Assistência veterinária à fauna silvestre em contexto urbano amazônico: Descompassos entre legislação, práticas locais e ação institucional conservacionista

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the conditions for veterinary assistance to wild animals in an urban context in the Amazon. It recognizes that the rich sociobiodiversity found in the region implies multiple modes of relationship between specific social groups and wildlife, and that the juridical dichotomy between legal and illegal practices of fauna use does not adequately reflect the particularities of such intercourse configurations. It emphasizes that the socioenvironmental diversity of the region is also expressed in its urban areas, due to the connections between its cities and the green spaces of the countryside, and due to internal migration. Aside the social injustice caused by the labeling of several popular segments as criminals, the thesis suggests that the naive reproduction of the legalistic discourse threatens the ultimate goal of fauna protection, basal for the environmental juridical order. It intended to demonstrate how the imposition of the legal mindset on the work of a University Veterinary Hospital (UVH) has led to the rupture of relations between this institution and the popular segments that performed practices of fauna usage. Fieldwork with anthropological perspective was carried out in a UVH in an urban context of eastern Amazonia and employed participant observation of the institution routine, semi-structured interviews with its technical staff and analysis of medical records referred to the patients attended from 2013 to 2016. In this way, it was registered a gradual distancing from the formal sphere of wildlife protection in relation to important popular circuits of fauna users. Additionally, such distancing was found to occur in parallel to the intensification of interactions involving the UVH staff and officials of environmental agencies, with partial adherence to their binary classification scheme. Data indicated that the popular segments previously related to the UVH were not animal traffickers nor updated predatory practices – contrarily, they were generally adepts to domestic rearing of wild animals in urban backyards. Thus, the thesis argues that the disruption between formal spheres and popular segments, in the described context, was counterproductive to reach the goal of fauna protection, because it has restricted the provision of veterinary assistance to wild animals, hindering the conservation of wildlife populations in the green periurban areas. Therefore, it indicates that veterinarians working with wild animals and public systems of animal protection should avoid strictly ecological or legalistic analyzes and adopt a socioenvironmental perspective, contributing to legitimate sociobiodiversity values and even to make conservationist actions more effective.