But extinction is also averted when the species is preserved ex situ with no attention to the wider ecological community (Braverman 2015). This is ideally considered an interim solution, until reintroduction to its original habitat is possible. But, for some species, their fate becomes a permanent placement in laboratories, farms, zoos, or homes intensively managed by humans, in an environment depleted of ecological community. If people choose to invest in preserving individual animal bodies, in isolation from their historical ecological context, these animals are subjected to enormous biopolitical power, which the philosopher Thom van Dooren has called “ a regime of violent-care.” As feminist anthropologist Juno Parreñas suggests, such regimes operate through reproductive management that reinforce systemic sexual violence and essentialist notions of natural gender (Parreñas 2018). Control over large populations of wildlife also falls under similar biopolitical regimes. Geographer Catherine Oliver has named it “the opposite of extinction” (Oliver 2022).

The papers on these two panels consider the histories of species which have experienced population decline in their native ranges and of breeds that have been selected from wild species. The captive populations ensure that they are not in danger of going extinct in a traditional sense. Because of human interventions on individual bodies with tightly managed ecological infrastructures, there will be no ending. We examine the effects of this condition with papers on 6 species. The antidote to wildlife extinction can look like domestication. We ask how people understand and explain the contradictions in their management and and how can historians interpret extinction and captivity simultaneously? We also consider the costs of rescue to individual animals lives and the costs of preservation through unwildling.

Braverman, Irus. Wild Life: The Institution of Nature, (Stanford, 2015).

Jørgensen, Dolly. ”Endling, the Power of the Last in an Extinction-Prone World,” Environmental Philosophy 14 (2017): 119-138.

Marris, Emma. Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World. Bloomsbury, 2021.

Manganiello, Christopher. “From a Howling Wilderness to Howling Safaris: Science, Policy and Red Wolves in the American South,” Journal of the History of Biology (2009) 42:325–359.

Oliver, Catherine. “The Opposite of Extinction.” White Horse Press Blog, 17 May 2022.https://whitehorsepress.blog/2022/05/17/the-opposite-of-extinction-%EF%BF%BC/

Parreñas, Juno Salazar. Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. (Durham Duke University).

Sepkoski, David. Catastrophic Thinking Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2020).

Van Dooren, Thom. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University, 2014).