Cane Toads

There is a scene in Cane Toads: The Conquest (2010) that I found unexpectedly disturbing and sad. Volunteers from the Kimberley Toad Busters are shown filling plastic bags full of cane toads with CO₂, before unceremoniously dumping their lifeless bodies into a mass grave. A solitary cane toad is depicted watching on, a bystander to the attempted eradication of its own species, as a mournful soundtrack heightens the pathos. Despite being rendered environmentally aware by countless public campaigns and media stories detailing the impacts of cane toads on Australia’s native animals and ecosystems, I could not escape an overwhelming feeling of sympathy for the toad. ¹ I was aware of the aesthetic resonances of this scene, of its overt attempt to manipulate my emotions through the construction of a toad holocaust, but I still found it incredibly moving. ² The animality of cane toads, or an awareness of the devastatingly violent price exacted on these animals for simply being out of place, an introduced or out-of-ecology species in a foreign landscape, kept disrupting the stability of my ecological convictions. This sense of ambiguity is key to writer-director Mark Lewis’s approach as a filmmaker and his cinematic depiction of the complexity that surrounds cane toads in Australia.