Hedgehogs, Killing, and Kindness

How our understanding of and relationship to hedgehogs reveals the complex interactions between culture, technology, bodies, conservation, and care for other animals.

Across the globe, the bumbling hedgehog has been framed in a variety of ways throughout history—as a symbol of both good and bad luck, of transformation, of vengeance, and of wit and reincarnation. In recent years, it has also, in different parts of the world, been viewed as a pest for its predation on ground-nesting birds and has thus become a target for culling. In Hedgehogs, Killing, and Kindness, Laura McLauchlan explores how human actors have interacted with hedgehogs and other species through time and attends to the questions these interactions raise when it comes to ending and preserving life in the name of species conservation and wildlife rehabilitation.

Grounded in rich empirical material and careful critique, Hedgehogs, Killing, and Kindness traces the author’s own more-than-human transformative experience and elucidates how care is shaped by and shapes various cultural and material forces. McLauchlan urges us to rethink and reflect on how cares are normalized, and at what and whose expense; what it might mean to care in more responsive ways; and finally, whether it is possible to kill with kindness in this rapidly changing and conflicting world. A valuable addition to the understanding and practices of multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, and the broader environmental humanities, this book sheds a necessary light on the fraught space between caring for and killing to care for other-than-human animals on our one precious planet.Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: On Coming to Care 1
1 Storied Attunements: Backyard Hedgehog-Human Interactions in a Time of Shifting Framings 19
Transitions: Welcome Cares 46
2 Wild Cares: Tinkering and Embodied Expertise 49
Representations 79
3 Sadness and Distributed Agency in Urban Hedgehog Conservation 83
4 Cauterizing Care and Sustaining Rehabilitation 113
5 Well-Aligned Cares: Making and Undoing Conservation Common Sense 141
Detachment and Affinity 173
6 Killing and/with Kindness? Holding Tensions in Biodiversity Conservation 183
Conclusion: On Being Made of Cares 213
Notes 225
References 233
Index 255“McLauchlan’s feelings are central to Hedgehogs, Killing, and Kindness. Though we may view our attitudes toward nature as natural, really, she argues, they are socially constructed. (There’s nothing either good or bad about hedgehogs, but thinking makes it so.)”
—Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker

“In Hedgehogs, Killing and Kindness, anthropologist Laura McLauchlan describes her fieldwork in the UK and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Her description is deeply personal, as she writes about the emotional strain of spending months caring for injured hedgehogs in the UK, then subsequently setting traps for them with amateur conservationists in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The book is made particularly thought-provoking by McLauchlan’s awareness of her perspective as a pākehā (non-Māori, settler-descended New Zealander). This allows her to critique aspects of dominant conservation culture, starting with the acknowledgement that it is indeed a culture, not a self-evident truth.”
—The Biologist

“Hedgehogs, Killing, and Kindness contributes to the small but growing body of work that highlights the importance of understanding the role of emotions in conservation.”
—H-Net Reviews“McLauchlan sensitively entangles us in a prickly hedge of interspecies cares. Her book beautifully unfolds the spatial paradoxes and contradictions of caring for this charismatic animal while respecting the other organisms impacted by its proliferation.”
—Jamie Lorimer, Professor of Environmental Geography, University of Oxford; author of Wildlife in the Anthropocene and The Probiotic PlanetLaura McLauchlan is an anthropologist with expertise in both ethnographic illustration and more-than-human approaches. Her work focuses on the role of learned practices and cultural concepts in supporting generative connection. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in anthropology at Macquarie University.