This study explored the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health of companion animal guardians. First, the extent to which emotional responses to COVID-19 predicted mental health outcomes was explored. Support from companion animals and humans as potential moderators of observed relationships between emotional responses and mental health was then investigated. Using data collected from 895 guardians, it was found that guardians experienced a range of positive and negative emotional responses. Regression analyses revealed that these responses predicted mental health outcomes. Negative emotional responses and loneliness showed a positive relationship with stress, anxiety, and depression, while positive emotional responses showed a negative relationship with stress and depression. Emotional closeness with companion animals, but not support from humans, moderated the relationship between negative emotional responses and both stress and anxiety, suggesting that when guardians experienced distress during the pandemic, they may have relied on companion animals for support.
This phenomenological research examined family relationships among ideological nonhuman-animal rights activists, while distinguishing between law-breaking and law-abiding activists. Analysis of semi-structured interviews with 30 activists highlighted two phases within the familial dynamics. During the joining phase, conflicts arose between the participants’ identities as activists and their identities as family members, creating a crisis in their relations with their parents and spouses. During the establishing phase, however, different familial dynamics developed among each group. The law-breaking activists were able to balance family life with their activism, ensuring the preservation of the relationship. By contrast, to try and maintain peaceful relations, the law-abiding activists kept their activism from their family, leading to a deterioration in the relationship. The findings are interpreted through literature dealing with the family dynamics of social activists in general, and animal rights activists in particular.
Due to its reliance on meat, the companion animals’ food industry significantly contributes to environmental problems. Despite these environmental implications, little is known about the relative importance that caregivers attach to environmental concerns in their evaluation of companion animals’ food products. Study 1 ( N = 317) showed that perceived nutritional value predicted whether caregivers were interested in plant-based dog food products, while pro-environmental identification did not impact the findings. In Studies 2 ( N = 460) and 3 ( N = 194), the promoted benefits of a fictitious dog food product were manipulated. Findings revealed that perceived health benefits rather than perceived environmental benefits were the main determinant of product interest. Together, these findings suggest that environmental concerns play a limited role in people’s views of companion animals’ food products. It is therefore important to address concerns about the health impacts of companion animals’ food products with plant-based content.
Human-animal studies ( HAS ) courses are becoming increasingly common in the college curriculum to help mitigate and address environmental and social problems. However, data on who takes these courses are lacking. This study examines differences between students who enroll in sociological HAS courses and those who do not. Survey data from three very distinct universities show that the main commonalities among students in HAS courses is bonding toward nonhuman animals and lower identification as meat-eaters. Differences across institutions further suggest that where instructors teach is perhaps as important as what and how they teach. These findings have implications for course design, pedagogical methods, recruiting, and engaging students who would otherwise not take HAS courses, and addressing potential barriers to transformational learning. The study provides missing baseline data so HAS scholars can assess change over time.
In the psychological literature on the efficacy of equine-assisted therapies, it is common to read that horses are suitable for such work because of their evolutionary inheritance as “prey-animals,” making them highly attuned to the emotional states of others. Yet this assertion is rarely questioned. This article explores prey-animal ontologies within an ethnographic study of an Equine-Assisted Personal Development ( EAPD ) center in England, and how they helped facilitate client interpretations of individual horse behaviors. I argue that in this EAPD , prey-animal ontologies constructed horses as highly skilled “emotional natives” with significant, almost deistic powers. In some ways this was progressively relational. However, in other ways, it inscribed a problematic anthropocentrism, with the horse conceived as almost permanently in response to human agency. Moreover, it was sometimes empirically difficult to sustain. Prey-animality, then, in EAPD , both challenges and reinforces human power relations with horses in complex ways.
A primary goal of animal shelters is to adopt animals into permanent homes. Many potential adopters learn about adoptable animals via online advertisements. It remains unclear how to best format these advertisements to increase the likelihood of a successful adoption. Participants (N = 561) completed a questionnaire after viewing fictional dog adoption advertisements in which certain characteristics were systematically varied. Results indicated that characteristics of the advertisements influenced participant opinions. Participants showed preference for advertisements in paragraphs over those written as bullet points. Participants’ perceptions of the dog and their ability to identify potential behavioral challenges were influenced by the type of language used in the advertisements. Participants expressed interest in having additional information in the advertisements, including information about the dog’s behavior. Our findings can help guide the content and structure of dog adoption advertisements to maximize information transfer, meet reader expectations, and result in more successful adoptions.
This study assessed how attachment to and caring for a companion animal dog in later life influence one's sense of self in this life-stage. Interviews were conducted with 12 older men (62-72 years of age) caring for a companion animal dog. Six men were then convened as a focus group to further discuss their experiences of caring for their dogs. Interviews and discussions revealed several themes: the way they thought about their dogs, i.e., viewing them as family and feeling responsible for their care influenced their attachment to their dogs; previous loss of dogs instilled in them a reverence for life for all living things; and as a result of caring for their dogs, the men developed a transcendent view of aging, framing their aging experience as being meaningful and purposeful.
The Association for the Treatment and Prevention of Sexual Abuse (ATSA) is an organization for researchers and clinicians in the field concerned with treatment and understanding of individuals who have committed sexual abuse or are at risk of committing sexual abuse. ATSA's annual conference for 2025 takes place at a SeaWorld hotel, a choice which stands in contrast to ATSA's mission of preventing abuse. This commentary reviews the history of animal exploitation and ongoing maltreatment that enable the continued public display of animals at oceanaria such as SeaWorld. The scientific evidence of an overlap and similarities between violence and abuse against human and nonhuman animals is summarized, highlighting how abuse of nonhuman animals is not without relevance for ATSA's members. Choosing a conference venue affiliated with abuse and exploitation of nonhuman animals unveils the double standards of an organization whose mission is to prevent abuse.
Research has shown that animal-assisted therapies can be beneficial for mental and physical needs within vulnerable populations. Research aims include: 1) To examine the heterogeneity of interactions between children with ASD and their animals in their homes through quantitative data; 2) To explore the experiences of animal ownership in families of children with ASD through qualitative interviews. Results included 10 individuals with varying ASD severity based on Social Responsiveness Scale, varying income ranges, and age. Quantitative results showed age was strongly associated with higher touch, gesture, and affection scores; children with severe ASD had the lowest and children with moderate ASD had the highest total human-animal interaction scores. Qualitative analysis revealed three major themes within the participant interviews: child development, family considerations, and comfort. Future research should include larger observational studies to help identify the effects income levels and ASD severity may have on animal-child relationships.
The current study assessed relations between young adults' lifetime trauma exposure, strength of attachment to companion animals, mindfulness (objective experiential awareness), and two indicators of wellbeing (i.e., physical and mental health). Participants were 423 undergraduates (77.5% female; 91.7% White; Mage = 22.23, SD = 6.87) who completed online surveys to assess previous exposure to traumatic events, attachment to companion animals, mindfulness, and wellbeing. Results indicated that more trauma exposure was associated with stronger attachment to companion animals and less mindfulness, both of which were related to worse physical and mental health. Discussion highlights implications for research and practice, underscoring the need to enhance mindful awareness, particularly for individuals with companion animals, as they adjust to challenging life events.
Between December 2020 and February 2021, two ships with nearly 2,700 lives on board crossed the Mediterranean Sea on a round trip, but no country agreed to disembark them. That story could well be framed within the humanitarian crisis of refugees, which has shaken the Central Mediterranean since 2014. However, in this case, the victims were not migrants, but farmed animals who were suspected of being infected with bluetongue disease. Health crises in general, and particularly zoonoses, provide extraordinary opportunities to stress the limits of humanitarianism. Although, in its origin, humanitarianism was based on a responsibility for and kindness to all forms of life, this paper proposes that its evolution toward a rationalized and political model has placed the emphasis on human wellbeing only. Through a post-humanist critique, which we call "One Humanitarianism," this work revisits the origin of humanitarianism, proposing technologies and discourses that help make visible nonhuman suffering.
Viewing Bengal as an administrative unit, this article explores how ideas surrounding "breed" were instrumental in describing, classifying, and enumerating cattle within official narratives in British India. It examines British agrarian and veterinary records, highlighting recurrent discontents with cattle within the purview of Bengal's administration. The official narrative maintained that the cattle of Bengal were "diminutive" and "degenerate" and these characteristics were primarily attributed to the region's predominantly tropical climate. Official discussions repeatedly lamented the absence of proper nutrition for cattle, linking it to pasture shrinkage. Such perceived shifts in the landscape were articulated as major factors for cattle being starved, overworked, and thereby physically impoverished in this province. This article also discusses ramifications of certain policies adopted by the government to address the problem of alleged cattle-degeneration and highlights anomalies within colonial narratives in perceiving "breed" as a stable category for classifying and organizing nonhuman animals.
This article examines Stephen King's Cujo and Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series as examples of infection literature that explore the violence and potential of multispecies encounters brought about by zoonotic disease, using infectious agents as mediators in interactions between humans and nonhuman lifeforms. Both texts are interested in the interplay between violence and relationality: King's horror novel uses an encounter between a woman and a rabid dog to deconstruct narratives of domestication and portray a different kind of intimacy, while Tchaikovsky's science fiction series uses war and infection as the groundwork for multispecies communica-tion, cohabitation, and collaboration. Cujo, Children of Time, and Children of Ruin are thus useful for exploring "outbreak narratives" (Wald, 2008) from the perspective of human-animal studies.
This vignette considers the animal body and pain in settings of animal production, experimentation, slaughter and captivity.
Relational perspectives in Human-Animal Studies remain generally within a consecutive order, following a comparative approach from which insights about the relationship are then deduced in a successive step. The Special Issue turns to relationality instead as a specifically inter-subjective dynamic in the formation and transition of collective and individualized identities and the analysis of social relations. The introduction argues for applying the concept of modes on a meta-analytical level to the study of relationality to address relationality’s challenges as an analytical lens. In response, the contributions to the Issue explore concrete forms of relations and their practical execution as a lens to explore how interspecies relations are structured, mediated, and complicated through lived encounters. The Special Issue thus advances relational approaches to the study of animal-human collectives by making processes of relating the primary focus of and gateway into the study of animal-human relations without undermining their polarities of independence and self-determination.
This article explores the relationalities of care involving horses and humans in the context of horse-racing. By examining the horse doping cases in the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club ( RHKJC ) from 1969 to 1971, a historical analysis demonstrates how caring for these relations requires infrastructures and relationalities of care. As a powerful institution that regulated gambling within postwar Hong Kong, the RHKJC became embroiled with allegations of horse doping. The cases involved more than 50 horses during the 1969/70 racing season, resulting in a fatality for one horse. This article argues that these kinds of care are institutional and episodic, both of which are necessary to sustain caring inside and beyond the confines of the racetrack. By positioning these relationalities within the socioeconomic movements of Hong Kong in the 1960s, the article also seeks to include animals and the relationalities of care as integral to Hong Kong’s social history.
This Special Issue, The Enemy of Kinship & Kinship with the Enemy, examines anti-anthropocentric ideas of kinship through the lens of the “enemy.” It asks how animals conceptualized as “enemies” challenge expanded definitions of kinship. The introduction explores how figures such as parasites, pests, and invasive species disrupt ethical imperatives for kinship and compassion with nonhuman others. These beings often seek contact with humans, who frequently respond with efforts to expel or eradicate them. By rethinking kinship beyond traditional Western paradigms, the issue highlights how different models of kinship create distinct “enemies” and shape actions to counter or coexist with these “anti-social” others. Through case studies from Latin America, Southeast Asia, West Africa, and Northern Europe, the issue explores the complexities of making kin with the enemy while uncovering diverse kinship systems in which such relationships unfold.
Children’s abuse of nonhuman animals in literature has not received much attention from Western literary studies. This paper examines child-nonhuman animal relationships in François Boyer’s (1947/1950) French, post- WWII novel, Forbidden Games . It discusses images of childhood in late 19th- and early 20th-century culture, investigating connections between maltreatment of nonhuman animals by children and ideas of childhood as a phase of becoming “human.” Teleological images of children learning to distance themselves from nonhuman animals inform narratives of “human” phylo- and ontogenesis. The following analysis traces these concepts in Forbidden Games , outlining trajectories of child-animal relationships depicted in the novel. While Boyer shows increasingly violent treatment of nonhuman animals by children, he uses it to criticize chauvinistic and restrictive ideals of “growing up” to become “human.” Building on Bond Stockton’s term “growing sideways,” the analysis investigates how Boyer’s children and their play with nonhuman animals might destabilize anthropocentric value systems surrounding them.
In this article, I take the theme of this special issue on “The Enemy of Kinship and Kinship with the Enemies” as a provocation to challenge previous work, including my own, on convivial conservation and interspecies kin-making across Southeast Asia. How do species spoken of as “pests” and “enemies” fit into models of interspecies relatedness? What happens when we focus on our particularly vexed interspecies relationship to disease-bearing bugs? Drawing on the figure of the mosquito, I proceed to probe the limits both of Indigenous practices of making good relations and kinship with other species, and of modes of interspecies kin-making that underpin them. I end by speculatively forwarding the notions of “making peace” as an alternative way of coexisting with species whom people regularly refuse to make kin, or even friends.
