Ecology, Capability and Companion Species: Conflicting Ethics in Nevada Barr’s Blood Lure

Abstract

The primary concern of this essay is the way Nevada Barr’s Blood Lure (2002), set in Glacier National Park, handles the animal as murderer motif and the ethics that are signalled and developed in the text. Textual ethics are signalled by the park setting, the representation of grizzly bears and human–non-human relations, as well as by several intertexts. The essay argues that the novel’s ethical stance is compromised by an incompatibility of its affiliations with, on the one hand, the conventions of the detective genre and of the Anna Pigeon series, and, on the other, three different and incompatible ethical schemas: ecological ethics, as defined and discussed by Donaldson and Kymlicka, capability ethics, described by Nussbaum, and Haraway’s companion species ethics. The novel’s unwillingness to engage in a discussion regarding wild animals in captivity, and grizzly bear welfare, is found to be especially problematic.