"YOU CAN'T IGNORE THE RAT": RAT CONTROL AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL HABITUS IN ALBERTA, CANADA.

Sociologists have increasingly focused their analytical lenses in recent years on the role of nonhuman animals in the fabric of social life. This paper builds on this work by foregrounding the generative function of culture in defining relationships with animals. Based primarily on qualitative ethnographic and interview data, it presents an analysis of Alberta, Canada's province-wide rat control program that has allowed Alberta to boast a "rat-free" status for decades. I investigate the significance of this institutional rat control effort in Alberta's cultural life, and why being "rat free" is a meaningful distinction for Albertans. I will specifically argue that Alberta's rat control program has been shaped by the cultural context in which it has emerged, one in which whiteness and conservatism are culturally preeminent and defined by a potent nativist aversion to myriad forms of outside influence. In the process, I advance a framework for understanding multispecies relationships that draws on Bourdieu's notion of the habitus, which I call the environmental habitus. Using this formulation, I demonstrate the coconstitutive relationship between material human-rat interactions and the systems of cultural meaning within which they occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]