Putting Animals Back Together, Taking Commodities Apart

Each year ARCAS Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in northern Guatemala receives 200 to 700 animals: cardboard boxes stuffed with baby parrots, crates full of lizards, monkeys with leashes ringing their necks. Many of these animals were confiscated while being smuggled for the pet trade. Seized animals represent a fraction of overall trade (legal and illegal) in and out of Guatemala and of global trade, worth tens of billions of dollars annually. Forming wild animals into companion commodities in these bio-economic circuits involves severing them from their social, ecological, and familial networks and replacing these systems with human-provided supports: food, shelter, and diversion. Many of these commodities fail because the animals die. For the few animals that are confiscated alive, rehabilitation for return to the wild is a form of decommodification attempted through various misanthropic practices—actions and routines designed to instill in animals fear and even hatred of humans—that aim to divest animals of human ties. This article draws on participant observation and interview fieldwork and socioeconomic scholarship to critically examine the dual processes of making and unmaking lively companion commodities. It suggests that commodification and decommodification are not processes of "denaturing" and "renaturing," respectively. Rather, following Haraway and Smith, they are both productions of particular natures. This article considers the differential contours and subjects of these natures, as well as their ecological and ethical stakes, concluding by suggesting that the collapse of the culture–nature dualism should not preclude acknowledgment of nonhuman animals' wildness and the violence that can attend its attrition.