Dear reader,

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In almost 140 pages, as part of my master's thesis, I tell the story of a young male wolf who was shot by an unknown woman with a rifle in 2017 after an almost 850 km long hike near the Schluchsee in the southern Black Forest. The story of the young wolf is also part of the larger story of 'the wolves returning to Germany'. It is also a history of wolf monitoring, the attempt to use scientific methods to prove where wolves currently live in Germany. Ultimately, it is also a story of humans and non-human animals.

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How do wolves become words?

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In cooperation with employees from the wildlife ecology working groups of the Baden-Württemberg Forest Research and Research Institute, the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research Berlin (IZW), the Senckenberg Research Institute, Gelnhausen branch and the LUPUS Institute Spreewitz in Saxon Lausitz, fragments of the The migration story of the illegally shot “Schluchsee Wolf” from 2017 was compiled in a joint reflection process by those involved in the research that lasted several months. By providing detailed descriptions of all the work steps involved in providing evidence of wolf presence and migration, this work is intended to provide interested parties, laypeople and those responsible for wolf monitoring with an insight into the everyday scientific work of multilocal and transdisciplinary wolf monitoring.

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It is always important to ask the question of which inter-species power relations influence the wild animal ecology, scientific and political understanding of non-disciplinary 'wolf monitoring'. I put both scientists and wolves up for discussion as potential actors in wolf monitoring. In order to follow this lead, in an introductory theoretical part of this work I present already known concepts from German-speaking human-animal studies, which specifically deal with concepts of 'agency'. As I work, I embed these into concrete, power-structural matrices from the field. In order to verbalize these matrices, I use suggestions from intersectionality analysis, as proposed in 1993 by the Australian sociologist Val Plumwood for human relationships from the perspective of postcolonial studies. 

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The aim is to gradually attempt to counteract dichotomous or exclusive attributions of attributes and/or linguistic generalizations (e.g. 'the (bad) wolf') of various living animal groups. By recognizing the diversity and strangeness of the counterparts, concrete interspecies relationships such as those between humans and wolves can be examined without placing groups or individuals above others per se.

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“How do we put the world into words?”, Latour, 1999, p. 120

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I follow the actors – I follow the photo evidence, tracks and physical remains of a young wolf and a group of scientists who examined it. The adaptation I have chosen of Latour's** idea of ​​“circulating reference” helps me to understand how the different material states of the wolf sea wolf (photo, body, DNA) changed forms in the context of wolf monitoring and thereby provided information about life and revealed the identity of the deceased male dog. In the detailed results section of this work, the reader understands how scientific wolf monitoring methods help to create facts about wolf presence and distribution in Germany.

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This master's thesis is intended to help make wolves and humans visible as individuals in the discourse about Germany's 'returning wolves' and, using the example of several wolf monitoring scenarios, to illustrate that non-human animal counterparts, as well as humans, are presented as potentially powerful actors in the political discussions about wolves can be. In my opinion, such a change of perspective at eye level between species is necessary in order to think about conflict situations, boundaries but also possible meeting points between species and thus build sustainable and cooperative relationship structures for future coexistence.

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Here is the link to the work:

 

Jaeger MA [IA] Freiburg 2018 research partners

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* Federal documentation and advice center on the subject of wolves

** In his 1999 essay - "Circulating Reference - Soil Samples from the Amazon Jungle" - the anthropologist Bruno Latour accompanied a group of French pedologists and Brazilian botanists as they worked in the field.

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At the edge of the Amazon rainforest area, the scientists asked themselves whether a particular forest area was expanding or being displaced by the adjacent savanna; A similar question to that presented to the employees of the wolf monitoring facilities required sound assessments to be made about how population dynamics, areas of occurrence and distribution of wolves will develop in Baden-Württemberg in the future. In his fifty-eight-page, photo-philosophical essay, Bruno Latour describes all those “intermediate and translation steps” (Latour, 1999) that scientists have to overcome with the help of instruments in order to create a coherent chain of “representations” (Latour, 1999) of their object of study up to the scientific ones To create publications about what is being researched. B. Latour's field-philosophical research interest lies in the production of knowledge.

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My thanks,

JULIAN JAEGER