CANE TOADS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 157

Lewis utilises many of these strategies in his cane toad films, but I would like to
suggest that in extending a 'companion species ethic' to invasive species, his films
provide a new model for understanding the complexities of the cane toad problem.
Lewis's documentaries constantly flirt with and move between perspectives that
seem to emphasise our shared animality with cane toads and perspectives that
reinforce the (necessarily human-centric) ecological idea that cane toads need to
be battled and controlled for the benefit of the environment. What saves his films
from reinforcing the ideology that invasive species are always irredeemably bad—
animals to be eradicated and killed with impunity—is his constant questioning of
expertise and his construction of animal-eye-view shots.
First, then, to Lewis's strategy of undermining the status of scientific expertise
as the foremost way of knowing animals. His decision to move away from the
expertise of scientists to the practical knowledge of ordinary people was intentional.
As Lewis argues:
I wanted to focus on the people that knew the animal best, and they weren't
necessarily scientists. Scientists generally specialise in animals and then they
narrow that specialisation down to some sort of habit or element or attribute
of the animal, whereas ordinary people are as good at observing animals as
scientists and seem to know them just as well, if not sometimes better. So in
other words the beekeepers, the people at home whose houses were invaded
by cane toads, or the people that ran them over in their cars or who smoked
them.
(Lewis, 2012)
By calling on the expertise of ordinary people, Lewis was able to represent cane
toads from a variety of different angles. In the process, he challenged the idea,
implicit in the totalising narratives of many blue chip wildlife documentaries (which
generally use voice-of-God narrations suffused with the knowledge of unseen
scientific experts) that a single perspective could adequately explain the complexity
of the issues surrounding cane toads. 13
This sense of uncertainty about the superiority of scientific knowledge is also
extended to the portrayal of scientists themselves. In contrast to the air of stiff-
backed expertise that usually accompanies media portrayals of scientists, the
biologists and other experts that Lewis interviews reveal their emotional attach-
ments to animals (including cane toads) alongside their specialist knowledge.
Perhaps the most humorous instance of this occurs in Cane Toads: An Unnatural
History when Dr Glen Ingram mimics the cane toad's mating call, illustrating not
just his intimate knowledge of cane toad behaviour but his clear admiration for the
animal. He later reprised this scene, to similar effect, in the second cane toad film.
In another scene from the original film, mammalogist Dr Michael Archer mourns
the loss of a western native cat, a research animal he also kept as a pet, which died
after misadventure with a cane toad. Looking straight down the lens, he emphatically
describes the sense of loss he felt at the death of this animal: 'Within twenty minutes