Dealing with sentient surplus: Exploring greyhound rehoming in New Zealand

Abstract

Within the social sciences, attempts to move beyond dualist ontologies has seen the agencies, bodies and labours of nonhuman animals be better accommodated in the fabric of ‘the economic’ and ‘the social’, efforts that have been largely inspired by Haraway’s (2003) post-dualist, relational ontology of ‘naturecultures’. However, these efforts have produced celebratory stories of human-nonhuman entanglement, and little attention has been paid to the ways in which animals “come to bear capitalist value or not in contemporary social relations” (Collard & Dempsey, 2017, p. 78). An emergent body of more-than-human, political economic geography scholarship is seeking to address this gap by critically engaging with the metaphor of entanglement as it plays out in capitalist projects of commodification and accumulation. This thesis contributes to this body of work by uncovering the Harawayan entanglement of processes and relations that constitute the practice of ‘rehoming’ greyhounds that are surplus to New Zealand’s racing industry’s requirements. By bringing together recent scholarship on more-than-human geographies, moral economies and economic assemblages, the thesis asks: what are the processes and relations that have rendered the greyhound a commodity and subsequently problematic surplus that must be dealt with? How and to what effect is the practice of ‘rehoming’ constituted as its fix? Answers are sought through a discourse analysis of documentary material and interviews with key actors in the world(s) of greyhound racing and rehoming. The surplus greyhound emerges from this analysis as an object/subject of both commodification and care: a problematic, capitalist natureculture I call ‘sentient surplus’. It is suggested that this attempt to deal with the sentient surplus of an industry is a project of value, built and sustained by moral-economic processes that see value in this capitalist natureculture be reworked so that accumulation can continue. As such, the story of this natureculture is more cautionary than celebratory. The thesis brings natureculture and moral economy into productive alignment to show how we might better pay attention to not only the hidden contingencies of projects that produce nonhumans as economic ‘objects’, but also to those of projects that purport to deal with their messy moral entanglements.