Orang-utans as issue animals: how flagship species are implicated in rallying actors around conservation issues

Within human cultures, animals often come to symbolize the environmental controversies in which they are entangled; yet the roles played by such animals go far beyond mute signification. This paper critically engages with ‘flagship species’ theory from the field of conservation, to trace an account of the ways in which animals become implicated in the rallying of various actors (and objects) around conservation issues. It introduces the term “issue-animals” to describe the under-explored practice where flagships are proposed, accepted, and implicated as representatives for particular issues facing habitats or ecosystems. Drawing heavily on the insights of relational-material perspectives within contemporary human geography, it develops an animal-centric epistemological approach with which to interrogate the attachment of a particular animal and issue: the orang-utan and palm oil-led deforestation in south-east Asia. Orang-utans are found to be implicated in the rallying of both publics and of conservation actors, but the agency of orang-utans as issue-animals affects and interacts with these actor types in different ways. Through illuminating the various processes involved in this context, a tentative step towards a more general account of issue-animals is subsequently proposed