INVASION OF THE CROCODILES - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 251

where crocs were previously unknown' (BBC, 2007). In terms of harm, they do
pose a threat to humans and their livestock, but their rate of increase is unlikely to
threaten ecosystems or disrupt ecosystems' services. The economic harm they cause
is more than balanced by the economic contributions of tourism and the sale of
crocodile skins and other body parts. Whereas saltwater crocodiles attack on average
four humans per year, thousands of crocodiles are killed on commercial farms
annually, and there is an annual controlled harvest of up to 60,000 eggs from the
wild. While the psychological effects of being attacked by a large crocodile can be
devastating, and the physical wounds are often serious and require prolonged
treatment, many more humans are killed by other better loved animals in the
region. An NT News article noted that, according to coroners' records, the
crocodile was the seventh most likely animal to kill you in the Northern Territory,
on a list topped by horses, cows and dogs (Watkins, 2009).
Thus, it seems that the high profile often given to the danger of crocodile
attacks, and the appeal of a film title like 'invasion of the crocodiles', are cultural
artefacts. As the only indigenous large predator on the continent, and the only one
to kill and eat humans, crocodiles are freighted with considerable symbolic baggage.
In part assisted by the popularity of the Crocodile Dundee films, and through
increased ecotourism to the region, crocodiles have become icons of the Australian
bush. Unfortunately, the wild and the domesticated are becoming increasingly
intertwined, and it is no longer easy to make distinctions between urban Australia
and the bush 'out back'.
Harriet Ritvo has drawn our attention to the messiness of our use of the term
'wildlife', arguing: 'in a world where human environmental influence extends to
the highest latitudes and the deepest seas, few animal lives remained untouched by
it. At least in this sense, therefore, few can be said to be completely wild.' She gives
the example of wolves translocated by air to Yellowstone National Park in the USA
(Ritvo, 2011: 208). Now crocodiles have lived alongside humans for millennia,
and considering the numbers of humans and crocodiles in the northern Australian
states (in addition to local residents, around 1.4 million tourists a year have been
visiting the Northern Territory since 2005/2006, and the state's population of
saltwater crocodiles surpassed 75,000 in the mid-1990s), it should be clear that
attacks on people are very much the exception. It should also be clear that
crocodiles have become, and are increasingly becoming, accustomed to living
alongside humans, and this will lead to accidents and, in isolated cases, deliberate
attacks on humans.
We should not discount the individual agency of crocodiles. After all, the
crocodile that attacks, like the one that so determinedly went after Val Plumwood
in Kakadu National Park in 1985, is the exception to the rule. It may have attacked
first because it felt threatened, and then in hunger - both rational explanations -
but it may just have been an exceptional individual that she had the misfortune to
encounter. 5 This kind of idiosyncratic behaviour is not relayed in the published
scientific literature, which is about generalisations and rules. However, it peppers
the fireside conversations of those who work with crocodiles. These are the night