Disciplining desires: Understanding how bird hunters' desires shape prospects for sustainable hunting

This article highlights the importance of attending to desire in addressing the tension between hunting and biodiversity conservation. While some position hunters as conservationists and passionate stewards of nature, others assert that killing animals for fun is incompatible with conservation. Here, I use a psychoanalytic political ecology approach to move beyond these arguments by focusing on hunters' underlying desires towards the hunting process and the animals being hunted. Drawing on ethnographic research with Maltese bird hunters - including those who also express their passion via bird photography and others who seek catharsis abroad through hunting tourism - I show that while some hunters appear to be governed by their insatiable desires, others express their desires in more disciplined ways, setting limits on how much and what they hunt, or even shifting the object of desire from hunting to bird photography. Distinguishing between such disciplined desires and unrestrained desires that lead to greedy overhunting, I contend, opens the possibility, in certain contexts, of reconciling hunters' desires with pursuit of sustainable hunting. Following Lacan, I argue that when hunters take responsibility for their desires, accept the impossibility of complete fulfillment, and learn to live with this lack, sustainable hunting might be possible. Wholesale rejection or condemnation of hunters’ desires, entrenches the divide between pro- and anti-hunting groups, overlooking the potential to channel their passion for birds away from destructive violence and towards sustainability, whether hunting locally or abroad.