van Heijgen - Becoming Pheasant Becoming Pheasant The Making, Unmaking, and Remaking of a Hunted Bird Eugenie van Heijgen Wageningen University HUMANIMALIA 15.2 (Summer 2025) Abstract: Pheasants have long been considered the most hunted bird species in the world. No other “hunting animal” has been bred, released, and shot for as long and as intensively as the pheasant. In the Netherlands, after centuries of actively shaping these birds and the landscapes in which they were hunted, the rearing and release of pheasants is now prohibited. Yet this hunting legacy still shapes how pheasants are regarded — or disregarded — in contemporary nature conservation and management. By analysing historical hunting documents, interviews, and current policies, I trace how the ecologies, relations, and biological selves that make up pheasants have been shaped by hunting practices. I argue that, because of their ambiguous status derived from this hunting past and the changing nature of contemporary landscapes, pheasants are “unmade” and rendered elusive to conservation efforts. At the same time, pheasants have found ways to re-make themselves and make a living in modern landscapes — paradoxically, still in dialogue with hunters — which might be understood as a form of multi-species stewardship. In this way, pheasants defy labels such as wild, domestic, feral, or native, and shed light on how historically formed interdependencies continue to shape contemporary efforts at biodiversity and nature conservation in Anthropocene landscapes. Keywords: conservation; stewardship; wildlife management; game animal; animal history; hunting; landscape Bio: Eugenie van Heijgen is a lecturer at the Forest and Nature Conservation Policy group at Wageningen University, where she also earned her PhD in 2025 in the Cultural Geography group. This article is part of her doctoral research, in which she examines hunting landscapes in the Netherlands as co-shaped multi-species assemblages through time and space. In her work, she explores how hunting has historically shaped human–animal–landscape relations, as well as our understanding of species, the wild, and conservation itself. Email: eugenie.vanheijgen@wur.nl ORCiD: 0000-0001-5438-7026 Copyright © 2025 Eugenie van Heijgen This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. Humanimalia 15, no. 2 (2025): 147–183. DOI: 10.52537/humanimalia.19718 mailto:eugenie.vanheijgen@wur.nl https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5438-7026 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.19718 van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant | 149 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) With all due respect, in the world of nature man- agement he is seen as an inferior species; he does not matter. It’s the same for the real bird fanatics: for them the pheasant doesn’t count. He isn’t real. He has been walking around the Netherlands for two thousand years, but he isn’t real. Interview with biodiversity monitoring expert, 29 September 2023 Introduction I am used to having encounters with pheasants. Especially where I grew up, close to the river floodplains, I would see them every day while walking our family dog. Sometimes I would spot one, usually a male, seemingly strolling casually through a field. On other occasions I was startled by a figure flying up from behind a blackberry bush, flapping noisily, accompanied by a shrill metallic crow. Female pheasants are camouflaged in shades of brown, con- trasting with the spectacularly coloured cocks. Sunlight reveals their chestnut, golden-brown, dark green and red colouring, making them appear exotic and out of place. At the same time, these beautiful birds are bound to the landscapes of my childhood. But the presence of pheasants and their appreciation in the Dutch landscape are far from self-evident. Pheasants are probably the most hunted bird species in the world.1 Active breeding, rearing, and releasing have been practiced for many “hunting animals”, but for none as long and as intensively as for the pheasant.2 Thanks to these practices, the pheasant is currently one of the most widely in- troduced birds worldwide.3 Pheasants have been bred, reared, and released for their meat and later for sport shooting/hunting. It is generally assumed that the pheasant was introduced to Western Europe by the Romans. Yet the first historical records of pheasants 1 See Hill and Robertson, The Pheasant, 123–36. 2 de Rijk, Vogels en mensen, 79. 3 Fuller and Garson, Pheasants, 2. See also Errington and Gewertz, “Pheasant Capitalism”. 150 | van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) in the Netherlands appear in the fourteenth century in connection with medieval banquets. At the wedding feast of Duchess Katherine and Duke Edward in The Hague in 1369, six pheasants were served alongside 273 rabbits. From the sixteenth century onwards, the breeding, rearing, and re- leasing of pheasants intensified.4 Hunting policies aimed to protect the species, such as bans on collecting eggs, destroying nests, or hunting for a few years after release. For example, in the province of Utrecht, protecting nests included a seven-metre radius restric- tion on mowing heather. After the French Revolution and subse- quent changes in land ownership, when the role of the aristocracy in the Netherlands had somewhat diminished, pheasant hunting became more popular. From the second half of the eighteenth cen- tury, the pheasant became an important “hunting object” through- out Europe.5 Where pheasant hunting had once been an elite privi- lege, landowners now obtained the right to hunt them themselves.6 With more hunters, the systematic introduction of pheasants took off in the Netherlands. As a result, by the end of the nineteenth cen- tury, the birds were living independently throughout the country: “Originally introduced, but now living in a completely wild state in all provinces except Groningen and Drenthe”.7 In contrast to many other countries — such as the UK, where in 2016 up to forty-seven million birds were released and fifteen million shot8 — in the Netherlands it has been forbidden to rear and release pheasants since 1998. For the first time in a long co-evolving his- tory, pheasants are seemingly left to become feral/wild. However, the centuries-long interdependency of pheasants and hunters still leaves its traces. 4 See De Rijk, Vogels en mensen, 79. 5 ten Den, Achtergronden en oorzaken, 13. 6 This transition from connecting the hunting right to ownership of the land did not go smoothly. See Bruneel and Wessels, “Verenigd maar verdeeld”. 7 “Oorspronkelijk geplant, maar thans in volkomen wilden staat levende in alle provin- cies, behalve Groningen en Drente”. Albarda, Aves Neerlandicae, 61. Unless otherwise specified, all translations are by the author. 8 Aebischer, “Fifty-Year Trends”, 6. van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant | 151 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) Scholars in the Environmental Humanities, Animal Geographies and related fields have paid close attention to the complex, entan- gled relations between human and nonhuman lives in shared land- scapes.9 Whether using concepts of (actor-)networks, assemblages,10 topologies,11 meshworks,12 or hybridity,13 they all make the ontolog- ical claim that understanding the world involves dynamic relations between organisms and environments. By drawing attention to the complex entangled lives of humans, nonhumans, and landscapes, animal geographers (and others) have challenged binary assump- tions, such as thinking in terms of strict human–animal14 and na- ture–culture15 divides. Recognizing these entanglements inevitably raises the question of what it means to be human in relation to an- imals — and highlights how animals actively figure in shaping their own lives and relations. Despite this recognition, the dominant epistemologies through which we understand, treat, and envision the conservation of ani- mals remain based on distinctions that reinforce purist views of or- ganisms as species, breeds, and/or gene pools, tied to fixed and de- lineated places of belonging. Meanwhile, the historical geographies of human–animal relations are still often understood as a trajectory towards ever greater power and control.16 This perspective reaches its epitome in the era increasingly referred to as the Anthropocene, when animal lives have generally become more tightly controlled for human purposes; instrumentalized as commodities or intensively managed in the name of conservation. The story of the pheasant illustrates this development. Throughout history, pheasants have been relocated, bred, and reared for hunting. Yet to see these prac- tices merely as expressions of human power, domination, and con- trol risks upholding human exceptionalism as the sole driving force 9 Philo and Wilbert, Animal Spaces, Beastly Places. 10 Gibbs et al., “Camel Country”; Gorman, “Therapeutic landscapes”. 11 Whatmore and Thorne, “Wild(er)ness”. 12 Ingold, Being Alive, 63. 13 Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies. 14 Plumwood, “Politics of Reason”. 15 Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture. 16 Tuan, Dominance and Affection, 7. 152 | van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) shaping landscape ecologies and nonhuman lives. Thus, it reaffirms what many argue is a major pitfall of using the term Anthropocene: the idea of humans as an all-powerful species that, as a single ho- mogeneous unit, completely dominates “our” environment and all other beings that live there. By addressing pheasant becomings and exploring their genealogies in Dutch landscapes, this paper aims to tell a broader story. I take up Erica Fudge’s call to find ways to tell animal histories that help to “reconnect with our planet, and recog- nize ourselves as inseparable rather than special; reliant upon rather than dominating”.17 Instead of seeing hunting as only the act of kill- ing to exert dominance over animal lives, what happens if we take seriously the ways in which hunters and pheasants historically in- fluenced each other’s modes of existence? In what ways has — and perhaps still is — the relationship between pheasants and hunters a “becoming with”?18 In this article, I explore the shared histories of pheasants and hunt- ers in the Netherlands, focusing on how pheasant becoming involves the agency of both pheasants and hunters. I ask how pheasants, hunters, and landscapes are “agential and active in the co-produc- tion of spatial relations”,19 by tracing the making, unmaking, and re- making of pheasants. This is important because pheasants bring into perspective more affirmative ways of envisioning Anthropocene landscapes for wildlife — that is how pheasants transition from be- ing intensively bred to finding their own ways of becoming “wild”, and how they do so in relation to hunters. Through their historical interdependency with hunters, pheasants challenge neat labels like wild, domestic, feral, and native, and complicate our ideas of care and stewardship. They also show how formal efforts to conserve na- ture and biodiversity today are impacted by historically formed in- terdependencies. In the next section, I explore the theoretical and methodological implications of understanding animal histories and futures as processes of agential co-becoming. I then describe “mak- ing pheasant” as the historical process of rearing and releasing, how 17 Fudge, “History of Animals”, 262. 18 Haraway, When Species Meet, 150. 19 Miele and Bear, “More-Than-Human Research Methodologies”, 229. van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant | 153 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) pheasants and knowledges about them are “unmade”, and how pheasants “remake” themselves in relation to hunters. I conclude by arguing that we might understand the relationship between pheasants, hunters, and the landscape as a form of multi-species stewardship. Narrating Agential Animal Histories, Presents, and Futures In the age of the Anthropocene, human–animal relations are often understood on a spectrum between full human control and wild an- imal self-making. Characterizing animals as domestic, wild, feral, na- tive, or exotic not only sets up a simple wild–domestic dichotomy, it also inscribes an ideology of human mastery. Within this spec- trum, the “domestic” animal is defined by its dependence on hu- mans, while the “wild” animal is defined by its independence from them. Yet, as Anna Tsing writes: “Through such fantasies, domes- tics are condemned to life imprisonment and genetic standardisa- tion, while wild species are ‘preserved’ in gene banks while their mul- ti-species landscapes are destroyed”.20 Indeed, the wild–domestic interface creates powerful wildlife man- agement strategies by assigning a legal status to animals depending on the spaces they occupy. For example, in rewilding schemes where large herbivores “de-domesticate” themselves and “rewild” the land- scape,21 legal tensions arise around animal welfare and biosecurity, since their protection depends upon their being under human con- trol.22 Similarly, conservation that aims to harness and promote free-living wildlife as ecological vectors in rewilding often involves intensive human management. Designating animals as “wild” does not necessarily serve them well, since it means that they become subject to wildlife management, which often involves large-scale killing.23 Arguably, legally labelling animals as wild, domestic, or fe- ral can constrain certain becomings in ways that are harmful for the 20 Tsing, “Unruly Edges,” 144. 21 Lorimer and Driessen, “Bovine Biopolitics”. 22 Lorimer, Wildlife in the Anthropocene, 97–117. 23 Kaufman and Mallory, The Last Extinction. 154 | van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) animals themselves. For example, Paul Keil traces how pigs in Aus- tralia have at various times been categorized as domestic, wild, and feral. He argues that such labelling has “un-made” their relational possibilities.24 At the same time, animal agencies may move outside legal human control by forging affective connections. As Maan Ba- rua shows, calling parakeets “feral” inscribes them into regimes of biopolitical population control rooted in nativist ideas about who belongs where — even as the animals themselves create openings for alternative and more just shared worlds.25 But not all animals have an unambiguous legal status. For example, when animals re- ceive protection as a threatened species “certain species’ lives are elevated to a political status, while the rest (initially at least, the un- listed) remain biological, or mere, life”.26 So while some animals enter biopolitical regimes when granted legal status as domestic, wild, or threatened, others remain “just” life — liminal and, perhaps to some extent, able to navigate in and out of the biopolitical realm. How animals and the ways they are perceived are made and un- made happens alongside constantly evolving, reshaping, and adapt- ing nonhuman agencies. We are all secret agents, depending on the circumstances, waiting for another being who will give us new agencies, new ways of becoming agents, actively acted upon, undoing and redoing precarious selves (through) one another. This is, since the beginning of our time as living creatures, our history: a his- tory that needs new stories, for these can be given a sequel.27 To move beyond the story of domestication as a unilateral mode of human control over “nature”,28 or the “wild” as untouched by hu- man interference,29 we need alternative stories. Building on efforts to understand relationality through the new materialist (re)turn in 24 Keil, “Unmaking the Feral”. 25 Barua, “Feral Ecologies”. 26 Braverman, “The Regulatory Life”, 20. 27 Despret, “Secret Agents”, 44. 28 Lien, Becoming Salmon; Swanson et al. Domestication Gone Wild. 29 Cronon, “Trouble with Wilderness”. van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant | 155 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) Geography, I consider the pasts, presents, and futures of human–an- imal assemblages to consist of ongoing collaborations, interdepend- encies, and co-becomings of humans and animals. So “instead of being some thing, life forms are constantly evolving, constantly be- coming, shifting in their composition”.30 This means that if “human nature is an interspecies relationship”,31 the same can be said for more-than-human natures. The notion of “species” therefore should not be taken to refer to fixed animal beings defined in terms of gen- otypes, static physical forms, or regular behavioural patterns, but rather to “ecologies of becomings”.32 When a species goes extinct, it is not the pure unit itself that we should mourn, but rather the loss of “vast intergenerational lineages, interwoven in rich patterns of co-becoming”.33 Becoming animal, however, entails more than interspecies interac- tions. The environment co-produces as well: “[O]n the one hand, the milieu ‘is taking’ the animal: it affects it, it captures it, it effectuates its power to be affected; on the other hand, the milieu does not ex- ist outside the ‘grasping’ to which it is submitted: it exists through the way that a given animal confers on this milieu the power to af- fect it.”34 This means that the affordances the landscape provides for animals to thrive and survive35 are multilateral; what matters to animals within “sensory bubbles” or Umwelten is based not only on a species’ or subject’s perceptual lifeworld but also shared and co-produced by atmospheres.36 As such, landscapes are “overlap- ping projects of world-making”.37 Hunting forms a distinct genre in human–animal–landscape entan- glements and becomings. The practice has been described as a cul- tural performance involving a close, personal engagement between 30 Greenhough, “Vitalist Geographies”, 38; original emphasis. 31 Tsing, quoted in Haraway, When Species Meet, 19. 32 Lorimer, Wildlife in the Anthropocene, 7. 33 Van Dooren, Flight Ways, 12. 34 Despret, “Secret Agents”, 38. 35 Gibson, “Theory of Affordances”. 36 Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt; van Heijgen et al. “Landscape Is a Trap”. 37 Tsing, “Dream of the Stag”, 14. 156 | van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) hunter and animal.38 Hunters often speak of experiencing a certain state of being, a sense of becoming part of nature by actively attun- ing themselves to the animal. But hunters do not form a relationship with just any animal: “It must be a special sort of animal that is killed in a specific way for a particular reason”.39 What makes these animals “special” seems to be related to what Jamie Lorimer calls the “affec- tive charisma” of conservation species, such as behaviour and physi- cal appearance.40 Additionally, their cultural identity or status, as well as the moral justifiability of their death in terms of ecological balance or food provision, play a role in making an animal huntable. Historically, the preservation and reservation of special animals for hunters can be understood as an early form of conservation.41 From their inception, Western conservation and management efforts, both at home and abroad, have been closely tied to hunting. The spatial relationships between hunter, animals, and the environment they inhabit — whether in Europe, North America, or elsewhere — are often framed as a form of care, identified as stewardship.42 This un- derstanding has crystalized into management practices directed towards particular species.43 Aldo Leopold, a key figure in inspiring environmental stewardship with his land ethic, originally proposed that stewardship as wildlife management entails: (1) predator control (though he later opposed wolf hunting); (2) reserving game spaces; (3) artificially replenishing game species; and (4) habitat controls.44 However, Leopold’s initial ideas about wildlife management were not entirely new. Elite hunting traditions in Western Europe already involved appointing caretakers for such tasks. In Germany, this type of care is known as Hege, referring to caretakers’ practices such as feeding animals in enclosed spaces. The term encompasses both a type of space (Wildgehege) and an ethos of managing that space 38 Marvin, “A Passionate Pursuit”, 46–60. 39 Cartmill, View to a Death, 29. 40 Lorimer, “Nonhuman Charisma”. 41 Taylor, American Conservation. 42 Von Essen and Allen, “Killing with Kindness”, 183. 43 Holsman, “Goodwill Hunting?”. 44 Gigliotti et al. “Changing Culture of Wildlife”, 79. van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant | 157 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) and the wildlife within it. When Leopold published his Sand County Almanac in 1949, he extended his notion of stewardship for particu- lar game species to an ethic of care for nature as a whole, building on work in the emerging field of ecology.45 This understanding of na- ture as a system or complex process has had consequences for how the role of hunters in “nature” is viewed today: hunting for wildlife management and ecological stewardship are often assumed to go hand in hand.46 For example, in some cases, population control by hunters is seen as necessary to protect ecosystems from excessive pressure by certain wildlife populations.47 Yet, as Robert Holsman ar- gues, seeing hunters as ecosystem stewards should not be consid- ered self-evident: in relation to broader ecological objectives, hunt- ers’ primary focus remains with the animals they hunt. At the same time, the appropriation of space, related practices of care and particular hunting traditions are bond up with an elitist vi- sion of exclusive land use, one that distinguishes hunting as desira- ble and legitimate from poaching, which is cast as unregulated and assumed to be unsustainable forest use by local communities. As such, stewardship has been critiqued for reaffirming human control and dominance over both human and animal lives. Stewardship, as it emerged from Christian theology, bestows upon humans both the privilege and the moral responsibility to take care of God’s creation.48 In this way, stewardship perpetuates an anthropocentric and Chris- tian-humanist worldview in which huntable animals are objectified as natural resources. Especially in a North American context, it has also been seen to reflect a colonial, patriarchal ideology that is at odds with Indigenous perspectives.49 Despite these critiques, scholars have begun to embrace the mul- tiple and often ambiguous meanings of stewardship, pointing to other ways it can be understood. Thus, Johan Peçanha Enqvist et 45 Mathevet et. al., “Concept of Stewardship”. 46 Holsman, “Goodwill Hunting?”. 47 Van Heijgen et al. “Haunted by Hunting”. 48 Callicott, Thinking Like a Planet, 167. 49 Eichler and Baumeister, “Hunting for Justice”; Luke, “Violent Love”. 158 | van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) al. identify care, knowledge, and agency as three dimensions that connect the discourse on stewardship in the academic literature: as an ethic, a motivation, an action, and an outcome. They argue that care is an underrepresented aspect in stewardship research, even though it can help us “identify and understand how more sustaina- ble human–nature relationships can emerge and persist over time”.50 This also means that if we understand stewardship as an embodied and practiced expression of care, we should pay attention to the ex- tent to which naturecultures51 foster interdependence, creativity, and other-than-human agencies and becomings — all while critically en- gaging with colonial and religious legacies. The identities of hunters as stewards or caretakers can therefore be seen as co-produced by the animals they hunt, and vice-versa — per- haps modelled on the way flowers gain agency “through becoming enabled to make their companion pollinators be moved by them, and this is how the latter could themselves be agents, through be- coming enabled to make the flowers able to attract them, and in turn to be moved by them”.52 We cannot draw one-to-one parallels between the bee–flower relation and that of hunter and pheasant, but it does appear relevant to consider the at least potentially pro- cessual, relational, and mutual — if not symmetrical — character of these practices of care. To understand the shared histories of pheasants and hunters — and the ways in which, over centuries, pheasants have been “made” pheasant — I have conducted a review of Dutch hunting literature dat- ing from 1895 until 1995. This includes a full review of all articles on pheasants published in De Jager (“The Hunter”, formerly De Neder- landse Jager), the official magazine of the Royal Dutch Hunters’ As- sociation (formerly the KNJV), using the keywords “fazant” (pheasant), “haan/hen” (cock/hen), and “kweken” (rearing). I have also reviewed most Dutch hunting handbooks published in this period, focusing on how, historically, pheasant bodies and behaviours have been moved 50 Enqvist et al., “Stewardship as a Boundary Object”, 26. 51 Latimer and Miele, “Naturecultures?”. 52 Despret, “Secret Agents”, 40. van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant | 159 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) and shaped by hunters. To understand the contemporary situation of pheasants, I have also gathered data from more recent newspa- per articles, policy documents, and websites of the Hunters’ Associ- ation and SOVON (Stichting Ornithologisch Veldonderzoek Nederland, the Dutch Centre for Field Ornithology). I have conducted several semi-structured interviews with hunters and exchanged emails and phone calls with SOVON, the FBE (Fauna beheereenheid, or Fauna Man- agement Unit) Gelderland, and the Hunters’ Association. Even though these methods focus on written and spoken texts, the pheasant has always been present in this landscape — both in my daily bicycle rides to Wageningen and in countless field trips to estates and other hunt- ing landscapes over the years. Making Pheasants There is no game species over which the hunter can exert as much influence as the pheasant. Mainly through artificial prop- agation, but also through feeding and protection. This “human connection” does not mean that pheasant hunting is in any way inferior to hunting other game. If that were so, generations of excellent hunters and game wardens here and elsewhere would never have concerned themselves with pheasants, for their interest was never in “chickens”.53 What a pheasant is and how they are envisioned has historically been shaped by this “human connection”. According to the above, what makes a pheasant a good game bird is their ability to respond to a variety of manipulations, including rearing and releasing. Even though these processes are very similar to the keeping of chickens, what sets pheasants apart is their ability to turn “wild” again. Thus, while for chickens, connections with humans are comparatively one- sided, in the case of pheasants, the “human connection” results not 53 “Er is geen wildsoort waarop de jager zo’n invloed kan uitoefenen als de fazant voor- namelijk door de kunstmatige vermeerdering, maar ook wel door het voeren en de be- scherming in het algemeen Deze ‘mensverbondenheid’ betekent niet dat de jacht op fazanten onder hoeft te doen voor die op enig ander wild Ware het anders dan zouden generaties van voortreffelijke jagers en jachtopzichters zich hier en elders niet met fa- zanten hebben opgehouden, want naar ‘kippen’ ging hun belangstelling niet uit.” Car- touche, “Fazanten”, 813. Quoted in Dahles, Mannen in het groen, 209. 160 | van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) only from human manipulations but also from the ability of these animals to shape this connection themselves. Until the ban on re- leasing pheasants in 1998, pheasants in the Netherlands — as is still the case elsewhere — were highly manipulated into becoming hunt- able animals. In what follows, I will outline how the pheasant came to be a “perfect” huntable bird and how this has historically been enacted in relations with hunters as part of shared lifeworlds from the late nineteenth century through to the late twentieth century. Rearing At the end of the nineteenth century, the pheasant became a desir- able game bird. With the decline of many other hunted birds (such as partridge) due to intensified agricultural land use, the ability of pheasants to adapt quickly to changing landscapes made them a blessing for hunters. Rearing pheasants was seen as the most ef- fective way to secure a large huntable population within a relatively short time (one to two years). Because the entire process from rear- ing to release is time-consuming and costly, it was initially done mostly by elite landowners whose estates were large enough to hire a dedicated game keeper appointed with the task of breeding pheas- ants. The aim of rearing was to introduce and “civilize” (inburgeren) the pheasants within these private domains.54 Over time, however, this changed: in 1957, one hunter noted that he “no longer [consid- ered the pheasant] the ‘elite bird’ it once was; one finds breeding flocks and sees attempts at rearing and release by owners of both large and small fields, in both guarded and unguarded hunts”.55 Pheasant chicks could be purchased at various ages (from one year old and older), or bred in enclosed pens, in so-called breeding groups (see figure 1). In these settings, the practice of captive rearing was legitimized by characterizing pheasant hens as poor mothers, incapable of raising many chicks on their own. In captivity, pheas- ant hens were considered “unreliable broody hens” (onvertrouwbare 54 Fürst, “Het inburgeren van den fazant”, 1. 55 “Het is niet meer de ‘élite-vogel’ van vroeger; men treft foktomen aan en ziet broeden uitzetpogingen bij bezitters van grote en kleine velden, in bewaakte- en onbewaakte jachten.” Cartouche, “ITBON”, 104. Fig. 1 Watercolour and pencil illustration of a pheasant breeding pen or “foktoom”, by the author. Inspired by a drawing by Rien Poortvliet in A. H. M. Jurgens, Kennis en praktijk van de jacht op waterwild, klein wild en schadelijk wild (1968), 101. 162 | van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) broedsters) because of their shyness towards humans.56 Wild pheas- ants were similarly considered “bad mothers”: “She lays her eggs carelessly in highly primitive nests, often in places that are plainly visible to all. Her way of brooding and caring for the young is like- wise so careless and inadequate that, out of fifteen to eighteen eggs, she raises only four to seven young.”57 The writer concludes that “[a]ll these circumstances make it necessary to raise pheasants as young domestic poultry and in many cases the hen must be kept confined and her eggs hatched under a foster mother.”58 So, as soon as the pheasant hen had laid her eggs, they were re- moved to be hatched by someone else. Which bird would make the best foster mother for pheasant eggs was the subject of lively debate and experimentation. Various chicken breeds were suggested as sur- rogates. Bantam hens could hatch eleven to thirteen eggs, while larger black chickens might hatch up to twenty-one.59 Especially hunters who would rear a small number of pheasants made use of chickens. “Artificial mothers” (incubators) were also introduced, but not all hunters were in favour of this. Keeping pheasant chicks warm by a lamp, without social interaction from a living mother, was by some believed to produce inferior birds: “chicks raised under a lamp are neither wild nor tame, I would almost call them ‘ordinary’. “They respond differently, less personally”, while chicken-hatched chicks would exhibit similar behaviour to their surrogate mother: “with a calm hen, I get calm chicks”.60 56 Ericus, “Jachtsport”, 438. 57 “De Wilde fazantenhen is een slechte moeder. Zij legt haar eieren op zorgelooze wijze in hoogst primitieve nesten, op plaatsen, die ieder gemakkelijk in ’t oog vallen. Haar manier van broeden en de jongen verzorgen is eveneens zoo zorgeloos en onvolkomen, dat zij, van 15 tot 18 eieren, slechts 4 tot 7 jongen groot brengt.” G., “Engelsche Fazanterieën”, 1. 58 “Al deze omstandigheden zijn oorzaak van de noodzakelijkheid, om de fazanten als jong tam plumvee op te kweeken en in tal van gevallen moet men de hen op-gesloten houden en de eieren, die zij legt, door een pleegmoeder laten uitbroeden.” G., “Engel- sche Fazanterieën”, 1. 59 Jurgens, Kennis en praktijk , 103. 60 “Ze reageren anders, minder persoonlijk. […] [B]ij een rustige kloek heb ik rustige kui- kens. De kuikens onder de lamp zijn noch wild, noch rustig; ik zou haast zeggen, ‘ge- woon’.” Zandhaas, “Betekent het uitzetten”, 236. van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant | 163 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) Release There are differing views on the best way to release pheasant chicks. Some authors suggest keeping the chicks in a large coop until they are eight weeks old before releasing them in the forest. Others ad- vise releasing them younger, at around four weeks, under the care of a turkey hen. Turkeys are considered too heavy and “careless” to hatch pheasant eggs, but they are praised as excellent nannies. Ac- cording to an article in the Revue der Sporten from 1909, four-week- old chicks could be brought into a remote forested area with their turkey foster mother, who would fiercely defend “her” chicks from predators if a dog or a cat slipped past the gun of a forester or game keeper. She would also teach the chicks to forage for food and roost with them high up in the trees. Once the chicks could take care of themselves, the turkey hen would leave them and “return home” (komt naar huis terug).61 Others recommended releasing the chicks at ten to twelve weeks, once they could “stand on their own feet” (op eigen benen kunnen staan).62 Ultimately, the aim of releasing was to “rewild”63 or make wild (ver- wilderen) the pheasant chicks, which means that the pheasants have to learn how to navigate the landscape and behave as true game birds during the hunt. Several factors are considered impor- tant. Pheasants are described as having a “natural tendency to roam” (aangeboren trekdrang),64 meaning that they move away in search of better living conditions if their place of dwelling is lacking. Landown- ers therefore tried to motivate pheasants to stay within their hunt- ing grounds, given the effort and expense invested in raising them. A. H. M. Jurgens recommends gradually releasing small groups of pheasants from a coop in a forested area, feeding them in the same place every day. So long as some pheasants are still inside the coop, the rest are unlikely to stray far. Once all of them have been released, 61 Ericus, “Jachtsport”, 439. 62 Jurgens, Kennis en praktijk, 109. 63 Not to be confused with the discourse of “rewilding” landscapes through (re)introduc- tion of keystone species to promote ecological processes. Here it refers to the process by which individual animals such as pheasants are “made” wild again. 64 Jurgens, Kennis en praktijk, 93. 164 | van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) the daily feeding routine would teach the birds to view the forest as a safe haven — ideal for roosting in trees and feeding at specific times. In this way, pheasants “know the way, as it were, and easily return to the place of release in autumn” (kennen zij als het ware de weg en keren in het najaar gemakkelijker naar de plaats waar zij zijn uitge- zet terug). Thus, releasing pheasants in the forest helps to manipu- late and predict their behaviour, ensuring that they are “where the hunter wants them” (waar de jager hen wil hebben) when hunting season comes around.65 This might explain why, even though — as I will explain later — pheasants do not necessarily exclusively inhabit forests, hunting literature often refers to them as “forest pheasants”. Hunting In pheasant hunting, the place where the hunter wants the pheasant to be is related to the flight behaviour of the bird and the method of hunting. This is peculiar, as pheasants are taxonomically classi- fied as a ground bird (Ratites): “They are good on their feet and can, if they wish, outpace almost any other fowl; but they fly poorly and do so only when absolutely necessary”.66 Nevertheless, hunters prize pheasants for their flight: they can reach speeds of up to 95 km/h (59 mph) and “their method of flying requires powerful wingbeats, producing a flapping sound, especially when taking flight; but once the pheasant has reached a certain height, it flutters little and shoots forward rapidly in a downward glide with outstretched wings and tail, as if on an inclined plane”.67 Pheasants were traditionally trapped or hunted with falcons, but with the advent of firearms, they became popular quarry for shoot- ing. In the UK, this type of hunting even developed into its own 65 Jurgens, Kennis en praktijk, 109. 66 “Zij zijn goed ter been en kunnen, als zij willen, in het hardloopen bijna met ieder an- der Hoen wedijveren; zij vliegen echter slecht en doen dit daarom slechts in den uiter- sten nood.” Kalsbeek, Fazant, pauw, kalkoen en parelhoen, 2. 67 “Hun wijze van vliegen vereischt krachtige vleugelslagen en gaat daarom vooral bij het opvliegen met een klappered geluid gepaard; wanneer echter de Fazant eens een ze- kere hoogte bereikt heeft, fladdert hij weinig, maar schiet met uitgespreide vleugels en staart als van een hellend vlak in benedenwaartsche richting snel vooruit.” Kalsbeek, Fazant, pauw, kalkoen, 2. van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant | 165 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) practice known simply as “shooting”. This practice is all about ma- nipulating and predicting the flight behaviour of the bird. As such, the “poor” flying skills of the pheasant make it an excellent game bird for shooting. Antonius Hermans described the essence of shooting as “the art of bringing them up, over, and down”.68 “Bringing them up” means flushing the pheasants into the air. In every hunting method, pheasants are startled into flight. This can be done by a dog flushing birds from cover, while a single or a small group of hunters follow behind. In driven shoots, so-called “beat- ers” walk through the landscape, systematically driving birds toward waiting hunters. Ideally, throughout the drive (drift), individual pheas- ants should be continuously made to fly up. “Bringing them over” means manipulating the birds so that they “present themselves” in the appropriate way. In general, high flying pheasants are desired. According to J. Antonisse, the best condi- tions for high flying pheasants are created in driven shoots: “this re- ally gives the game the opportunity to show its worth”, and, he adds, “the same goes for the guns”.69 To achieve this, a pheasant must: (a) be in prime condition; (b) be flushed at the right moment; (c) have clear space to gain height easily; (d) have a target cover to aim for; and (e) be able to spot the guns in time once airborne, and attempt to soar over them.70 Evidently, the landscape plays an important role in producing high flying birds. Ideally, pheasants fly over open ground between coverts, making them accessible targets. Pheas- ants tend to look for cover in places they are familiar with, and this knowledge allows hunters to predict flight paths. As such, the land- scape is much more than a backdrop to the hunting scene; it plays an active role in the process of becoming a huntable pheasant — and in the knowledge and skills required to be a good hunter. Finally, “bringing them down” is about the skill of the shot. Hunters who shoot pheasants while they are still flying low are frowned upon 68 Hermans, Jagerswoordenboek, 104. 69 “Hierbij krijgt dit wild pas echt goed de kans te laten zien wat het waard is. Overigens geldt dit evenzeer voor de geweren.” Antonisse, De jacht in Nederland, 133. 70 Antonisse, De jacht in Nederland, 133. 166 | van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) and considered to go against the hunter’s ethos. Instead, pheasants should be allowed time to climb and pick up speed. Meanwhile, birds that refuse or fail to climb are dismissed as “flutterers” (flodderaars). During the hunt, hunters are referred to as “the guns”. They are ex- pected to be able to distinguish cocks from hens, as the latter must often be spared. Naturalizing Pheasants The sparing of hens suggests that hunters were keen to encourage natural breeding, rather than having to rely on rearing and release. Indeed, at various times pheasants have lived all across the Neth- erlands in a fully wild state. In many cases, rearing and release were intended as a starting point from which pheasants would (re-estab- lish) wild populations: “these semi-wild pheasants sometimes vol- untarily leave the forests in which they were hatched and raised, to settle independently, live entirely wild all year round, breed, multi- ply, and form colonies that can survive without human help”.71 The process was literally referred to as inburgeren — “naturalization”, in the sense of granting citizenship to the hunting field. This naturalization was, however, actively encouraged by hunters. Various measures were taken to ensure annual repopulation of wild pheasants within the hunting grounds. First, the environmental con- ditions had to be right. To this end, extensive knowledge exchange took place in the hunting literature about the pheasants’ preferred habitat. This literature sees the pheasant as “a cross between for- est-fowl [woudhoen] and field-fowl [veldhoen], needing both woods and open country to thrive. It needs the flat field, which in summer offers a desirable place to stay with good cover and more abundant food, and the forest, which provides shelter in the winter and the roosting places overnight”.72 This suggests that pheasants are not 71 “Intusschen verlaten deze halfwilde fazanten somstijds vrijwillig de bosschen, waarin zij uitgebroed en opgegroeid zijn, gaan zich zelfstandig vestigen, leven het geheele jaar door volkomen in den wilden staat, telen voort, vermenigvuldigenn zich en vormen koloniën, die zonder hulp van den mensch kunnen bestaan.” Kalsbeek, Fazant, pauw, kalkoen, 6. 72 “De fazant nu staat tusschen deze twee groepen in: hij houdt het midden tusschen woud- en veldhoenders en heeft voor zijn gedijen behoefte zoo- wel aan bosch als aan vlak. Hij heeft het vlakke veld noodig, dat hem in den zomer een gewenscht verblijf met van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant | 167 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) “tied to any particular type of landscape but feel equally at home in polders, forests, or dunes”.73 Second, when the environmental con- ditions were favourable, hunters took further measures to support existing populations of wild pheasants. One such was the creation of so-called “wild pheasantries”. These were areas planted with trees and scrubs, where tame males were introduced to attract hens and where the birds would be fed and protected from predators, both by the physical layout and the active culling of predators in an around these preserves. Another common practice, likely centuries old, was to protect pheasants from harsh winters by catching and keeping them in an attic or coop until spring, when they were released to breed.74 This was especially popular on estates.75 Not everyone ap- proved, however: at the turn of the twentieth century, one hunter argued against providing winter shelter: “He [the pheasant] gladly makes use of it, which softens him up, to his own detriment and that of the landowner. By nature, the pheasant is a hardy bird”.76 The pheasant’s “nature” and genetic disposition were actively ex- perimented upon. Despite pheasants’ adaptability to a variety of landscape types, some hunters believed not all pheasants were equally suited to every biotope. Jurgens distinguishes three kinds of pheasant in 1968: (1) “forest pheasants” (boschfazanten), smaller birds whose cocks lack the white neck ring and who “do” best in low-lying terrain; (2) “Mongolian” or “Formosa” pheasants, also known as “ringnecks”, which are larger and do have a white neck ring. These were introduced to Europe in the nineteenth and twenti- eth centuries, and are better suited to higher ground;77 and (3) “Ten- ebrosus” pheasants, which are dark birds, thought to be a sponta- goede dekking en rijkelijker voedsel biedt, en bosch, dat hem beschut in den winter en hem gelegenheid schenkt, ’s avonds te boomen en er den nacht door te brengen.” Fürst, “Het inburgeren van den fazant”, 1. 73 Dam, Jagen, 56. 74 Kalsbeek, Fazant, pauw, kalkoen, 6. 75 De Rijk, Vogels en mensen, 79. 76 “Hij maakt er evenwel gaarne gebruik van, hetgeen hem tot zijn eigen schade, en die van den jachteigenaar, verweekelijkt. Van nature is de fazant een harde vogel.” G., “En- gelsche Fazanterieën”, 1. 77 Jurgens, Kennis en praktijk , 95. 168 | van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) neous mutation of the “forest pheasants” originating in England in 1888. These are the author’s favourite. He believes they fly better, taste better, are “definitely better mothers” (beslist betere moed- ers), and they do well in his hunting grounds which are marshy with reeds and willows.78 With the introduction of these different breeds and their supposed variety of characteristics in terms of behaviour, appearance, and bi- otope choice, ensuring breed purity became of interest. Especially outside the Netherlands, pheasants were carefully bred to main- tain a pure stock. The Dutch literature shows a slight preference for “pure” strains, but no real effort seem to have been taken to keep them so — all varieties could interbreed and produce fertile offspring, meaning that wild pheasants would all inevitably become “bastards”. Yet this “impurity” was not necessarily always considered a down- side: crossbreeds were usually considered “strong, fertile, and well adapted to their environment”.79 Accordingly, becoming a natural- ized pheasant in the Netherlands also meant becoming a genetic hybrid, adapted and attuned to landscapes informed by its ances- tral lineage as a hunting animal. The ability to naturalize and to turn “wild” also gave pheasants a liminal legal status between domestic and wild. Arguably, a hand- reared pheasant could be classed as livestock, but once released they would become wild game animals. If recaptured alive, for ex- ample to be kept in an attic during a cold winter, they would revert to livestock again. In the UK, where rearing and releasing still occur, this legal grey area works in favour of the hunting elite, since only animals classified as wild may legitimately be hunted. The ambiva- lent nature of the pheasant highlights a political and legal tension between the wild and the domestic, as George Monbiot wryly re- marks: “the pheasant’s properties of metamorphosis should be a rich field of study for biologists: even the Greek myths mentioned no animal that mutated so often”.80 78 Jurgens, Kennis en praktijk, 97. 79 Antonisse, De jacht in Nederland, 133. 80 Monbiot, “The Shooting Party”. van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant | 169 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) As this section has shown, the “human connection” between pheas- ants and hunters has historically been characterized by elaborate manipulations to create perfect huntable birds and by shaping land- scapes in which they can be brought “up, over and down”. And it is this historical connection that entangles pheasants in processes of unmaking, as the next section will show. Unmaking Pheasants Thanks to the use of arguments that are not always entirely fair — yet eagerly listened to in our anti-hunting society — we now live in an era in which the release of pheasants is banned. There are even many activists who openly state that they would not regret it at all if the pheasant were to disappear completely from the Netherlands, as this would be a neat way to get rid of a troublesome exotic species.81 The ban on rearing and releasing pheasants, introduced in 1998, ex- posed conflicting values. Naturalists regarded the bird as exotic, while hunters worried that pheasants were being driven to extinc- tion for precisely that reason. Although pheasants are classed as naturally occurring wild bird species under the Dutch Birds Direc- tive, to this day “many bird watchers don’t really take the pheasant seriously. They see the bird as an exotic descendant of captive-bred birds that were released en masse for hunting well into the last cen- tury, and as a hybrid — a mix of various subspecies and variants from their original range, from the Balkans eastward deep into Asia”.82 Un- derstanding pheasants as exotic frames them as out of place in the Netherlands, and their presumed hybridity renders them unnatural. 81 “Dankzij het gebruik van lang niet altijd zuivere argumenten — waarnaar in onze anti- jachtmaatschappij zo gretig wordt geluisterd — leven wij thans in het tijdperk van het verbod op het uitzetten van fazanten. Er zijn zelfs legio aktievoerders die er rond voor- uitkomen dat zij het geenszins zouden betreuren wanneer de fazant geheel uit Neder- land verdween, omdat dat het een mooie opruiming van de storende exoot zou vor- men.” Huygen, “De overbodige fazant,” 539. 82 “Veel vogelaars nemen de fazant niet echt serieus. Ze beschouwen de vogel als een exoot, nazaat van gefokte vogels die tot ver in de vorige eeuw massaal werden uitge- zet als jachtwild. Een bastaard, bovendien, een mix van diverse ondersoorten en vari- anten uit hun oorspronkelijke woongebied, van de Balkan oostwaarts tot ver in Azië.” Urlings, “Mens en Natuur”. 170 | van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) As exotic and hybrid birds, their state of being and place of belong- ing are denaturalized. This delegitimization can be understood as the legacy of a biotic nativism that is deeply embedded in nature management.83 While it may appear to be just the view of a handful of birding enthusiasts, this perspective deprives pheasants of value and interest, which, in turn, can influence policymaking. Informa- tion about the conservation status of pheasants in the Netherlands is based on counts by volunteer bird watchers, coordinated and as- sessed by SOVON, the Dutch Centre for Field Ornithology. This organ- ization has the aim to track the numbers and distribution of birds in the country. The results of SOVON’s counts inform nature policy and management. This means that policy effectively depends on infor- mation gathered by people who may have little interest in pheas- ants: for some counters, the pheasant quite literally does not count. Since the affective relationships produced through counting prac- tices are “a crucial element of knowing as well as managing wild an- imals”,84 pheasants, as underappreciated birds in the world of bird- ing, seem to occupy a blind spot. SOVON do still report on the conservation status of pheasants in the Netherlands. According to SOVON, pheasant populations are not do- ing well. Whether an animal population has a sustainable future in the Netherlands is determined in a so-called staat van instandhou- ding (conservation status). This assessment considers the animal’s distribution, population size, habitat (quality and extent), and fu- ture prospects. In 2022, SOVON assessed the conservation status of pheasants as “moderately unfavourable” (matig ongunstig).85 Ac- cording to their 2023 report, “the species is generally unable to sus- tain itself independently”. That the pheasant population might even- tually settle into small regional groups is considered “plausible, but not certain” (aannemelijk, maar niet zeker).86 Seemingly, the hunt- er-pheasant connection makes it difficult to define whether they live in a natural state: “Due to the strong human influence on the popu- 83 Barua, “Feral Ecologies”. 84 Boonman-Berson, Rethinking Wildlife Management, 3. 85 SOVON, “Staat van instandhouding”, 2. 86 SOVON, “Factsheet Fazant”, 5. van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant | 171 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) lation in the past, but also now in the border regions and probably also locally, there is probably no question of a natural situation”.87 The report also notes that some illegal releasing still occurs. Para- doxically, current understandings of how pheasants are faring repro- duce a “politics of purity”88 in which their naturalness and wildness are defined by their distance from humans — a wildness untainted by hunters. Meanwhile, to minimize pressure on the remaining pop- ulation, the national bird protection organization Vogelbescherming advocates a total ban on pheasant hunting. Unmaking is a “process that disregards how being exists through interactions with others”.89 Arguably, interactions between hunters and pheasants — from their historical introduction to the more re- cent introduction of sub-species by hunters — have rendered them exotic and hybrid. Because of their association with hunters, pheas- ants are “unmade” into unnatural beings. As a result, they are not seen as charismatic or even relevant conservation species in the Netherlands. This low status is probably best understood in relation to the species they are emphatically not: partridges. Partridges share a very similar history. They too have been kept, bred, and released for hunting, supposedly even since Roman times. Unlike pheasants, however, partridges are regarded as native. Due to rapidly declining numbers from intensive farming, hunting partridges was banned in 1998. Today, specialists count and register partridges and in some ar- eas also ring them for monitoring. Subsidies are provided to nature organizations to create landscapes specifically for partridges. Pheas- ants benefit indirectly from these landscape changes, but there are no subsidies specifically for enhancing pheasant habitats, nor are they monitored in the same way. In the Netherlands, pheasants now largely slip through the net of formal conservation efforts. While the historical and ongoing interactions with hunters make pheasants uninteresting as conservation subjects, hunters them- selves are arguably caught up in this process of unmaking as well. 87 SOVON, “Factsheet Fazant”, 5. 88 Rutherford, “The Anthropocene’s Animal?”, 216. 89 Keil, “Unmaking the Feral”, 20. 172 | van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) For example, they are excluded from formal knowledge production based on population counts. Even though hunters have been count- ing pheasants for years, their methods have so far been deemed in- valid. As Jamie Lorimer and Steve Hinchliffe have shown in the case of corncrakes, counting and surveillance methods shape which lives become visible that allow for political representation.90 This may ex- plain why the Hunters’ Association (Jagersvereniging) is now lobby- ing for an official, standardized counting protocol for both hunters and bird watchers, to be recognized by the Central Bureau of Statis- tics (CBS). This can be seen as a strategy to prevent a total ban on pheasant hunting and to legitimize hunting by providing accountable data. Such efforts illustrate how hunters, too, are delegitimized as advocates for pheasants. Their extensive historical and ongoing rela- tions with pheasants render them unsuited to “speak for” pheasants. In this sense, hunters’ knowledge and motivations are “unmade” too. Pheasants’ liminal status between wild and domestic, as well as their association with hunters, keep them from being fully integrated into formal conservation efforts. Whereas, historically, rearing and re- lease can be considered a form of intense bio-control — including procedures of classification, monitoring, ordering, spatial confine- ment, and restraint — pheasants are now less politicized and sci- entized than other targets of conservation. Compared to other “alien species”, pheasants seem to occupy a unique position. They were not introduced as an “ecological tool” for managing biosecurity,91 nor are they viewed as a biosecurity threat. They are not seen as rewil- ders of novel ecosystems or as indicator species for one, unlike, for example, partridges. As such, the ways in which pheasant lives have become culturally and spatially entangled with the rural biology of the Dutch landscape remains largely unexamined. Remaking Pheasants In what has widely come to be referred to as the Anthropocene, hunting appears as one of the many forms of violence against the 90 Lorimer, “Counting Corncrakes”; Hinchliffe, “Reconstituting Nature Conservation”. 91 Buller, “Introducing Aliens”, 184. van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant | 173 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) nonhuman world, especially when it is not deemed necessary for subsistence in a Western context. At the same time, scholars have turned their attention to non-Western communities for insights into alternative, more sustainable and less destructive ontologies, in which hunting plays an important role in understanding human– nonhuman relationality.92 The process of unmaking described above can be understood as a process in which “lively entanglements are unwound”.93 The entanglements of pheasants with hunters render pheasants “not real” (as quoted in the epigraph to this article) and disqualify them from serious consideration as a conservation spe- cies. While hunting in Western contexts might be considered a one- sided act of domination — especially when elite hunters combine taking animal lives with claiming control over land — at the same time this risks rendering animals as mere passive subjects of total control and also obscures human–pheasant relationality. There- fore, to understand and evaluate the character of the pheasants and the type of interaction with the hunters, we can also consider how lively entanglements are “re-wound” or re-made, as part of an ongoing, ever-changing and situated relationship between hunters and pheasants. Since the ban on rearing, releasing, and supplementary feeding of pheasants of 1998, their numbers have declined sharply. Whereas pheasants were once widespread across the country, they have now vanished from many areas. For example, pheasantries in sandy, forested areas kept populations stable, but as soon as these were abandoned, ironically enough, the ‘forest-pheasant’ disap- peared from these landscapes as well as from hunters’ language. Pheasants began to move away from their assigned spaces to- wards “beastly places”94 of their choosing, where they could come into their own and breed on their own terms. At the same time, the dynamics shaping pheasant populations, distribution, and behav- iour have also changed due to major landscape transformations. Pheasants depend on a wide variety of foods, including berries, 92 See Ingold, Hunting and Gathering; Nadasdy, “Gift in the Animal”. 93 Frederiksen, “Haunting”, 533; cf. Rose, “Angel of History”, 77. 94 See Philo and Wilbert, Animal Spaces, Beastly Places. 174 | van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) grasses, buds, insects, and crop residue, but with the intensifica- tion of agriculture, lowering water tables and growing urbaniza- tion, food availability has decreased. These landscape changes have also increased predation pressure, especially from foxes, due to reduced cover. This means that not only have the conditions for pheasants’ survival in the Dutch landscape changed over time, but so too have hunters’ tactics for killing and/or caring for them. Pheasants and hunters are now entering into a new relationship in which hunters are far more reliant on pheasant agency and less focused on controlling them. We can assume that the pheasant has been naturalized in Western Europe for more than two thousand years. Due to its cleverness and physical strength, it has been able to maintain itself effortlessly, has not introduced any foreign diseases, has not driven away or exterminated other bird species, and is al- ways a feast for the eyes (including the quietly brown-yellow hens), while the cock’s metallic call adds a fascinating element to the landscape.95 Hunters have long celebrated the pheasant’s resilience and beauty, and have adapted landscapes for them for centuries — a practice that continues to this day. Many scholars now suggest we should appreciate the adaptive abilities of animals as “Anthropocene he- roes” in novel ecosystems, by highlighting how spaces are shaped by multispecies encounters and proliferation rather than fixed sets of species.96 At the same time, this also means recognizing that hu- mans are not only destroyers of landscapes, but also, at times “in- crease rather than decrease biodiversity, or at the very least allow for different kinds of biodiversity to emerge and thrive”.97 In these landscapes, pheasant agencies, to quote Despret, emerge not only 95 “Wij mogen er van uitgaan dat de fazant dus in West-Europa al meer dan 2000 jaar is ingeburgerd. Hij heeft zich door zijn slimheid en lichamelijke sterkte moeiteloos kun- nen handhaven, heeft geen vreemde ziektes binnengebracht, geen andere vogelsoor- ten verdreven of uitgeroeid en is steeds een lust voor het oog (ook de stemmig bruin- geel gekleurde hennen), terwijl de metalige roep van de haan een boeiend element aan het landschap toevoegt.” Huygen, “De overbodige fazant”, 539. 96 See Palmer et al. “Hybrid Apes”. 97 Rutherford, “The Anthropocene’s Animal?”, 218. van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant | 175 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) as the ability to “make others do things” but also to “incite, inspire, or ask them to do things” in various ways.98 First, pheasants appear to have changed the way they are hunted and appreciated. The grand driven shoots of the past required large populations, but with fewer birds now spread across various land- scapes, dedicated pheasant shoots no longer take place. Today, pheasants are part of a varied tableau of small game taken during small-scale flushing hunts — but only in places where pheasants re- main relatively abundant. In many other hunting grounds, pheasants have become animals not to hunt: “In the past, pheasants were shot, but if you see one here now, don’t shoot — they’re rare.”99 Whether pheasants are considered huntable thus depends on their presence or absence in particular landscapes. Arguably, pheasants now partly determine their own huntability through their spatial dispersal and declining numbers. Second, pheasants turn hunters into landscape managers. “The pheasant […] requires careful management to ensure the conser- vation of the species”.100 While in a conservation context the spatial relations between hunters and the animals they hunt are often un- derstood in terms of regulating populations through hunting, in the case of pheasants “hunters bring attention to preventing mowing losses [by protecting nests], they create game crops, and manage corvids and foxes”.101 Hunters intervene in intensively farmed land- scapes by providing small strips of cover or food for wildlife — but only with the landowner’s permission. In this way, hunters act as caretakers of pheasant habitats and spatial advocates for pheas- ant lives. Even though Robert Holsman argues that hunters could be better ecosystem stewards,102 the care hunters give to pheasants 98 Despret, “Secret Agents”, 40. 99 Interview with hunter, 18 August 2023. 100 “De fazant […] vraagt een zorgvuldig beheer om de instandhouding van de soort te waarborgen.” Koninklijke Nederlandse Jagersvereniging, “Fazant”. 101 “Hierbij geven jagers aandacht aan het voorkomen van maaiverliezen, leggen ze wil- dakkers aan, beheren ze kraaiachtigen en vossen.” Koninklijke Nederlandse Jagersver- eniging, “Fazant”. 102 Holsman, “Goodwill Hunting?”, 814. 176 | van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) can be seen as precisely the kind of interdependency and co-be- coming that matters when it comes to affording forms of pheasant agency. For pheasants seem to “incite, inspire or ask”103 hunters to change landscapes and take protective measures. These affective practices create opportunities to accommodate pheasants while at the same time pheasants themselves choose where they want to live — with or without the help of hunters. In this sense, hunter– pheasant interdependencies turn hunters, at least partly, into (land- scape) managers, living alongside pheasants in “a mutual compo- sition of worlds”.104 If we take seriously the ways in which pheasants make hunters do things, then stewardship cannot be understood as a solely human endeavour, one that in this case would rest exclusively in the hands of the hunter. Building on — but also moving beyond — their history as charismatic flyers to be shot, pheasants have become stewards of their own lives and landscapes, where they negotiate manage- ment with hunters. Rather than simply casting hunters as ecologi- cal stewards, perhaps we might see the wider range of practices that maintain pheasant ecologies and landscapes as a form of multi-spe- cies stewardship. Multi-species stewardship, as a mode of caring for animal lives and landscapes, is co-shaped by pheasant presences and absences, behaviours and shared histories that create — or re- make — possibilities for pheasants to thrive and live unfettered lives. These historically evolved ways of being are embedded in a wider landscape that shapes which possibilities emerge: a reared pheas- ant or a wild pheasant, a pheasant living in the dunes or the flood- plains — each might enact its pheasantness differently.105 Conclusion This article has shown that through processes of making, unmaking, and remaking, becoming pheasant is a multispecies affair. This is es- pecially clear in view of their history as hunted animals. Bred and raised by chickens and turkeys, cared for and released to be shot by 103 Despret, “Secret Agents”, 40. 104 Barua, “Feral Ecologies”, 911. 105 Tsing, “The Dream of the Stag”. van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant | 177 Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) humans, pheasants are now choosing their own habitats, which are subsequently cared for by hunters to cater to their needs. Clearly, the bird’s hunting history still plays a role in its absence from policy mak- ing, expert interest, and management today. Meanwhile, pheasants are carving out a place for themselves as open-field dwellers and as attentive mothers, adapting to the Dutch landscape through a mul- tispecies negotiation with hunters. As such, the ongoing adaptations of pheasants to changing landscapes have inevitably reshaped both their behaviour and geographies, as well as hunter–pheasant inter- dependencies over time. From a broader spatio-temporal perspective, becoming pheasant is not a linear passage from wild to domestic to feral, but rather a com- plex and dynamic trajectory in which pheasant knowledge, adap- tive fitness, and “naturalness” are renegotiated over time and in spe- cific places together with hunters. Thus, pheasants disrupt simple categories such as wild, domestic, feral and native — which argua- bly makes them elusive as conservation targets. At the same time, pheasants complicate our understanding of human–animal relations in the Anthropocene. For example, while the domestication of chick- ens — and their fossilized bones as a geological marker — is consid- ered the ultimate symbol of the Anthropocene,106 pheasants have co- existed with humans since long before chickens were domesticated. Research shows that eight thousand years ago in China, pheasants were drawn to human settlements by food, eventually forming in- terdependent relationships.107 Yet because this human connection never altered their genetic makeup, pheasants are not formally con- sidered domesticated. Unlike chickens, then, pheasants have devel- oped an interdependency with hunters while remaining “wild”. Thus, pheasants complicate not only the categorization of human–animal interdependencies themselves, but also our understanding of how these relationships are formed. The ways in which pheasants become with hunters is not simply a story of one-sided domination: pheasants have long been caught 106 Bennett et al., “How Chickens Became”. 107 Barton et al., “The Earliest Farmers”. 178 | van Heijgen , Becoming Pheasant Humanimalia 15.2 (2025) up in performances108 as hunting animals, co-producers of a mul- tispecies management, and resilient birds able to secure a state of wildness, determined by the opportunities for autonomy and self-determination.109 Pheasants show that stewardship need not be understood as a solely human-driven affair; in a relational world, care practices emerge through complex inter- and intra-actions be- tween hunters, pheasants, and landscapes based on shared his- tories. I argue that we might understand these relationships as a form of multispecies stewardship which brings a more-than-human perspective to conservation efforts and debates. 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