Between ticks and people: Responding to nearbys and contentments

Abstract

Ticks, their bodies, the affects and emotions they inspire, the diseases they potentially carry, raise questions that are different, though not unrelated, to those concerning the dogs, lab rats, chickens, or wolves more typically encountered in Animal Studies. Engaging with such questions leads us to consider a ‘geography of nearby’ that attends to the spatial, emotional, behavioural, taxonomic, historical, ecological, topographies that tie particular humans and creatures together in particular ways. As an example of how this geography of the nearby infuses material encounters, practices and theories, this paper attends to the way that ethics is framed within the Animal Studies literature. Setting the emotional registers inspired by ticks against those typically adduced in framing ethical responsibilities to other creatures we might come to recognise the politics and ethics of inclusions and exclusions which shape much literature in animal studies. To make such a move is not to criticise or dismiss work within Animal Studies but to demonstrate how the animals we think with shape the theoretical, practical and political consensus we reach. The paper concludes with a move toward ‘contentment’ as a register for encountering ticks.

Introduction

This is a response to small, blood sucking arachnids and how, as they buried themselves into my skin in search of the nourishment blood provides, they also inserted themselves in the theoretical texts I was reading. As I moved through various emotional registers in response to their presence, these small critters at this particular moment diffracted what I was reading and thinking about in the summers of 2010 and 2011. They have stubbornly stayed with me.

Ticks. Their discovery raises affect/emotional responses in humans such as disgust, repulsion and violence. They are plucked from the skin and killed in a variety of mechanical and chemical ways. This may be the limit of the tick–human interaction except they carry diseases such as TBE (Tick Born Encephalitis) and Lyme disease (Borreliosis). Such possibly life threatening diseases raise justifications for killing, but they also cause anxiety, both personal concern and national immunisation programmes. The combinations of ticks, humans, technologies, bacteria and viruses create significance and have personal, social and economic consequences.

The attention within the natural sciences focuses on either epidemiological studies of the diseases for which ticks are vectors, or studies that engage with the ecologies of different ticks.¹ Beyond the natural sciences, the focus is almost entirely on human health (there are a few exceptions e.g. Smith, 2013 or Hatley, 2011). This foregrounding of disease, however can be seen as hiding ticks and the relations they create in favour of the medical challenges they pose to humans, thereby reducing ticks to vectors of disease. Ticks therefore, along with a range of less charismatic creatures, could be considered as “invisible animals” as they are both socially out-of-sight and absent from wider academic enquiry. The diverse ecological relations of “invisible” animals however, offer much to our understandings of our more-than-human socialities; the “invisible” animals of this world – the ticks, the microbes, bacteria and fungi, indeed worms, insects, fish and rodents are far more numerous than the visible creaturely presence witnessed as pets, companions, farm/food animals, laboratory and zoo subjects/objects. Further, their presence is more marked than humans give them credit for. The challenges of the microbial – from infectious diseases to the fungal rotting of our homes and monuments – are as significant as the possibilities of mycoprotein food substances (e.g. Quorn), pharmaceuticals (e.g. insulin) or waste processing and as Hird 2009 has so clearly demonstrated bacteria are worthy of academic scrutiny without needing to reduce them to uses for or threats to human ways of being. Therefore, while there has been increasing attention in recent years to the more-than-human² aspects of our social worlds (see for example Whatmore, 2002), there has been a tendency to focus on interactions between people and large, often mammalian, animals.³ Thus academic accounts of animals often (unintentionally) engaged the more obvious kinship bonds between humans and animals like us; animals that are spatially, emotionally, behaviourally, taxonomically, ecologically nearby.

Barbara Hernstein Smith (2004) discusses the ‘ethical taxonomies’ of kin and kinds that run through popular and academic accounts of biological relatedness. Hernstein Smith notes that when the notion of ‘the human’ is unsettled there are no ‘naturally’ obvious points at which kinship stops, and therefore no rational groupings to which differing levels of responsibility apply. But within these relations, knots of significance or kinship continue to have significance in individual lives, socially and politically as animals play roles in spaces as diverse as the home, the laboratory, the plate, the wilderness or environmental policy. As a consequence of these knots of significance the emotional, political and cultural ways that humans negotiate sameness and difference becomes particularly relevant. It is through a discussion of what I term the geographies of nearby that this paper engages these negotiations and points to their implications in both theory and practice.

The aim of this paper therefore is threefold. First to highlight how a geography of nearby creates a particular animal for ‘Animal Studies’.⁴ Second, the paper will examine the role of emotions in tying these topologies of significance and kinship and consequentially discussions of ethical responsibility. Third and in response to the questions that ticks raise at the emotional, bodily and theoretical levels, the paper attempts a move towards contentment as a route for engaging ethical responsibilities with animals that are currently not seen as significant. First however, it is necessary to position ticks within the wider body of work that has emerged over recent years dealing with more-than-human perspectives.