Animal behaviours, post-human lives: everyday negotiations of the animal–human divide in pet-keeping
- 1 August 2006
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Informa UK Limited in Social & Cultural Geography
- Vol. 7 (4), 525-537
- https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360600825679
Abstract
This paper explores the ways in which pet-owners in contemporary Britain mobilize the categories of ‘animal’ and ‘human’ in their attempts to understand their pets. Pet-keeping forms one of the closest forms of human–animal interaction in modern western society and as such provides an ideal opportunity to examine the ways in which people understand the similarities and differences between humans and non-humans in the course 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 of instinctual behaviour to recognize their individual subjectivity and ‘personhood’, but also respect their ‘animalness’ and difference, rather than valuing them simply on the basis of their similarity to humans. These disruptions of binary categories provide a model for understanding notions of ‘post-humanism’ in the lived reality of everyday life.Keywords
This publication has 4 references indexed in Scilit:
- Animal RitesPublished by University of Chicago Press ,2002
- Hybrid Geographies: Natures Cultures SpacesPublished by SAGE Publications ,2002
- Pets and protein:Journal of Rural Studies, 2001
- Virtual EthnographyPublished by SAGE Publications ,2000