Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
image reproduced in the press is hence the product of a carefully managed process,
involving the LACS monitors stalking and videoing the hunt (but not intervening
to protect the animal), the LACS processing the video tape (selecting this particular
image and making it available for wider distribution), and then the RSPCA selecting
the image for inclusion in its advertisement (constructing a text around the image
and purchasing the space in newspapers).
The process of translation therefore raises a number of questions about the
representations being mobilised, and in particular about their 'representativeness'.
These issues were aired with regard to a second advertisement, by the IFAW (see
Figure 9.2
). Entitled 'The effect of a pack of twenty on an expectant mother,' this
contained a photograph of a dead fox with its thorax ripped open—again taken by
the LACS monitors—accompanied by text including quotes from veterinary post-
mortems. However, the implication of the headline that the photograph showed a
pregnant vixen was challenged by the pro-hunting lobby, who claimed, first, that
the photograph was of a male fox, and, second, that the photograph had been taken
at a time of year when foxes would not be pregnant. Whatever the truth of these
allegations, they reveal the dilemma of displacement inherent to representation. For
an object to be represented it needs to be translated into a mobile form, yet that
translation separates the representation from the subject such that its veracity is
always open to question. But if it is the representations which are important in
achieving outcomes, if those representations are always constructed in the image of
those who mobilise them, and if our knowledge of any subject can only ever be
partial, is the correspondence between a representation and its subject really
significant? Or should representations merely be judged by their success in enrolling
actors into a particular project? These issues are important in questioning discursive
and political representations, but they become fundamental when applied to
scientific representations, where the authority of the representation rests on the
scientist's perceived ability to construct a knowledge which replicates an objective
truth.
Take 4—the appliance of science
Science plays an enigmatic role in the hunting debate. The discourse of modernism
insists that the representation of non-humans is the province of science, and
therefore that when questions about non-humans enter the political arena it is on the
basis of scientific representations that decisions should be made. Science is presented
as a panacea which overcomes the problems of bias inherent to other forms of
representation and provides objective, factual, information from which rational
judgements can be made. Yet science fails to perform this role in relation to hunting
because the appropriate scientific knowledge does not exist. While the reports of
veterinary surgeons, biological surveys of animal numbers
