocation is likely also more passive in other
cases, particularly in Sweden where the public is slow to actively
protest. Here, they may take the form of a gradual erosion of trust in
hunters. Moreover, we argue that the nature of the revocation is also
subjective in the first place. Hence, we were also able to show hunt-
ers' criticism toward instances when they felt that SLO should not
have been revoked–­that the public overreacted in their resistance.
This included charges of sentimentality and selective tolerance to-
ward certain animals. At the same time, we showed how they reflect
on their own knee-­jerk reactions to cull orders, including personal
idiosyncrasies that made them reluctant to cull certain animals—­like
a nightingale.
In terms of the reliability of the SLO concept as a measure of
legitimacy, Melé and Armengou (2016) argue that moral legitimacy
does not necessarily follow from a general legitimacy by public sup-
port. SLO is merely a populist kind of legitimacy. To them, moral le-
gitimacy must be determined separately on the basis of justification
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von ESSEN and REDMALM
according to ethical principles. The latter critique is important to
our context insofar as it involves lethal harm to non-­human animals,
a practice whose morality is frequently contested across publics
(Hampton, Fisher, et al., 2020). Resistance to urban wildlife culling
ostensibly demonstrated a more populist/public acceptance behind
SLO than a moral one. But we contend, appraisal of SLO is clearly
increasingly infused with animal rights and animal welfare ethics.
Much of the basis for resistance to culls among both the hunters and
in their perceptions of the public hinged on principles of minimizing
suffering and impeding unnecessary death among sentient beings,
including not exposing them to stress or what they saw as “unfair”
treatment.
However, we fully note that resistance to culls also revealed
norms and values that do not neatly or consistently line up with
ethical philosophies. Moreover, attachment to certain individual an-
imals, or objection to unsightly methods of killing (but which were
better for quick deaths) are not always grounded in scientific prin-
ciples either. Enticott  (2015) for example, found that the public's
views on the legitimacy of badger culling in the UK was not affected
by scientific evidence on culling effectiveness. Other studies have
shown that people have selective tolerances to certain animals and
blame others for damage caused by these more favoured species
(Treves, 2008). The combined lack of ethical consistency, failure to
be persuaded by scientific or ecological evidence may on the one
hand be dismissed as irrationality (ibid). We believe, however, that
to ask for rationality and consistency is a tall order of environmental
and animal ethics theory, which may not be the definitive blueprint
for people's actions that ethicists sometimes like to project. Rather,
categorizations of people's ethical frameworks when it comes to the
treatment of animals is arguably best done retrospectively to try to
match when as close as possible with a given framework. Hence, a
licence to operate is unlikely to be able to be predicted a priori from
ethical values. As Crowley et al. (2018) suggest, the closest we may
get is to reconstruct an “ethical taxonomy” for different species and
hope this has some explanatory power for future culls.
However, as we have demonstrated, there are still logics to re-
vocations of SLO that operate beyond the species identity. Thus,
looking forward, we wonder if whether specific resistance to culls
may also be linked with a clashing between disparate nature philoso-
phies around the right to take wild animal lives for societal interests.
How will the SLO for culling for biosecurity continue to develop? As
Biermann and Mansfield (2014) argue that the “right of the sword”
over nature has transitioned to a new right to “make live and let die”
in modern societies, we posit that biosecurity and one health agen-
das now begin to promote a “duty of the sword” for unruly wild an-
imals in cities, which may face broader resistance at some point in
the future.
Indeed, the biosecurity cull approach presents a potentially
agonistic and massifying take on wildlife threats—­culling inter-
ventions are generally not based on methodological surveys or
exact calculations, but on approximations and “hunches”, meaning
that there is often no way to know whether each single death was
necessary. This may clash with emerging schools of thoughts of

von ESSEN and REDMALM
compassionate conservation (Edelblutte et al., 2022). According to
the latter, wildlife is to be approached as individuals with welfare
rights. Indeed, martial metaphors to “cleanse” and “purify” space
that frequently surface as rationales for culling today (Hinchliffe
& Bingham, 2008) may be increasingly detrimental to SLO. Since
SLO is highly contingent on resonance with current values, change
may be afoot. Indeed, even the removal of invasive alien species,
commonly thought of as animals non grata to be dispatched at all
costs to protect biosecurity, is now being scrutinized with respect
to humane standards by the IUCN. A working group if interna-
tional experts published the first evaluation of and recommenda-
tions for culling standards for invasives in the EU in 2022 (Smith
et al., 2022). This points to what Crowley et al. (2018) present as
“contestation” (p. 137) over human control over nature, including
unsavoury practices of culling, corresponding to what we term
“rupture” of the biopolitical regime. Beyond an academic discus-
sion, it is actively beginning to manifest as pressure on managers
and policy-­makers to consider also non-­lethal measures to control
populations (Gilchrist, 2021).
6  |   CO N C LU S I O N
In this paper, we have taken up the call for examining how wild
animal deaths may be constructed as socially acceptable and
unacceptable by bringing together resistance to culling for bios-
ecurity in the context of urban wildlife management. Our study
shows that SLO in the context of culling wildlife can and is for-
feited quickly if the cull violates certain criteria that pertain to
who makes the cull, what is culled, where the culling takes place,
and how and when it is carried out—­t hat is, the necroaesthetics of
the cull. The rationale for culling animals is otherwise a deciding
factor in its SLO: killing for sport and entertainment is increasingly
contested. In our material, the rationale was the same: the cull
was ordered for biosecurity in a broad sense, including protecting
one health—­native biota, public health and safety and wild animals
(either protecting their lives, or protecting them from suffering)—­a
rationale more difficult to oppose than the former. Still, we show
that certain modalities and materialities of the cull contribute to
rendering wildlife uncullable.
AU T H O R C O N T R I B U T I O N S
Erica von Essen and David Redmalm conducted an equal number of
interviews for the manuscript. Erica von Essen conceptualized the
premise of the manuscript. Both authors wrote in all sections, having
coded separately. David Redmalm contributed with both data and
analysis throughout.
AC K N O​W L E D
​ G E ​M E N T S
The authors wish to thank Kathleen Epstein and Marianne
Singsaas who contributed with invaluable insights from their re-
search on culling practices in Scandinavia during this manuscript's
early stages.
|
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      1361
People and Nature
C O N FL I C T O F I N T E R E S T S TAT E M E N T
The authors declare there is no conflict of interest. Rachelle Gould
is an Associate Editor for People and Nature but was not involved in
the review process.
DATA AVA I L A B I L I T Y S TAT E M E N T
The manuscript uses qualitative data in the form of transcribed
interviews approximately 1.5 h in length, and some 15–­20 pages
long. Because of the situated nature of the interview situation, the
identifying information available in the unabridged transcripts, and
not having asked our respondents to make their interviews publicly
available at the time of collection, these are not uploaded to a public
repository. The transcripts, which are in Swedish, may be available
upon request by contacting the authors and specifying clearly in-
tended purpose and use and with adherence to stringent anonymi-
zation procedures.
ORCID
Erica von Essen  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9169-0064
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