Wild attachments

Wild attachments are persistent, affective ties between people and wild animals. They form when individual wild animals, populations, or species come to matter to a human person, community or culture, beyond simple preference or copresence. They develop through an interplay of nonhuman charisma, material–semiotic interactions, and the incorporation of wildlife into individual, collective, and place identities. Despite having clear sociopolitical, ecological, and management implications, these attachments have not been clearly conceptualized as a distinct phenomenon. This article establishes a conceptual framework for understanding wild attachments, integrating empirical research on human–wildlife relations with theoretical insights from animal geographies, anthrozoology, and conservation social sciences. The framework maps attachments across two dimensions: the form an attachment takes (personal, collective, or symbolic) and its focus (a wild individual, population, or species). Understanding wild attachments helps explain why certain animals inspire more care than others, and why interventions that threaten them provoke intense resistance. Human responses to animals and their management are also political, entangled with questions of identity, place, community, and belonging. Examining these attachments raises important questions about the conditions that foster them, their permanence and stability, and the ethics of their strategic use in conservation.