Marketing Animals - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

T
he last decade has witnessed a reinvigoration
in studies of human – animal relations. In the
field of animal geographies this development
has been particularly significant, with animals
increasingly recognised as significant players in
social worlds across diverse places and scales,
including across urban and rural locations, and
even within intimate spaces that are traditionally
the site of close human relations, such as within
home and family. Yet despite these
developments some animals continue to occupy
a fringe position in the scholarly imagination. In
particular, microscopic creatures and those that
are slimy, scaly, or with an exoskeleton have
received little attention in scholarly studies (see
Bear 2011 for discussion and an important
exception), and are a particular absence in
studies of home, which have predominately
focused on domestic pets (see for example
Franklin 2006; and Power 2008; Power 2012a).
The absence of these organisms contrasts with
the significant place that many such animals
have in everyday human activity. For example, in
the context of home these animals are typically
categorised as pests and are a key target of
homemaking activity. Killing and the death of
KILL ‘EM DEAD!: THE
ORDINARY PRACTICES OF
PEST CONTROL IN THE
HOME
In recent years critical animal geographies have pointed to dearth of stories about the small, the microscopic, the
slimy and the abject. The exoscheleton, though painfully present to anyone bitten by a bedbug or disgusted by a
cockroach, has been all but absent in dominant animal geographies. Death and the killing of animals is a further
notable absence. However, this scholarly absence is not parallel within the popular imagination, where
cockroaches, files and dust mites loom large at the centre of a homemaking war focused on the eradication of
house pests.
Text by Emma Power
136
animals – the outcome of these homemaking
practices – is a further notable absence in animal
geographies as well as within geographies of
home, a curious absence given that many of the
animals that people come into contact with in
the context of home are dead in the form of food
and clothing, or will die as a direct result of
human activities ranging from the euphemistically
termed ‘pest removal’ to the euthanasia of loved
pets (see Animal Studies Group 2006 for an
exception that does examine killing practices,
though does not examine domestic pests or
homemaking practices). In this paper I bring
attention to relations between people and animal
pests in the context of homemaking, looking at
the normalised practice of pest removal within
the home and the ways that it is represented and
promoted through advertisements in Australian
homemaker magazines.
Pest removal processes typically entail the
exclusion and killing of animals categorised as
pests. They are an essential component of
everyday homemaking practice and are a key
way that a house is maintained as home.
However, at the same time that these practices
consolidate home, in bringing practices of killing