Tracking "Injurious Species": Strays, Roadkill, and Highway Ecology in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath

This essay focuses on the numerous strays, predator species, wild animals, and roadkill that undermine land management in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939). By putting the novel in conversation with mid-twentieth-century animal policy, this essay argues that animal control, as both an aspiration and a set of organized practices, destabilizes human authority over animal bodies at the same time that it commits violence against those bodies. Steinbeck's animals both fall victim to and creatively challenge animal control. Furthermore, when these animals rove in and out of human communities, settlements, and structures with no regard for (or understanding of) private property, they call attention to the inherent limitations of government animal policy. If we pursue the movements of these animals by following their paths and observing the "blot[s] of blood" on the highway, we might discover that our own bodies are just as vulnerable.