Wild Animals and the Many Meanings of Hunting in the Pantanal Wetlands of Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay, 1880–1964

This paper uses wild animals as a lens through which to examine the interpenetrating worlds of a variety of social groups that crossed paths in the Pantanal, – an ecologically diverse wetland that straddles the border between Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay – during its integration into the world economy.  Although historically the Pantanal’s flood cycles discouraged permanent settlement, by the late nineteenth century reliable transportation networks (navigable rivers and, by 1912, a railroad linking the region with São Paulo) coupled with a worldwide demand for central South America’s natural resources facilitated the movement of people and goods through the region at unprecedented scales.

The commodification of wild animals in the Pantanal mirrored the region’s integration into these broader networks.  In the 1880s hunting functioned mainly as a subsistence activity, supplementing the income and diet of the rural poor.  By the 1950s, a network of professional hunters was supplying merchants with over 100,000 skins annually to supply national and international markets.  The Pantanal also achieved an international reputation among sportsmen and field scientists as one of the best places in South America to hunt and collect specimens. The region’s rural poor began to operate as ecological knowledge brokers, guiding expeditions that depended upon their understanding of animal ecology within a complex wetland environment.

This paper considers the overlapping and conflicting meanings that different groups of “hunters” ascribed to wild animals in the Pantanal.  While many in the sport-hunting and scientific communities came to advocate stricter regulation of commercial hunting practices, government authorities viewed hunting – and resulting exports – as a critical source of tax revenue and the rural poor viewed it as essential to survival.  These competing visions centering on wild animals gave birth to social and political conflicts about resource use in the Pantanal that persist to this day.