Sighting & Siting

A Self-Study¹

The questions that stay with us are rarely neutral. They gather force from experience, from education, from discomfort, and from the private places where grief and argument begin to overlap. This piece began as an effort to examine the questions that had been following me most closely: why roadkill affects me so deeply, why I am unsettled by the indifference that often surrounds it, and why the worlds of animal ethics and environmental ethics so often seem to speak past one another. What follows is less an answer than a self-study of attention—an attempt to understand what I notice, why I notice it, and what that noticing reveals.

The self-study that follows first took shape in conversation with a small group of critical peers: Jahleel, Dane, and Milena. I brought forward two questions that had been occupying me: why roadkill affects me so deeply, and why I remain troubled by the apparent uncoupling of animal ethics from environmental ethics. Of the two, the roadkill question drew the most immediate response. I was the last to share, and as I listened to the others think through their own projects, I began to realize that my inquiry was more self-referential than I had initially recognized. It was not only a question about roadkill, or even about the indifference that so often surrounds it, but about the personal and scholarly biases that shape the way I encounter such deaths in the first place.

Milena’s self-study, in particular, reflected many of the same emotional tensions as my own. Through listening to her, I found myself better able to analyze my own response. The reflection below therefore follows, in part, the contours of her discussion, because my own discovery emerged organically in relation to hers.

Roadkill has always been a source of chagrin for me, but paradoxically also a source of inspiration and curiosity. Since beginning the ANZO program, I’ve become aware of a change in the intensity and direction of my response to roadkill. Increasingly I feel disconnected from the community around me who not only appear indifferent to the existence of roadkill but also contemptuous of my efforts to remove roadkill, rendering nugatory my hopes of ever resolving the ‘roadkill question’. Much of this change I attribute to the new learning environment I find myself in; I have new tools, both practical and intellectual, with which to approach the roadkill question and analyze my experience/reaction to roadkill. I felt it worthwhile here to consider the learning process and how, as a student, I adapt and evolve as a result of that learning. One can and often does change behaviorally as a result of learning – but in the online/distance format these associated changes in behavior aren’t necessarily remarked on by fellow students, making it a uniquely personal journey. Of the four key learning strategies as defined by David Kolb (2007), I have always self-identified with “Abstract Conceptualization.” Learners of this strategy, also named the “thinking strategy,” tend to refrain from decision-making until they have acquired an intellectual understanding of a given situation. My natural learning process is to consume knowledge with the goal of assimilating a theoretical underpinning. Although much of my original reaction to roadkill is guided by an emotional or affective response, my education and ensuing cognitive understanding of the issue is a large part of the reason that roadkill has come to vex me as intensely as it does. I think it’s safe to say that most, if not all of us, pursuing ANZO studies share a disposition that is partial to the plight and welfare of animals and yet, during OCC and throughout this first semester, I was struck by the realization that we do not all see all animal species/groups as equal. Several discussions about the treatment (here I mean intellectual treatment) and place of ‘wild’ animals left me feeling alienated even from my peers. I’ve spent some time trying to disentangle the influence of cognitive versus affective associations in my reaction to roadkill, and (after thinking about it for a couple weeks) I’ve surmised that the two broad theme points of contention I brought up earlier (why do I care so much about roadkill? and why aren’t all animal activists also environmentalists? ) are in fact connected.

Having obtained a degree in environmental science and conservation management, I have a foundation in ecosystem processes that has endowed me with an ecological sensibility and an understanding of wildlife movement and migration paths. This knowledge is automatically deployed whenever I observe an animal on a roadway; moreover, I rely on it to predict animals on roadways too. Unlike so much of the commentary that emanates from the public, such as that quoted by ANZO student Sarah Bowen “[animals] should learn to stay off the road” (2020), I recognize that roads are integral elements of wildlife habitat. There are many ecological factors that contribute to road use by both mammals and reptiles (Hill et al., 2021). I understand roadkill as a wildlife management problem, linked to the road effect zone or the virtual footprint the road has on that landscape. But that is not all it is. The totality of my academic career has had an inherently interdisciplinary character, nourishing learning across disciplines, across spatial and temporal scales, and across both qualitative and quantitative means of analysis, and this has allowed me to understand roadkill as a social problem too. I’ve become acutely aware of the ways in which cultural contexts – like Malamud’s notion of dislocation (2022) – have made irrelevant the idea of animal’s habitat. As an ANZO student I have been introduced to modes of thinking that engage critical perspectives, with the result that roadkill emerges as a pattern/phenomenon/category of exploitation made permissible by an underlying philosophical framework that seems tenuous at best, totally indefensible at worst. 

In addition to shaping how I negotiate experiences of roadkill (and the world at large) my education has also provided me with the tools to make sense of past experiences, which in turn, catalyzes yet more behavioral change. A relevant example is provided by my very first week of class in ANZ 513 (Critical Animal Studies). Refusing to watch a documentary that was assigned for our first task, I was forced to unpack my reasons for objecting to it. I include the short discussion as Appendix 1 for reference but suffice to say that learning about the concept of moral shock as described by Fernandez (2021) helped make sense of certain experiences and shaped my self knowledge. Conceptualizing by naming is a foundational part of learning and my personal empirical experience of the world is continuously bolstered by cognitive engagement.

My education has also complemented my lived experiences. Growing up as I did between four continents, with a mixed ethnic and no fixed cultural identity, it was natural and easy to adopt an interspecies mindfulness. My encounters with other species were never any different from my encounters with people from other nations: each caught up in their own unique struggle for existence. A few weeks ago, while rummaging for research on the topic, I came across Henry Beston’s The Outermost House wherein he says –

“[animals] are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time”

Beston, 2003

Then, just this week, Wolch (2002) echoed the same sentiment, referring to animals as “strange persons similar to outsider human groups” (p.728). 

This speaks to the power of the personal narrative. My pragmatic and spiritual experience of life has shaped my aversion to activities and modes of thinking that harm, whether directly or indirectly (structural violence), nonhuman others. However, although this accounts for my awareness of roadkill, it doesn’t sufficiently explain why I’m utterly slayed by the reality of roadkill, much more so than the equal reality of poaching, or debeaking, or wolf hunting.  

I was only really struck by this personal truth during Milena’s discussion of the intersectionality of the issue she is targeting. Milena’s focus is on wet markets in Thailand – a realm of human-animal interactions that, like roadkill, usually results in mortal injury to animals. As I’ve already stated, there was a high degree of emotionality in each of our respective discussions. The conversation surrounding Milena’s topic came to center around the social issues imbricated in the existence of wet markets in Thailand – namely that it’s the livelihood and primary source of income for most of the human actors involved. I realized that there is no commensurate economic justification at play with roadkill. If anything, cost-benefit analyses fall in favor of preventing roadkill and avoiding collisions because of the high cost of damage to individuals (including injury and death), society (roadkill removal personnel, emergency services, etc.), and the insurance industry. All told, in present day dollars, the best estimates of the total annual cost to society associated with wildlife-vehicle collisions is over 8.5 billion dollars (Defenders of Wildlife, 2011). Nor, I realized, is there any specific, culturally sensitive framework that complicates the issue or impedes its resolution, as is the case in Thailand where Buddhist principles prohibit interference in death and suffering. Considering this about roadkill raised questions about the degree of animal exploitation that our society permits. 

Here my inquiry once again becomes very personal (read insular) and I examined some of the characteristics of the immediate society I find myself in, one I intentionally chose for its rural-esque character (I left NYC for here) and for its progressive focus on degrowth and sustainability. In line with these initiatives there has been a resurgence of small animal husbandry and concerted attention to humane raising and slaughtering as well as full lifecycle care of farmed animals. This is a community that is civic minded and that cares about what’s good for the entire community. In light of this, the local incidence of roadkill (for which there are no reported numbers beyond my own recorded observations), seems regressive and hypocritical, and my community guilty of what Desmond calls a “contradictory ethics of care and dismissal” (Desmond, 2013) . It is largely as a result of this that I feel a particular hopelessness and alienation. My community appears to be violating a social contract that it purports to uphold. 

What bothers me about roadkill is not simply the devaluation of life ascribed to the liminal animals that cross our paths, but also, more sinisterly, the question of human character. Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm determined that character is inferred from behavior. What troubles me is the frame of mind from which the behavior emanates. ²There is no separating my concern for roadkilled animals from my inherent appreciation for species. Edward McCord asks in his book The Value of Species: “What kind of humanity do we want to embrace?” His focus is on the startling rate of species loss and humanity’s apparent indifference to it. There can be no hope of reversing it, he says, unless we can understand why it matters “to the public interest that we do so and how doing so ranks among competing values.” The same can be said of roadkill: there can be no hope of preventing the phenomenon of roadkill unless we understand why it matters to the public interest that we do so and how doing so ranks among competing values. But perhaps people don’t care. McCord also asks: “Would they be better off if they did care?” I do not have a clear answer for this. 

In the case of endangered species or Asian wet markets and the illicit wildlife trade many people do care but the principle of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ takes hold, which results in little direct action. The same cannot be said of roadkill. Here again, thinking about Milena’s topic prompted further introspective reflection. What is it about the visibility of roadkill that is so arresting? In Western society, exempting the small subset of humans who identify as hunters, we are not often privy to witnessing animal death. Most animal death, that which entails animals for human consumption, or slaughtered animals, takes place behind closed doors, hidden from view and protected by Ag-Gag laws. Film and culture critic Vivian Sobchack notes that there was a shift in cultural attitudes towards death following the post-Victorian period which saw a “rupture between death and daily social life” (Sobchack cited in O’Brien, 2016, p.35). Since then, the removal of death from the public sphere has resulted in “an incremental structure of death in contemporary life” (Sobchack, 2004, p.229). Natural (human or companion animal) death unfolds as an indistinct succession of movements: from health, to managed care, to hospital bed, to … . Death has become an essentially fragmentary process, “express[ing] itself as a problem of visibility” (Sobchack cited in O’Brien, 2016, p.39). Perhaps it is this visually charged material reality of death that makes roadkill so shocking. Like in film, which provides an appropriate parallel of specular engagement, the spectator is made further uncomfortable by being tasked with the ethical responsibility for his or her act of viewing.

Viewer discretion advised …

1. Sighting & Siting by Anissa Bejaoui on on Exposure ↩︎
2. Curiously, it is also Fromm who first used the term biophilia. Fromm defined the essence of biophilia as “love of life in contrast to love of death” (Fromm cited in Acampora, 2018). I remark on this with exaggerated interest because much of the indifferent behavior responsible for roadkill rings as very bio-phobic.) Bibliographic references available here: https://idofa.co/?p=126 ↩︎