This essay originally appeared in Feministische Geo-RundMail, an online publication by the working group Feminist Geographies, as part of their Feminist Fabulative Futures issue.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, wallabies are invasive pests. Introduced in the 1800s, they’ve since multiplied into a serious threat to native ecosystems, chewing through native bush and cash crops. In a world of “multispecies” relationship, what does it mean to be an invader? What forms of care, cruelty, and gendered violence emerge in the name of ecological protection? This essay—part field diary, part feminist critique—begins on a misty morning in the bush, where I joined a team tasked with researching, and trapping, wallabies.
“Wallaby Day”
At first light, the air was thick with the earthy fragrance of last night’s rain. Lush green hills rolled out around me, serene but for the low rumble of the ATV carrying me to the next trap.
We caught sight of a shadowy figure curled within the vibrant red mesh of nylon trap, probably a wallaby. Cody, the contractor, a pig hunter, and a former wallaby exporter, led the way; Two loud and reliable ATVs traced the line of nets he had set the day before along a wire fence, six strands stretched between wooden poles.[1] But we were not alone.
As we approached, a wallaby, standing next to the trapped one, retreated after a moment of hesitation. A second wallaby leaped briefly out of the bush and fell back in. Another waited quietly, just at the edge of the rain-soaked pasture that bordered the woods. “So we probably have a female here,” Brian said, pointing at that triggered trap, “It’s mating season. Those are probably all males trying to court her.”
And so began my Wallaby Day. My doctoral project on invasive species brought me to Aotearoa New Zealand. Until humans arrived just less than 800 years ago, its two large and many small islands evolved without land mammals, save three species of bats.[2] Birds and insects took over the niche ecological roles normally filled by mammals; some birds, like the iconic Kiwi, became flightless. Because of this unique and relatively recent biogeography on the grand scale of evolution, all land mammals currently present in New Zealand are effectively non-native (thus often considered invasive). Without co-evolving and competing with the introduced biota, many native species—regardless of the taxa—are vulnerable to the pressures these newcomers bring.
Challenges remain as for which species are to be eradicated, controlled, or tolerated. Cattle and sheep, for instance, are key to the country’s economy. Pigs and deer hold deep socio-cultural significance for both Māori and Pākehā settler communities. Cats and dogs, the companion species, have to be distinguished from owned to stray to feral—difficult task. Some animals like rats, stoats, and possums seem to be a lot more straightforward. In 2016, the New Zealand government launched the Predator Free 2050 initiative, aiming to eradicate these three species by mid-century: an ambitious campaign with the vision of a predator-free future, restored to the nation’s pre-human past, enforced through an arsenal of land-based and aerial trapping, poisoning, and shooting, as well as emerging genetic technologies.
As part of my research trip, I spent time as a visiting student at an environmental research institute. During my final week there, the department I worked in finally received approval for their wallaby fieldwork. They invited me to join them for a day and I jumped at the chance. The project leader and ecologist, Brian, picked me up at four in the morning and we drove south for two hours through the dark to meet Cody to pick up the wallabies at first light.
Wallabies were introduced to New Zealand from Australia in the late 1800s for hunting and private collections. Without any natural predators, their populations soon grew rapidly and were noted as a major problem by the 1940s. In 2012, they were declared “unwanted organisms” under the Biosecurity Act 1993, effectively became an invasive species. According to the Department of Conservation, wallabies “graze on pasture and browse on native plants,” “eat everything that’s at their height in our native bush, including the seedlings that make up future native bush,” “destroy productive farmland and forests, and reduce biodiversity in our iconic landscapes,” and “cost New Zealanders millions in lost farm production and the overall benefits we get from our environment.”[3]
Cody’s Stories
Cody was steady and unassuming—the kind of Kiwi Pākehā bushman that I’ve come to know. His grey hair was tousled, and he wore denim hunter’s chaps over camo pants, topped with an oilskin (a waxed jacket) that gave off a familiar musky smell. As a short East Asian female, I’ve gotten used to having to prove my worth in the bush. So when Cody asked me if I’d killed something before, I wasn’t surprised; the handful of trappers that I’ve met before him, mysteriously, all asked the same question.
As we were walking towards the triggered net, Cody recounted his days as a wallaby exporter. Around thirty years ago, wallabies were exported from New Zealand to zoos and private owners around the world, fetching between 200 and 250 NZD each. Cody was making up to 5,000 NZD a week—enough for him to trap wallabies for a month and take the next one off. “Much more than what the ecologists are paying me these days,” he remarked with a grin.
Despite having the same explosive hind legs like kangaroos, wallabies are skittish animals. Overheating, hypothermia, or muscle breakdown—a set of conditions known as capture myopathy—can kill them during handling. That morning’s urgency made more sense in hindsight. It had rained the night before, and wet conditions could quickly turn dangerous for a panicked wallaby caught in the trap.
Cody was reasonably proud of his careful ways with wallabies, and the experience hadn’t left him. Speed was key—get them into the burlap bag as soon as possible. Darkness tends to calm them. Force was expected, but fast and blunt was preferable to drawing out their fear. It was also important to acclimatise them to the shipping container—let them settle, feed them something nice. Sheep pellets were apparently a popular item. “You don’t want them to be too uncomfortable,” Cody said. Care in kidnapping a wallaby was made of small acts—practical, maybe—but they also marked a quiet refusal to let the animal’s suffering become incidental. His approach was swift, utilitarian, and oddly gentle.
When the government banned wallaby export, Cody’s fortune ended, all because of a notorious wildlife smuggler called Freddie Angell, who started trading wallabies as well after he got out of jail. Freddie however didn’t care for care. “He just shoved them in a crate and shipped them,” Cody said. “He didn’t take the time to tame them.” Many of Angell’s wallabies arrived dead. Those that survived the trip were confused and disoriented, often ramming their head to death in the process. His customers started complaining, the government got wind of it and shut the whole trade down.
As we prepared to move on to the next trap, another wallaby that had been wandering around popped up near us again; as soon as our eyes met, he darted back to the refuge of the bush. We were joking about how relentless these guys were, and there, Cody launched into another story:
“You know I once saw a female gang-raped by ten wallabies. I spotted a group of wallabies so I went to see what’s going on. One female was getting raped in turn by ten. They were all taking their turns and she was just screaming in pain! When the males were done, I drove to the female. She was so traumatised, she didn’t even try to run. I picked her up just like that and she was soaking wet. I couldn’t believe it… I could’t believe it!”
“Maybe she thought you were next,” Brian laughed.
“What did you do to her then?” I asked.
“Well, I sold her!” Cody replied.
My arms were folded across my chest—only later did I realise I’d been holding myself.
The Promiscuous Female
My Wallaby Day was part of a broader effort to refine methods for monitoring their presence and movements. Very often, after large-scale trapping or poisoning campaigns, one can hardly detect any target animal by sighting or observing droppings anymore. “But what does it mean? Does it mean that they are all gone? Or are they hiding? Just because you don’t see them doesn’t mean they’re gone. That’s why better monitoring methods need to be put in place,” Brian explained. Catching “the last one(s)” is one of the trickiest tasks in invasive species management. The stakes are high: if the remaining individuals are all male, the threat may be contained. But if one is female—worse if she is pregnant—it could undo years of eradication work; it could mean not only the prospect of re-invasion but also a fresh round of expenditure, ecological disruption, and mass killing. In this multispecies war of attrition, the female reproductive agency is a powerful curse.
Language in biology also taps into this anxiety: terms like promiscuity are used to describe a species’ ability to mate with multiple partners. Feminist scholars like Banu Subramaniam, for instance, identifies “the oversexed female” as a recurrent trope used to cast invasive species as hyper-sexual and overbreeding.[4] Metaphors are essential for science communication, but they are never innocent: interpretation of the metaphors depends on the cultural understanding that produces them.[5]
The promiscuous females incite not just biological concerns but moral panic. This is no surprise, when describing New Zealand’s unique biogeography that has been used to justify its expansive invasive species management effort, ecologist John McLennan said: “the defence of isolation for remote islands has no fallback position. It is all or nothing, akin to virginity, with no intermediate state.”[6]
Conservation, in New Zealand no less, is a very gendered space. The hunter/trapper/conservationist are often the same person, in multiple roles, shaped by a particular masculine archetype: the rugged, independent, and humorous bushman immortalised in the figure of Barry Crump[7], a popular mid-20th century author and outdoorsman whose writings defined the Kiwi ideal of the “good keen man.”[8] In this tradition, humour is not just a trait but a kind of social currency: it signals competence and downplays discomfort in the masculine world of the bush; it softens and gives cover for the brutality of the work. Reproductive processes like mating, gestation, and birth are very often the subject of a Schrödinger’s joke. When it comes to invasive pests, their criminal nature—quite literally an unwanted alien—seems to add legitimacy to the malice and righteousness of the jokes. Once, another trapper, Mike, who (jokingly) called himself the “masterbaiter,” told me stoats are pedophiles. Why? Because the males mate with both the mother and her newborns, and their ability to delay implantation—fertilised eggs could remain in the uterus for a prolonged period and implant when food is abundant—is a major factor in their rapid spread. This reproductive strategy, though wildly strange to humans, is also found in other animals including some bears and seals. It appeared that Mike was not concerned by the aptness of pedophile as an analogy, surely the oversexed females would not mind to seize the moment to make more babies, even as babies themselves! Such half-serious banter is often mediated in an ambiguous rhetorical space, where scientific terms like “delayed implantation” mingle uneasily with vernacular expressions like “pedos” and “virgins” that evoke familiar human understanding. This conceptual slippage is captured fully by the very term “invasive species” itself: at once technical and moral, diagnostic and accusatory.
Ambivalent Care, Violent Care
We picked up three wallabies on Wallaby Day, but it’s the one I never met that has stayed with me. Why was I holding myself? Why was I so uncomfortable? I kept turning over my own oxymoronic presence, both as a fellow mammalian female and a supposedly neutral observer, confronting what was to others an amusing account of rape. But was it rape? Why did Cody choose to tell the story that way? Why begin with rape? If it was rape, why didn’t he intervene? Was my discomfort the consequence of me trespassing this gendered space, one that I may leave behind at the end of a field trip? Why did he appropriate the experience of women to interpret the violation of an animal?
In trying to answer my own questions, I began to wonder whether Cody, in his own way, was also trying to make sense of what he had seen. His story felt less like a celebration of violence than an uneasy attempt at understanding. In telling of a wallaby’s violation, he reached for a anthropogenic referent—rape—to articulate what otherwise seemed incomprehensible. In this way, his account inverts what Carol Adams observes about the link between sex and meat: where animals are often recalled to make women’s suffering intelligible, here, a woman’s experience is evoked to make sense of a female animal’s pain.[9] The treatment of women becomes the language through which the wallaby’s violation is rendered legible—even imaginable.
Cody, for all his gruffness, showed a nuanced kind of care in how he handles wallabies: the logistics from traps to burlap bags to shipment required extraordinary strength, tenderness, and patience. It was care, and, yes, perhaps for financial interest, but care nonetheless.
This ambivalence—violence wrapped in care, extermination laced with gentleness—is a stark reminder of the totality of being an invasive species. In her reflection on bee culture, race, and kinship, Anna Tsing reminds us that our perceptions of nonhuman life are always mediated by our own cultural logics; even when we try to speak in their terms, we cannot escape our cultural “sense.”[10] Cody’s “violent-care” exemplifies this ambivalence where his instinctive care for animals is intercepted by the knowledge, a “common sense” even, that wallabies are pests.[11] To be invasive is to be ontologically terminal: to live only as a prelude to erasure. This negated ontology makes stories like the “rape of a wallaby” not only tellable, but comprehensible—violence becomes ambient, even amusing.
I can’t help but think the female wallaby was violated three times over; first in the act itself, second in her capture and sale, and third in the retelling. Her pain was made legible only through the language of human violence—shocking, but also perversely captivating. No one, not even those who worked closely with her kind, seemed interested in understanding her on her own terms. Her female body was not just violated, but rendered available: for sale, for interpretation, for eradication. The rationalisation of this cruelty is gendered in a disturbingly inverted way. Trappers like Cody and Mike justified their actions not simply through the logic of pest control, but more so by casting wallabies and stoats as perverse creatures—species of rapists, of incestuous males. The discursive power of an invasive species narratives plays out in the field: an animal invader cannot escape the treatment reserved for one, and the violences that follow are permitted and rendered insignificant, if not simply necessary.
The Underside of Kinship—a Future with Non-Kin
Another problem this invasive species narratives is its conceptual convenience: it shifts attention away from the reasons we kill towards the fact that we simply should and we rarely pause to ask what they are killed for. In this way, cruelty can masquerade as pragmatism—licensed by ecological urgency, reinforced by crude humour that one needs to survive the hard work in the bush.
Donna Haraway urges us to “make kin, not babies,” a call to expand relational ethics beyond reproduction, a step towards multispecies justice.[12] But what is justice to those who are decidedly non-kin—the alien, the invader, the enemy? What futures exist for species whose very being is considered terminal? If living-with and making-kin are deliberate modes of shared continuance, then what kind of relation, care, and futurity is possible with those we have cast out?
In this field story, care persists. There was gentleness in the handling, a refusal to let suffering—however trivialised—pass entirely unnoticed. But that care was riddled with contradictions. The logic of invasive species renders care for them almost illogical and laughable.
Yet I believe this entanglement offers a way forward. If violence and care are not opposites, then the task is to reorder their logic: to centre care, even when violence, like trapping and culling, are deemed necessary. After all, in conservation, violence is a means to an end—the end being the protection of those species we choose to care for. To let care take precedence over violence is to ask: what species are we choosing to protect—as kin—that we declare others disposable—as non-kin?
I offer this as a fabulative gesture, not to redeem violence in conservation, but to imagine a future where non-kinship does not automatically warrant cruelty. Consider: What are wallabies removed for? Whose space and livelihood are they invading? What ecological relationships are restored by their disappearance? These questions remain absent in this essay not by my own omission, but by their very absence in my field experience. To practise non-kinship requires what Claire Jean Kim calls an “ethics of avowal”—a willingness to own up to the difficult decisions we make, to be clear about those that we choose to stand with, and to refuse the false comfort of moral neutrality and scientific objectivity.[13] An ecological future with, and without, invasive species begins not with fantasy of a wholesale conviviality or enmity, but with the imagination—the fabulation—of other forms of responses: ones that do not hide from the violence, and lead with care.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank the editors Annabelle Müller and Alina Gombert from the Feminist Rundmail for their helpful comments. Special thanks also to Wayne Linklater for his in-depth reading and for thinking with me through my field encounters in Aotearoa New Zealand.
[1] All names in this story have been changed.
[2] One of the bat species, the greater short-tailed bat, is now believed to be extinct due to the arrival of ship rats. John Wilson n.d. “History – Māori Arrival and Settlement.” In Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. Ministry for Culture and Heritage Te Manatu Taonga. Accessed May 28, 2025.
[3] Department of Conservation. n.d. “Wallabies: Animal Pests.” Accessed April 13, 2025.
[4] Banu Subramaniam. 2001. “The Aliens Have Landed!: Reflections on the Rhetoric of Biological Invasions.” Meridians 2 (1): 26–40.
[5] Matthew K. Chew and Manfred D. Laubichler. 2003. “Natural Enemies—Metaphor or Misconception?” Science 301 (5629): 52–3.
[6] Elizabeth Kolbert. 2014. “The Big Kill.” The New Yorker, December 15.
[7] One of his books Wild pork and watercress was remade into a movie Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), written and directed by Taika Waititi. After Crump’s death, two of his four wives accused him of frequent domestic violence. See his fourth wife’s memoir: Robin Lee-Robinson. 2004. In Salting the Gravy: A Tale of a 12 Year Marriage to Barry Crump. Tauranga, N.Z: R. Lee-Robinson.
[8] Simon Nathan. 2015. ‘Conservation – a history’. In Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. Rowan Gibbs. 2001. Barry Crump: A Bibliography. Originally published in Kotare 4, no. 2, and republished by the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, Victoria University of Wellington.
[9] Carol J. Adams. 2020. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. Twentieth anniversary edition. Bloomsbury Revelations Series. London, England: Bloomsbury Academic, An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.
[10] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. 1995. “Empowering Nature, or: Some Gleanings in Bee Culture.” In Naturalizing Power, edited by Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney. Routledge.
[11] Thom van Dooren. 2015. “A Day with Crows – Rarity, Nativity and the Violent-Care of Conservation.” Animal Studies Journal 4 (2): 1–28.
[12] Donna Jeanne Haraway. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
[13] Claire Jean Kim. 2015. Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age. New York: Cambridge University Press.
*Cover image: Wallaby Day, 2025. Photo taken by the author.
[Cover Image description: An All-Terrain Vehicle (ATV) on rolling hills in a misty morning.]
Originally edited by Annabelle Müller and Alina Gombert from the Feminist Rundmail; edited and reviewed by Katie Kung and Deniz Karakas at EHN.
