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Rendering nonhuman life for sale is a fundamental facet of contemporary capitalism. Political economy extensively examines how nature is commodified but fails to analyse the difference liveliness of animals makes to processes of commodification. Drawing upon empirical work on lions and elephants in the political economies of tourism and biodiversity conservation in India, this paper proposes analytics for understanding commodification and accumulation in relational and less humanist terms. First, it develops Haraway’s concepts of ‘lively commodities’ and ‘encounter value’, foregrounding animal ecologies to rework political economic categories of the commodity, labour and production in more-than-human terms. Second, it examines how lively commodities and encounter value configure political economies, mapping their specificities and economic potential. The paper advances potential diagnostics and vocabularies through which ecology and non-dualist accounts of agency might be integrated into the nature-as-resources approach of political economy.

Wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995. They had been absent for 70 years and were unknown to the elk, which grazed, slept and moved in the absence of an apex predator. The return of the wolf fundamentally changed elk behaviour. They now avoid areas of low visibility. They gather in smaller herds. They are more flighty, watchful, and anxious. Ecologists speak of an ‘ecology of fear’ (Ripple and Beschta, 2004), in which new animal behaviours have had cascading, landscape scale effects on wildlife. Some domestic dogs have learnt to predict and detect epileptic seizures and diabetic low blood sugar. These ‘service animals’ tune into shifts in human behaviour and the chemistry of their environment. They are trained to warn their companion of their symptoms with a nudge, or by whining, pawing, or anxious barking. If their owner is incapacitated they can trigger an alarm (Rooney et al, 2013). The sounds and smells of urban environments are conditioned to govern the behaviour of dogs. Adaptil manufacture a ‘dog-appeasing pheromone’. It is sold in a home diffuser and emits a ‘strong signal of security’ (Adaptil, 2016) to reassure dogs in new or stressful settings. The Dazer is a handheld device that emits an unpleasant high frequency sound to deter aggressive dogs. PestBye offer wall mounted, bark-responsive ultrasonic technology designed to silence ‘nuisance dogs’ in the immediate neighbourhood.

Relations between nature and capital have been a longstanding concern in the social sciences. Going beyond antinomies of posthumanist and political economic enquiry, this paper advances a set of relational analytics for incorporating liveliness into critical analyses of capital. Firstly, developing the concept of animal work, it shows how metabolic, ecological and affective labour become a productive economic force. Secondly, animating the commodity, it demonstrates how lively forces influence commodification and exchange, enabling or hindering accumulation. Thirdly, tracking animal circulation, it examines the logics of rendition that transform nonhuman life into capital. In conclusion, the paper develops a relational grammar for anatomizing the nature-capital dynamic, one that reorients the economic to be co-constituted by the ecological from the outset.