2025/07/01 by Monica Vasile · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Tourism, Volunteerism, and Development #Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration
paper · pdf · doi:10.1215/22011919-11713454
Abstract Metaphors in wildlife conservation can inspire and mobilize support for projects with uncertain and often contentious outcomes, yet they can just as easily distort conservation work itself—framing interventions in ways that misrepresent and even actively shape the realities they seek to describe. “Homecoming,” a term frequently invoked in wildlife conservation reintroductions, carries emotional weight, evoking notions of national pride and ecological belonging. However, this metaphor oversimplifies and romanticizes reintroductions, obscuring the struggle of animals against unfamiliar terrain, disease, predators, and harsh weather as well as the long-term, fraught, uncertain labor of the practitioners managing the process on the ground. This article examines the widely celebrated “homecoming” of seven endangered Przewalski’s mares, transported from Australian zoos to Mongolia’s Dzungarian Gobi Desert in the 1990s. Following their journey, the article pinpoints key moments in the reintroduction process and explores the tensions and attunements between human management action and the horses’ behavior. By tracing the mares’ biographies and those of their offspring, the article investigates how they navigate the reintroduction: how they respond to predators, interact with managers, and adapt—or fail to adapt—to harsh weather conditions. It proposes “homemaking” as a more accurate framework, capturing the ongoing, relational, and uncertain work of restoring livable spaces for near-extinct species. This perspective not only unsettles the misleading narrative but also restores agency to the mares, recognizing them as historical actors whose actions shaped the course of the process. It suggests a small change in conservation language, but one that recasts conservation as a long-term, shared endeavor binding human and nonhuman animals in mutual, if often uneven, undertakings.