Hunting Landscapes: a multispecies approach to the present, past, and future of hunting in the Netherlands

Summary

Hunting Landscapes develops a novel perspective on the present, past and future of hunting in the Netherlands. Many of the landscapes that we now cherish and understand as nature are inextricably related to hunting. The spatial relationships between people and animals – where ‘game’ animals belong, how we should manage and interact with them, and how hunter and hunted should act – are still shaped by these landscapes. In this thesis, three hunting landscapes, understood as hunter-animal-landscape configurations, are explored: Duck decoys and their multi-species atmospheres, red deer and wild boar management regimes at the Veluwe and pheasant co-becoming through stewardship by hunters. Combining multi-species ethnography with a genealogical methodology, this thesis brings to light the entangled histories of hunters, landscapes and animals, as well as investigates how these constitute seemingly universal understandings of ‘species’, ‘wild’ and ‘domestic’. Hunting Landscapes brings attention to the co-shaping of worlds and reminds us that contemporary human-animal-landscape relations and the ways in which we assume nature is to be conserved should not be taken for granted.