animal behaviours, post-human lives: everyday negotiations of the animal–human divide in...
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Animal behaviours, post-human lives: everydaynegotiations of the animal–human divide in pet-keepingRebekah Fox aa Royal Holloway, University of London, Department of Geography, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX,UK E-mail:Version of record first published: 20 Nov 2006.
To cite this article: Rebekah Fox (2006): Animal behaviours, post-human lives: everyday negotiations of the animal–humandivide in pet-keeping, Social & Cultural Geography, 7:4, 525-537
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Animal behaviours, post-human lives: everydaynegotiations of the animal–human divide
in pet-keeping
Rebekah FoxDepartment of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX,
This paper explores the ways in which pet-owners in contemporary Britain mobilize thecategories of ‘animal’ and ‘human’ in their attempts to understand their pets. Pet-keepingforms one of the closest forms of human–animal interaction in modern western societyand as such provides an ideal opportunity to examine the ways in which peopleunderstand the similarities and differences between humans and non-humans in thecourse of their daily lives. Through the close-lived nature of pet–human relationships,people come to understand these animals in a variety of ways which go beyond ideas ofinstinctual behaviour to recognize their individual subjectivity and ‘personhood’, but alsorespect their ‘animalness’ and difference, rather than valuing them simply on the basis oftheir similarity to humans. These disruptions of binary categories provide a model forunderstanding notions of ‘post-humanism’ in the lived reality of everyday life.
Key words: animals, animal–human divide, anthropomorphism, nature, pets, post-humanism.
Introduction
Recent developments in social theory have
increasingly challenged Cartesian notions of
the binary divisions between ‘nature’ and
‘culture’, ‘humans’ and ‘animals’, and ‘wild-
ness’ and ‘civilization’, and raised new
theoretical and ethical questions concerning
human relationships with the non-human
world. Some theorists have argued that we
are living in a ‘post-human’ world, in which
the absolute boundaries between humans and
non-humans, nature and society have been
broken down and all beings are connected
together in a series of overlapping ‘webs’ or
‘networks’ of activity (Instone 1998). Recent
work within environmentalism, science and
technology studies, sociology and animal
geography (Arluke and Sanders 1996; Har-
away 2003; Philo and Wilbert 2000; What-
more 2002; Wolch and Emel 1998) has
recognized the importance of non-human
actors in the fabric of everyday social life
and challenged taken-for-granted notions of
Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 7, No. 4, August 2006
ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/06/040525-13 q 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14649360600825679
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human uniqueness on the grounds of agency
and intentionality, opening up new and
exciting opportunities for the study of non-
human lives.
However, despite such theoretical advance-
ments residual humanist values continue to
shape much popular and academic thinking
and practice and it is still unclear how ideas of
the ‘post-human’ and ‘post-natural’ are to be
played out in the practicality of everyday
living (Wolfe 2003).
The uncertainty of the human exists alongside
continued claims of certainty. The binary
oppositions of the past tremble but continue to
inform everyday decisions, assumptions and
activities. It is precisely this contradictory
condition . . . with which a ‘critical post
humanism’ (Didur 2003) must now endlessly
engage. (Badmington 2003)
Much of the work on the subject remains
largely theoretical and there have been few
attempts (Haraway 2003; Sanders 1995) to
engage with actual material embodied
relationships between humans and animals.
As Castree (2003: 209) puts it we now need to
‘move beyond suggestive metaphors in order
to properly flesh out what an amodern politics
of socionatural hybridity is all about’. In this
paper I consider the ways in which people
engage with ideas of nature, culture and
animal subjectivity in their everyday inter-
actions with, what is perhaps for most people
in western society, their closest form of contact
with the animal world: the domestic pet.
There has been relatively little previous
work in geography on companion animals
(Howell 2000, 2002; Laurier 2002; Tuan
1984) despite their presence and significance
in many people’s everyday lives. Pets occupy a
liminal position on the boundaries between
‘human’ and ‘animal’, appreciated by their
owners as ‘minded individuals’ (Sanders 1995)
or friends, capable of rational thought and
emotion, yet also treated as objects or
possessions to be discarded if they do not
conform to human expectations and values
(Belk 1996). They are both valued for their
‘animalness’ and subject to practices, such as
selective breeding, training and neutering,
which attempt to ‘civilize’ them and make
them more like ‘little humans’. Thus compa-
nion animal ownership provides a useful
means by which to re-examine recent theor-
etical attempts to deconstruct the nature/cul-
ture boundaries and understand the ways in
which distinctions between the animal and the
human are mobilized, disrupted, crossed and
re-crossed in the practical everyday dilemmas
of ownership, responsibility and affection
for pets.
Various models exist that aim to deal with
issues of human–animal relationships and
what these negotiations might look like if we
begin to take animals seriously as sentient
subjects. The most influential arguments are
those of traditional animal rights theory
(Regan 1983; Singer 1975) which call for the
extension of moral consideration to animals
on the basis of their similarities to humans,
such as their abilities to act on intelligence
rather than instinct, the extent to which they
can demonstrate cognitive skills, curiosity,
problem solving and social awareness, and feel
or express abstract emotions such as loss and
deprivation.
According to Sanders (1993) pet-owners
have long recognized the individuality and
subjectivity of their animals, contesting tra-
ditional ideas of language as the basis of
identity and Cartesian notions of the human–
animal divide. He argues that pet owners are
routinely engaged in a process of identity
construction, using their day-to-day experi-
ence with their dogs to construct them as
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‘minded’ social actors. Owners attribute
‘personhood’ to their pets through several
mechanisms, including the recognition of
subjective thought, the possession of individ-
ual personalities, likes and dislikes, seeing the
animal as emotional and capable of engaging
in reciprocal social relationships and affording
the animal a social place as a member of the
family or close friend.
However, more recent work within the fields
of critical and feminist environmentalism
(Plumwood 2002; Seager 2003) has argued
that such theories go about addressing these
problems in the wrong way and allow for
erasure of difference and elevation of ‘higher’
animals (such as pets and primates) to the
status of humanity, whilst maintaining unsus-
tainable attitudes towards the environment
and ‘lower’ animals which are reduced to the
category of resources or ‘things’ for human
exploitation. They argue that many animal
rights philosophers are guilty of ‘neo-carte-
sianism’—simply trying to extend the privi-
leged category of humans in the human/nature
dualism rather than trying to break down the
dualism (Plumwood 2002: 143). Instead of
focusing upon notions of ‘personhood’ we
need to recognize the continuity of all life
forms and value beings for their own intrinsic
worth, autonomy and difference rather than
on the basis of their similarity to humans.
One recent publication that has aimed to
work with such notions of difference is Donna
Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto
(2003) in which she asks the question ‘How
might an ethics and politics of significant
otherness be learned from taking dog–human
relationships seriously?’ (Haraway 2003: 3).
In this manifesto Haraway considers the
history and significance of dog training and
breeding and the importance of dog–human
relationships for understanding specific and
individual relationships of love and interaction
across the species barrier. Haraway argues that
such relationships cannot simply be seen as
about domination and control, nor a straight-
forward idealization of animals ‘uncondi-
tional love’ for their owners, but about a
messy, difficult love which
seeks to inhabit an inter-subjective world that is
about meeting the other in all the fleshy detail of a
mortal relationship with all its inevitable comic and
tragic mistakes in the permanent search for
knowledge of the intimate other. (Haraway 2003: 34)
In this paper I draw on my own ethnographic
research with pet owners to consider the
various ways in which people practically
engage with understanding the similarities
and differences between themselves and their
animal companions on a day-to-day basis. Pet
owners must try their best to comprehend their
animals behaviour and intentions, balancing
various interpretations of popular animal
psychology that naturalize ideas of ‘instinct’
or animal behaviour with informal notions of
anthropomorphism that deny animals absol-
ute difference from humans and attribute them
with ‘human-like’ intentions or emotions. The
idea that pets have thoughts, feelings, inten-
tions and personalities could be described as
deeply anthropomorphic. These two contra-
dictory models exist side-by-side, with pets
seen as both ‘human’ and ‘animal’, and the
ways in which pet owners move between these
different interpretations provides a useful
means for thinking through more academic
notions of post-humanism, which themselves
aim to disrupt absolute human–animal
binaries.
In this paper I firstly consider my method-
ologies used in this research, before moving on
to discuss two different ways in which people
understand their pets through ideas of both
‘animal instinct’ and ‘anthropomorphism’ and
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the ways in which such ‘mixed’ understand-
ings disrupt binary categories of the natural
and social worlds. I then briefly consider the
case of unusual pets which challenge such
understandings and demonstrate the limits of
some pet-owners’ ‘post-humanist’ conceptions
of the animal kingdom.
Methodology
This article is based upon two years of ‘multi-
sited’ ethnographic research (Marcus 1995) in
Britain, including in-depth interviews and
observations with sixteen selected pet-owning
households (involving between one and six
visits) and participant observation in animal
hospitals, veterinary surgeries, pet shows, and
other pet-related sites and locations. In
addition, the selected households were asked
to keep ‘pet-diaries’ over a period of two
weeks, recording their everyday intimate
interactions with their companion animals
that they may not have deemed worthy of
mention in an interview situation. The
research also involved three months of ‘online
ethnography’ (Hine 2000) of internet pet
forums and chatrooms, particularly relating
to the ownership of unusual pets such as
reptiles, whose owners were difficult to
contact through traditional channels due to
recent controversy surrounding the import of
exotic species.
The sampling strategy for this research was
devised to reflect a diversity of pet-owners,
including breed enthusiasts, new pet owners,
those with multiple animals and owners of
exotic pets, as well as social differences
between owners, including a variety of house-
hold types (couples, families, single people and
the elderly). Pet-owners were recruited
through various avenues (pet organizations,
shows, snowballing techniques) and were
largely self-selected, as they had to agree to
devote large periods of time and energy to the
research process. Therefore these owners were
inevitably those with a particular interest in
pet-keeping, possibly excluding more ‘aver-
age’ owners who may be less attached, or even
view their animals with resentment.
The informants were predominantly white
and middle-class (again possibly reflecting
those who have time to devote to such
activities, particularly in the case of those
involved in showing) and included many more
women than men as the main interviewee (the
person who invited me into the house and did
most of the talking: many husbands or partners
were notorious by their absence or hovered in
the background). This may reflect a greater
interest amongst women in pet-keeping, or in
their willingness to talk about their emotions in
relation to it, the fact that some men worked
longer hours so were not in when I visited, or
perhaps my own positionality as a young
female researcher, feeling more confident
approaching another woman in a social
context such as a pet show and accepting
invitations to their home (England 1994; Silvey
2003). Therefore the research cannot be seen as
representative of British pet-keeping as a
whole, but reflects a specific view of pet–
human relations taken from a particular cross-
section of society. However, whilst the owners
represented here may reflect an overly positive
view of the pet-keeping relationship, certain
aspects of these relations are relevant to other
forms of human–animal interactions and can
usefully say something about the everyday
negotiation of post-human ideas.
Natural behaviours?
One of the major dilemmas posed by the pet–
human relationship is that of the pet’s dual
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status as both a ‘person’ and possession.
People must negotiate this in their everyday
decisions about their companion’s welfare and
treatment. Relationships with pets are not
necessarily easy and involve two beings
‘getting on together’ (Haraway 2003) in a
relationship that inevitably involves some
forms of restriction, power and control and a
certain degree of guilt, worry or uncertainty
about what the animal is thinking or feeling,
particularly where the relationship is seen to
be unsuccessful.
In his 1984 book, Dominance and Affec-
tion—The Making of Pets, Tuan argues that
pet-keeping is little more than an exercise in
patronizing and playful domination, reflect-
ing ‘man’s inherent insecurity and need to
display his power to subdue the unruly forces
of nature’ (Tuan 1984: 5). However, I would
argue that whilst humans are certainly the
dominant partner in such relationships (and
may see their animals as property, status
symbols or even toys), the relationship is
much more complex than this, involving a
range of reciprocal exchanges and emotions
of both human and animal agency. Thinking
about such relationships and human and
animal understandings of one another can
provide a useful resource for thinking
through the practicalities of post-human
perspectives in the reality of everyday lived
relationships.
One way in which humans try to under-
stand their pets behaviour is through popular
notions of animal psychology, based upon
studies of ‘natural’ behaviours in their wild
ancestors. Such ideas have gained immense
popularity in recent years, promoted through
numerous animal behaviour books (Bessant
2001; Morris 1986) and television pro-
grammes. Such guidebooks provide one
means of challenging anthropocentric under-
standings, revealing a marked change in
human attitudes to accept ‘animals as
animals’ (Philo and Wilbert 2000), rather
than furry ‘little humans’. However, such
readings tend to essentialize animal actions
into supposed ‘biological’ behaviour, such as
the ‘pack instinct’ in dogs, and ignore animal
agency and individual interaction in the
relationship.
In popular guides to pet behaviour notions
of the ‘natural cat’ revolve around ideas of
them as independent, solitary hunters, who
lead a ‘double life’ between the overprotected
child that they are with their human owners
and their ‘wild side’ as miniature versions of
large predatory cats such as lions and tigers
(Bessant 2001). This independent image
means that owners are often uneasy about
restricting their cat’s behaviour and allow
them a degree of freedom and independence in
the relationship not usually given to dogs.
However, such freedom is often difficult to
balance with emotional feelings towards the
cat as a ‘human-like’ being who they may wish
to protect and nurture and can cause a great
deal of worry for owners when cats disappear
for extended periods of time or they cannot
locate them when they are required for a meal
or emotional attention.
Such dilemmas are revealed in the case of
Fiona and her six-month-old kitten Oliver.
The issues here are those of appropriate care
and control, balancing Fiona’s affection and
protective nurturing feelings for this small
creature, with necessary feelings of guilt and
worry about his happiness and freedom.
I’m scared to let Oliver out especially when he’s
full of food and has no reason to come back. I feel
differently about him than my other cat Charlie
because he’s mine, I’ve had him since he was a
baby and brought him up so I feel responsible for
him. Charlie was here with James before I moved
in so there’s not much I can do about him going
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off on his own but I want to protect Oliver.
There’s a busy road at the top of the street and I
just don’t trust other people with him, the people
in the house opposite are always trying to feed
Charlie and steal him away from us. The first time
we let him out he disappeared for 20 hours and
got locked in someone’s garage and I sort of
blamed James for it because I just didn’t think he
was looking after him as carefully as I would.
Sometimes I think I’m being unfair though,
because he’s a cat and he should be allowed to
go outside and enjoy himself and chase birds and
things and I’m just being selfish because I worry
so much about him. (Fiona, interview, 2003)
This raises issues about ideas of ‘the natural’
and what humans consider natural cat
behaviour and instincts and their rights to
engage in activities such as hunting or
roaming. This must be balanced with their
expectations of an animal as a possession to
conform to their idealizations of what a pet
should be: always present, loving and grate-
fully reciprocal of human affection.
Many of my interviewees showed a wide
knowledge of popular notions of animal
psychology taken from books or television
programmes and used elements of these ideas
in explaining their pet’s behaviour. Owners
said that they had read up on pet psychology in
an attempt to better understand their relation-
ships and were keen to explain the ‘biological’
‘reasons’ behind their animals behaviour,
seemingly accepting these explanations as
‘scientific’ fact. For dog owners the overriding
argument was that of the ‘pack mentality’,
with owners adjusting their own behaviour to
prevent the dogs from becoming dominant
amongst their human ‘pack’. One owner,
Andrew, particularly adhered to such notions,
rejecting his wife’s ideas that their sheepdog
Molly is very intelligent and can tell what you
are thinking and feeling and arguing that:
She is just a dog and does things because she is a dog.
She thinks of us as her pack and likes to protect the
pack by barking if any visitors arrive and protecting
the weaker members such as the cat if any other cats
or dogs try to harass her. She is always fed after
Poppy (the cat) both to prevent her from stealing the
cat’s food and stop her from thinking she is
dominant, as dominant animals always get first
pick of the prey in the wild. (Andrew, interview,
January 2003)
Cat owners too were keen to use ideas of
‘instinct’ and ‘natural’ behaviour such as
Jane’s explanation of her cat Woody’s beha-
viour below. Such explanations can be useful
in mediating the more problematic aspects of
human–animal relationships, where animals
may behave in ways that go against human
norms and exhibit ‘non-human-like’ beha-
viour that challenges more anthropomorphic
understandings of them as miniature humans
or substitute children.
Woody scratches the door when I shut him out of
the living room when we’re out. I don’t think he
likes being shut out of part of his territory. But if I
let them in they will make a mess, scratching the
carpet and knocking the plants over. I know it’s only
natural for them to mark their territory and sharpen
their claws, but I’d rather they didn’t do it on my
new carpet! (Jane, pet diary, 2003)
However, it was clear that none of those
interviewed fully accepted such reductive
accounts of instinctual behaviour and both used
andrejected these ideas ina self-consciousway. In
most cases these notions were combined with
more ‘anthropomorphic’ understandings on the
basis of individual intelligence and emotion,
seeing their pets as real individuals or characters,
who can challenge taken-for-granted assump-
tions of their psychology through unexpected
agency, reactions or behaviour.
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‘Pets as people’: agency and anthro-pomorphism
Living intimately with animals on a day-to-
day basis means that pets and owners come to
know each other’s individual personality
quirks and traits, viewing their animals as
subjective beings and attributing them with
human-like characteristics. Whilst some own-
ers I spoke to were a little wary of highly
anthropomorphized accounts of animal beha-
viour, perhaps viewing me as something of
an ‘expert’ who would look down on such
unreflective understandings, many people do
interpret their animal’s everyday actions in
terms of their own ways of viewing the world.
Animals are regularly attributed with human
emotions such as jealously, anger, disappoint-
ment and love, which is usually a human
means of acknowledging the animal’s role in
an active reciprocal relationship.
Whilst Haraway (2003) is highly suspicious
of any attempt to understand animals through
human ways of seeing the world, she does
recognize that people do not have separate
thought processes for understanding animal
behaviour and to guess at their emotions using
human values may be better than simply
ignoring animal communications as ‘mere’
instinct.
All that philosophically suspect language is
necessary to keep humans alert to the fact that
somebody is at home in the animals they work with.
(Haraway 2003: 49)
Often this anthropomorphism can be very
knowing and self-critical, with people
enjoying creating fanciful notions of their
animals’ thoughts and behaviours, perhaps as
much for the benefit of other humans as their
understandings of the animals themselves. One
interviewee, Caroline, provided very anthro-
pomorphic explanations of her animals’
behaviour in her ‘tongue in cheek’ pet diary,
written from the perspective of her cat Eeyore,
sat at the keyboard, ‘making his paw ache!’
Whilst the diary was obviously intended to be
taken with a pinch of salt, it provided an
interesting insight into human anthropo-
morphic explanations of a ‘cat’s mind’ that
revealed Caroline’s interpretations of the ways
in which her animals see the world.
‘Eeyore’ pet diary—24 April 2003
This morning my mother and aunt and I sat on our
ledge and watched funny white stuff falling out of
the sky, I tried to catch it but it kept vanishing.
Human Mother turned the heating back on in our
house, she is quite thoughtful really, but we do have
very thick fur coats and quite like sitting outside. I
suppose she means well. I was a bit bored being kept
inside so I decided to do some big game hunting,
found a big blue bottle and chased it about for a bit,
then it stopped playing so I left it on the bedroom
floor. Human Mother can hoover it up; she’s always
running around with that noisy thing! Apparently
one of us is always leaving great lumps of hair on
her precious carpets and of course it couldn’t
possibly be Spider (the dog)! The lazy git was meant
to be giving me a paw with this diary but he’s just
sleeping in front of the wood burner as usual.
Others used ideas of anthropomorphism more
subtly, using it to attribute their animals with
an active role in the relationship and a
capacity for intelligent thought or emotion.
Charmaine described the ways in which her
dog Toby had adapted to her increasing
disability, showing intimate knowledge and
levels of thought and cognition well beyond
those of inherited genetic instincts.
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Toby is very good and follows me everywhere. He
even used to come with me on my hairdressing runs
when I worked. It’s as if he knows about my
disability and how hard it is for me sometimes. If
my sister Nicole takes him for a walk he will pull on
the lead but he never does with me and he waits for
me at steps where he knows I will be slow or if I’m
in my wheelchair he trots along beside. When we’re
playing with a ball in the house he knows I can’t
keep bending down to get it so he drops it on my
lap. (Charmaine, interview, March 2003)
Elizabeth discussed her cat’s emotional feel-
ings, particularly in relation to the recent
death of her husband Ian. Attributing animals
with feelings such as love and grief recognizes
their subjectivity and reciprocal role in the
pet–human relationship, rather than basing
their actions purely on instinctual behaviours
or abstract attachment to the human who
feeds them or whom they regard as a superior
member of the ‘pack’.
My husband died recently. He and the cat were very
attached. We adopted him when we moved into the
house a few years ago. Ian adored him and used to
talk about him all the time. Because he wasn’t very
well and couldn’t get about much he spent a lot of
time sitting in his chair, usually with Kim on his
knee. I found him lying in the bedroom when I woke
up in the morning. Kim was with me, he jumped up
on the bed and sniffed him, prodding him with his
paw to try and wake him up. He seemed to realize
that something was wrong and curled up asleep
next to him, refusing to leave his side until the
undertakers came to take the body away. After that
he slept on Ian’s clothes all day and night, where I
had left them after he had taken them off the night
before he died. He seemed disturbed and uneasy,
hanging around the house and following me as if he
thought I might go away too. He often went to Ian’s
chair, as if he was checking that he might have
come back. I don’t know how much animals can
understand, but he definitely knew something was
wrong and certainly missed Ian like crazy. I would
say animals can feel grief too. (Elizabeth, interview,
2004)
In the course of my research I was also
constantly aware of my own anthropomorph-
ism. In seeking a less anthropocentric view of
human–animal interactions, which acknowl-
edges the animal role in the relationship, I
subconsciously reflected my interviewees’
language in attributing thought and intention
to my animal subjects. Therefore when
describing a situation, I repeatedly found
myself describing an animal as bored, excited
or inquisitive, without really realizing that I
was doing so. However this in itself is relevant.
If the aim of post-humanism is to destabilize the
categories of ‘human’ and ‘animal’ themselves,
seeing these as interconnected and made up of
a complex network of associations, then the
problematic nature of ‘anthropomorphic’
interpretations is also questioned, because
particular qualities can no longer be seen as
distinctly human.
In addition to the attribution of supposedly
‘human-like’ characteristics and emotions,
pet–human relationships cross understand-
ings of the human–animal divide through the
embodied intimacy of their everyday relations,
revealing the importance of animals in every-
day human social interactions and conceptions
of family, kinship and domesticity. Many of
those I spoke to viewed their animals as part of
the immediate family, sharing in their intimate
daily routines and interactions. The relation-
ship with pets is a very tactile one, providing
both human and animal with physical contact
and affection. Much of the relationship and
interaction is based upon the owner’s sense of
reciprocal exchanges of love and affection,
with animals admitted to the most intimate
areas of people’s lives that would not be shared
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even with other humans. For many this
pleasure seems to be mutual, with both
animals and humans enjoying the simple
satisfaction of being together and engaging in
play and close physical contact.
After James has gone, Oliver joins me for cuddles as
it’s my day off. He’s wide awake and nudges me
whenever I relax my arm from tickling him. He rolls
around showing his tummy for difficult bits to be
tickled and looks at me and puts his paws on my
face a lot. I pretend to sleep and he nudges my face
with his and purrs. He makes me feel so happy.
(Fiona, pet diary, 2003)
This intimacy is something that some people
may be embarrassed to admit for fear of
stigmatization or disgust at the close-lived
nature of the relationship with another
species, which is seen as crossing moral or
social boundaries. Whilst it is accepted that
humans and animals will engage in close
physical contact, boundaries for this vary
greatly even within the same society or family
and ideas of hygiene and appropriate beha-
viour are very much a matter of individual
taste. Christine, another interviewee,
described her personal relationship with her
Pyrenean mountain dogs, a secret that even
her husband is not allowed to share.
The dogs sleep in the bedroom at night except the
puppy who isn’t allowed upstairs yet because it’s
bad for her hips. They go straight up there when
we go to bed and lie down still otherwise they
know they won’t be allowed to stay. My husband
doesn’t let Jenna sleep on the bed, but as soon as
she hears the door go when he leaves at five she
jumps straight up and by ten past five her head is
fast asleep on the pillow. I like this time snuggling
up to the warmth of a furry body beside me.
(Christine, interview, 2003)
Such non-verbal, non-cognitive interaction
again challenges human social and conceptual
boundaries, but perhaps in a less human-
centred way, valuing animals for their own
characteristics rather than trying to define
their ‘personhood’ through the recognition of
human-like attributes. This challenges con-
cerns over the ‘dangers’ of anthropomorph-
ism, which themselves stem from a particular
conception of the human rational subject and
consider animals in terms of their similarities
to humans.
However, these issues are not simple and
boundaries and assumptions that people draw
are variable and shifting, and may differ
considerably according to the type of pet
involved. The relationship between humans
and certain mammals such as cats and dogs
has become naturalized in our society and it is
almost assumed that humans will enjoy special
loving relationships with such creatures that
honour their subjectivity and place them in a
special category on the boundaries between
humans and animals. Yet as Seager (2003) and
Plumwood (2002) point out, there are limits to
these considerations and all animals are not
seen as equal in the ‘post-human’ world. In the
case of smaller or more unusual pets such as
reptiles, close inter-personal relationships are
not so widely accepted and may still be seen as
odd in today’s society, particularly in the case
of creatures such as snakes and rats that are
feared for their ‘difference’ (hard scaly skin, no
legs, long rubbery tails) or subversive image.
These animals challenge traditional ideas
of what a pet should be (furry, cuddly,
emotionally responsive) and call for a different
type of relationship to that enjoyed with larger
mammals. They complicate some of the
debates surrounding animal ‘personhood’ and
similarity to humans and how far people are
prepared to extend this into the animal
kingdom (Bride 1998; Griffin 1992). There
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was disagreement amongst my interviewees
about the degrees to which such animals are
capable of thought or emotional response, with
even many devoted owners claiming that they
are not capable of love (seen as a defining
feature in most pet-keeping relationships) and
in some cases treating them almost more like
a zoo or botanical collection than individual
social actors.
I think snakes are more a ‘visual’ pet. They are there
to be enjoyed cause they look pretty and also I find it
is rewarding to keep them and breed them as they
need more specialized care than just chucking some
food in a dish, or throwing a rug on a horse kind of
thing. As for what the snakes/geckos get out of the
relationship: they get all their needs delivered.
Food, warmth, a comfy, clean home and its fun
making their vivariums look interesting visually and
for their benefit too! I think I am much closer with
George and Meghan (a horse and dog), simply due
to them being able to understand emotion better
than reptiles can. I have heard that some
lizards/geckos can be ‘affectionate’ though and do
think my geckos are much more ‘friendly’ than the
snakes. (Rachel, livefood.co.uk, private message,
November 2003)
Thus relationships with reptiles reveal another
side to companion animal ownership, whereby
certain pets are placed further down, or even
outside the field of ‘personhood’, putting these
animals in a liminal category of their own on
the borders between pets and other types of
animals displayed in zoos or personal mena-
geries. These animals may be valued more for
their ‘difference’ and biological interest as a
‘foreign’ species, rather than for their person-
alities as human companions and treated more
as possessions or objects than individuals.
Although some owners do attempt to engage
in subjective relationships with such creatures,
they are very aware of and respect their
differences from humans, demonstrating the
limits of traditional animal rights thinking
which values other species simply on the basis
of their similarity to humans.
Conclusion
This paper has demonstrated some of the
sophisticated ways that people think through
their relationships with companion animals in
the course of their everyday lives, balancing
ideas of animal psychology and ‘instinct’ with
their own understandings of their companion
as an individual or friend. Living together with
another species on a daily basis necessitates a
certain intimacy and recognition of indivi-
duality and personality in non-humans,
challenging Cartesian notions of the animal–
human divide. According to Irvine:
The intimate nature of pet-keeping relationships
and everyday practices of interaction, physical
contact and play, by honoring animal’s subjectivity
and communication skills, can gradually undermine
hegemonic views of them as ‘other’ and become an
‘individualized act of political resistance to society’s
disregard for non-human life’. (Irvine 2001: 152)
For me the importance of pet–human
relationships lies in their very individuality
and personal emotion, that allows for the
recognition of not only the similarities
between humans and animals but also their
differences, allowing for an ‘ethics of care’
(Seager 2003) that has been largely rejected
in traditional animal rights philosophy and
recognizing that, as Shiva (2000: 74) puts
it, ‘even the tiniest life form (must be)
recognized as having intrinsic worth, integ-
rity and autonomy’ and should not be
valued simply on the basis of their similarity
to humans.
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The ways in which pet-owners readily mix
and match different interpretations of their
animals in the everyday practices can be seen
as a resource to complement more academic
notions of post-humanism and challenge
intellectual debates over blurring of bound-
aries and animal similarity and difference. If
people can happily move between the
categories of ‘animal’ and ‘human’ in their
everyday language, this places questions over
the problematic nature of the use of
‘anthropomorphism’ in academic debates.
This concern over the use of anthropomorph-
ism is itself is based upon a particular
conception of the rational human subject,
which sees certain qualities as particularly
human, which can only be self-consciously
attributed to animals in an attempt to define
their ‘personhood’. The intimate embodied
nature of the human–pet relationship can
challenge such ways of defining subjectivity,
through other types of relationality and
connection, which are not purely based
upon notions of language or intelligence.
This ‘lived intersubjectivity’ of two beings
sharing a messy, awkward, loving relation-
ship provides an ideal opportunity for
thinking practically about some of the real-
life dilemmas presented in recent theoretical
challenges to the animal–human divide and
helps us go beyond theories of destabilized
categories to the complex theorizations and
practices of everyday life.
However pet–human relationships are not
always successful and differences between
human and animal behaviour can lead to
lack of understanding and problems where
animals do not to live up to human
expectations of what a pet should be. It is
also important to note here the very
selectivity of this care and the distinct lack
of connection found in my research between
the love and care of individual animals and
what Jones (2000) refers to as the ‘ambig-
uous and space-specific’ human treatment of
animals, whereby we lavish affection on
certain creatures whilst exploiting, torturing
and eating others for human gain. This
includes the numerous animals killed to
provide ‘luxury’ foods for our valued pets
and their owners and the lab rats upon
which their medicines are tested. However
other types of human–animal relations are
also contested, involving a variety of
individual, emotional and practical under-
standings of animal subjectivity, for example
in recent work on farm animals (Holloway
2001; Tsovel 2005).
Furthermore, human understandings of
subjectivity have their limitations and do not
even extend to all forms of companion
animals, with people drawing variable and
shifting boundaries of ‘personhood’ that do
not necessarily include less similar creatures
such as rodents and reptiles, revealing the
continued valuation of other species on the
basis of their similarity to humans. Whilst pet
owners do challenge ‘post-human’ boundaries
with their understandings, humanity still
remains the key reference point and embedded
distinctions are difficult to undo. It is such
issues that now must be addressed in order to
come to terms with what kinds of ‘care, regard
and responsiveness’ (Cheney 1994: 158) might
be possible for us in a relationship with all
members of the non-human world.
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Abstract translations
Les comportements animaux, les vies posthumaines:les negociations quotidiennes du fosse animal–humain a l’egard des animaux de compagnie
Cet article explore les moyens utilises par lesproprietaires d’animaux de compagnie pour faire
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valoir les categories «animal» et «humain» dansleurs efforts pour comprendre leurs animaux. Lesanimaux de compagnie eleves a la maison represen-tent une des formes d’interaction entre humains etanimaux des plus etroites dans la societe occidentalemoderne et donne ainsi la possibilite revee depouvoir examiner les moyens que les gens utilisentpour comprendre les similitudes et les differencesentre les humains et les non humains tout au long deleur vie. Les rapports etroits qui lient les animauxde compagnie et les humains permettent aux gensde comprendre ces animaux par toute une gamme demoyens qui, au-dela des idees associees au compor-tement instinctif, distinguent leur subjectiviteindividuelle et leur «etat d’etre humain», en plus depouvoir respecter leur «animalitude» et leurdifference au lieu de les valoriser simplement envertu de leur ressemblance aux humains. Cesbouleversements des categories binaires fournissentun modele pour comprendre les notions de «post-humanisme» dans la realite vecue de tous les jours.
Mots-clefs: animaux, fosse animal–humain,anthropomorphisme, nature, animaux de compag-nie, posthumanisme.Comportamientos animales, vidas poshumanas:negociaciones cotidianas de la division animal–humano en la tenencia de mascotas
Este papel explora los modos en que lospropietarios de mascotas en la Gran Bretanacontemporanea utilizan las categorıas de ‘animal’y ‘ser humano’ con el fin de entender susmascotas. La tenencia de mascotas constituyeuna de las formas de interaccion humano–animalmas allegadas en la sociedad occidental contem-poranea y, por lo tanto, ofrece una oportunidadideal para examinar los modos en que laspersonas ven las similitudes y diferencias entreseres humanos y no humanos en la vida cotidiana.Por el hecho de ser una relacion estrecha la demascota–humano, las personas llegan a entenderestos animales en una variedad de maneras quevan mas alla de ideas de comportamientoinstintivo. Reconocen la subjetividad individualy los ‘personajes’ de los animales y, al mismotiempo, respetan su naturaleza animal y susdiferencias en lugar de valorarlos simplementepor su parecido con humanos. Estos trastornos delas categorıas binarias ofrecen un modelo paramejor entender ideas de ‘poshumanismo’ en larealidad vivida de la vida cotidiana.
Palabras claves: animales, division animal–humano, antropomorfismo, naturaleza, mascotas,poshumanismo.
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