More-than-human practices in wild animal farming: The case of China's forest frogs

In Northeastern China, forest frog farming has emerged as an important means of livelihood diversification and rural revitalization. This study examines how forest frog breeding practices have come under pressure following the post-COVID reclassification of frogs from “terrestrial” to “aquatic” species – a move that allowed the trade of economically valuable frog species to continue despite a broader wildlife consumption ban. Drawing on fieldwork in Jilin Province, our study analyses the ways frog farming is constituted by a delicate alignment of breeding techniques, state policy, and amphibian life cycles. We demonstrate how this alignment is reconfigured when new regulations disregard the biological realities of the frogs, causing practices to lose coherence and practitioners. Through the concept of “more-than-human practices,” our analysis reveals how frogs' inherent drive to thrive and reproduce co-constitutes the conditions of rural production, thereby generating friction with top-down regulatory frameworks. This suggests that the continuation of frog farming practices is directly contingent upon navigating complex institutional and more-than-human interactions. Effective governance of the wildlife-food nexus, we argue, must therefore move beyond static binaries to attend to the delicate alignment of practices, policies, and ecologies that shapes the stability of rural livelihoods.